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Here's the thing: your potato quality picture is 10x better than any picture of a flying saucer. You can clearly see what it is.
The problem with "unidentified" phenomena is that they aren't identified. You can't jump from "we don't know what this is" to "aliens" without proof. If you do, that's just faith not science.
In that way, aliens are just angels for atheists. They're a social phenomenon not a physical one. Notice how no one sees werewolves, vampires, zombies, etc. anymore. They didn't go away, people just stopped believing in them.
People in history have speculated about life in the rest of the universe, like on the moon and Jupiter. We even observed their "canals" on Mars. Things that we know now are almost impossible. Notice how "UFOs" didn't exist prior to about 1900. When humans gain the ability to fly, so do these aliens. Their ships somehow gained speed and maneuverability as ours did.
"But what if it really is aliens! That would be huge. We have to investigate each event in case they're real!"
This is how we know UFOs are just optical illusions: They change as we change, as society changes. It's like when you see your exact duplicate unexpectedly. You don't think "I have a clone who copies my every move!" You just guess there's a mirror there. But yeah, I guess you'll miss the 1 in a trillion times it's actually your clone.
Look, I've been pretty clear from the start that I'm not a UFO guy, I don't think that these are aliens, the odds are just too goddamn remote, but the fact is that it's something, and whatever it is is worth investigating.
Optical illusions don't just show up on radar, IR camera, visual light camera, and the human eye all at once.
Investigating the unknown is how we advance human science, and I believe that this is worth investigating. If it turns out to be nothing, then there's no great loss, but even something not-at-all obscure like ball lightning, which despite being known about for CENTURIES, is still not fully understood, or even well documented.
My potato quality F-35 picture is from only a couple hundred feet with the planes are on approach for landing. My house shakes when they go overhead. By contrast the tictac video we have was filmed at something like five miles distance. Even advanced military cameras don't get much resolution at that range, unless we're talking about the ones on a Keyhole satellite or something, and those aren't small enough to mount on a fighter jet. You really think some 2004 iphone is going to even see it at all, nevermind that flying a fighter plane doesn't leave much time for in-flight photography, and that carrying a camera into the plane's cockpit is an espionage violation.
LIke that's a big part of what these hearings were about before Grusch derailed things with his XCOM "downed alien craft and corpses" nonsense. The two professional pilots were talking about having some official mechanism for collating the data all in one place so it can be looked at seriously and scientifically. We just channel the energy of the crazy UFO nutters to actually accomplish some real science here.
Damn dude did you even read the comment you're replying to? The guy is literally saying "there's almost no way it's aliens, but we don't know what it is so we should figure out because science is good and we should be doing it." And you hit him back with "LMAO this dude thinks it's definitely aliens what an idiot!"