'Something else' is an identified object, a UFO is 'unidentified' at the time of the sighting. It all depends on whether you are eventually able to identify what you saw in terms of ordinary phenomena or not. Mr. Ilya Taytslin, a sponsor of the Astronomy Cafe sent me this interesting story:
"This is not a question, but an example of how strange some (more or less) ordinary things can look. One summer evening in 1989 I was driving eastward near Albany, NY under a clear sky, when suddenly near horizon ahead of me a bright triangular shape flashed into existence. The apparition lasted maybe a second -- long enough to see that it was a symmetrical triangle with the long side about as wide as one-fifth of the full moon. I pulled over to the side and several other cars did the same -- their drivers saw same thing I saw and were equally puzzled.
Next morning I read in a newspaper that the Stealth bomber (there was only one operational at the time) landed at Albany airport. Mystery solved. It was the B-2 bomber, too far away to be seen edge-on, but its belly reflected direct light from the setting sun when the pilot executed a half-loop. Yet anyone on that highway who had not read the next day's paper might have sworn he saw an "alien spacecraft momentarily de-cloaking!"
Sometimes we never can track down the cause of what we saw because the relevant details, such as military flight schedules, are simply never going to be available. From what I understand, the rise in UFO reports in this century seems to correlate pretty well with the level of Air Force activity, and with the progressive loss of contact that urban dwellers have with ordinary, but rare, phenomena in the sky such as bright meteors, and atmospheric twinkling and spectral distortion which cause bright stars to change color.
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