politics

showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible

good analysis but you missed an interesting fact, the tictac was filmed during a Navy exercise where they were very likely testing a weapon system they've been working on for decades now and by many accounts is going into production - this system apparently uses the intersection of high energy beams to cause an area of plasma to be created where they meet, the point of focus can be moved by moving the ground based emitters angle which causes the plasma ball (actually a short column with rounded ends) to move incredibly rapidly (like how search lights can move faster than any plane) likewise they can move in all the ways the tictacs moved - rapid, erratic direction changing for example. Such plasma would show on camera, to the naked eye, and afaik on most detection systems like radar. The idea of course is to use the plasma ball to destroy planes, drones, and missiles which would be a real game changer in ship defence, and something China would no doubt be very interesting in knowing the US is developing...

So as i see it there's a range of possibilities here, firstly the US is holding this hearing trying to convince China [et al] that they have no idea what causes the signatures their long distance radar and local spies no doubt detected and to pretend they're not making this super missile defence system... That seems kinda a bad way of going about it though and makes me wonder if actually the whole project only resulted in proving the infeasibility of such a system so they put a lot of effort into badly covering it up while also drawing attention to it in the hope that China will assume the system did work and invest their R&D budget into recreating it rather than research something that actually works - they did this to the soviets endlessly, things like remote viewing for example.

There's an even more conspiratorial answer too, maybe as said they know the results of the test because it's an unpiloted drone or ground / ship based counter drone weapon as mentioned earlier - details got leaked by people genuinely believing it's aliens but these details contained too much good intel so they needed to muddy the water - again, this was their MO when testing the stealth bomber and other secret projects - release loads of false UFO info so it's no longer clear what the top speed, turning ability, appearance, etc really is. That's why there's so much other weird stuff like the red football field or whatever it was getting muddled in with it, the real conspiracy comes with why it's such a huge news story and congressional investigations - the incredibly wealth people who very clearly and openly rule the world got worried that if the government continues to debate important things it's possible they'll accidentally pass some legislation or bill that inadvertently helps poor and middle-class people get out from under the poverty trap they've spend so long creating - they know that if even a few communities are able to thrive and act as an example of what's possible then it could bring about a social awakening that displaces them in an instant so they need to distract and disrupt the news cycle until they can get an wildcard gop crazy to enact measures to destroy solar and wind developments (they allow local communities to establish their own power grid which could be community run), to destroy internet freedoms (it allows disparate communities to work together for the common good via open-source, community ran social media such as lemmy, etc) and to create a whole new existential threat and panic which can be used to control people (probably 'brown people are scary' or 'think of the children' possibly some form of eco fascism)