It really grates on my nerves how easily people jump from "UFOs" to "extraterrestrials" in this topic. You'll see it everywhere, "OMG, the Pentagon just admitted UFOs are real and nobody cares! How crazy is this pandemic that nobody cares we aren't alone in the universe?!"

Nobody ever denied that there are Flying Objects that are Unidentified. It's just stupid clickbaitism.

Additionally, I find the assertions that "these things move in impossible ways" to be extremely disingenuous. The footage that gets released is universally very bad. It's low resolution, often shot in infrared transformed to visible light, being taken from aircraft moving at a high rate of speed, executing their own aerial maneuvers. "Oh, but these are experts in the field saying this". I know some of these experts. They aren't experts in every single system between camera sensor, tracking systems, and the limits of airframe motion.

There's one particular video (I can't find it right now) that shows a supposedly "impossible" roll and change in direction. Or, it could be that the filming aircraft rolled and the camera tracking system hit a gimbal lock situation, either because the tracking motors aren't able to move as fast as necessary, or because the tracking math wasn't implemented correctly.

But again, "glab glab glab, these are experts, I can't believe they'd make such a basic error as using Euler angles instead of Quaternions to calculate the SLERP." But I've seen some of this code with my own eyes. YES! A lot of control system engineers apparently don't know about Quaternions! Just because game developers do doesn't mean the majority of control system developers do. There are innumerable cases of things that people would consider "cross-domain knowledge" that doesn't actually end up crossing because of institutional momentum and industry insularity.

We like to rah-rah our military industrial complex as "the most advanced in the world". That doesn't mean it's the most high tech, best equipment possible, or that the best equipment was even installed on these aircraft.

Do you know anything about how government procurement works? "Military grade" often means "already 5 years obsolete by the time it hits the field". The tracking camera in something like an F-18 was not built in some Manhattan Project-style operation. It was built by a contracting firm who won the lowest bid. And they probably put their A-team on the avionics and the leftovers on everything else. They probably had just-out-of-grad-school electrical engineers who specialized in camera systems and only took the minimum requirements for control systems. They almost certainly did not hire the best experts in the field just to make a 1% component of the project, especially one that was probably designed to be replaced in 10 years under a new contract.