This happened 15 years ago during daytime. Lots of missing information such as time of day, time of year, location, whether there was radar contact made, and weather conditions. In addition, knowing the actual temperature of the anomaly and detailed weather conditions would have been helpful in assessing this “contact”. Based on the limited information presented in the video and considering atmospheric phenomenon, equipment operation, physics, and intelligent purpose of flight, I conclude the anomaly was equipment related due to an intermittent condition. I will first break down the other considerations I came up with before supporting my conclusion. Atmospheric Phenomenon: I have read about and my own family witnessed a bright object(s) either remaining stationary or moving and then suddenly moving at a high speed and out of view. This happens when a light source or atmospheric condition, either natural or manmade, reaches it’s focal plane. I personally saw “Dancing UFOs” over San Francisco during a clear, cold night. Stars were “twinkling” very noticeably, implying very high winds at altitude. I saw 2 bright objects move together across the sky while they both moved towards and away from each other fairly rapidly by a irregular distance and frequency as they travelled across the night sky. The size of the light and speed of the object(s) were consistent with a satellite(s). There may have been an atmospheric inversion at an altitude that was not experiencing much wind, causing the possible double image. The winds at higher altitude distorted the apparent travel path of the point(s) of light. My conclusion: My sighting was a single satellite that had it’s image distorted by unusual atmospheric conditions. Physics: If an object has mass, to move that mass through a medium and under the influence of gravity requires energy and will perturb the medium it is traveling. We have the technology observe the atmospheric effects of an aircraft from a plane, but this technology would not likely to be on a fighter jet, especially in 2014. To rapidly change directions, one needs to increase their energy output. Two points about the sighting in this regard: The anomaly’s brightness seemed steady throughout the sighting, even as it veered sharply off to the left and related second point is if the infrared we were seeing was related to an propulsive energy source, why was it still in view after the sharp turn? Additionally, there was no mention of the actions the pilot took to reacquire the target. Intelligent purpose of flight: Flying is energy consuming and risk of detection is high, especially if you are an alien. If an alien wanted to make contact, they could do so in many ways. Therefore, if the sighting in question represents an alien spacecraft, they would have been traveling for another purpose. It is very expensive from an energy standpoint to enter the Earth’s atmosphere from space and fight atmospheric drag and gravity, especially by a traveller that would likely have limited resources. Energy source other than chemical? Nuclear or gravity based propulsion systems would have a energy signature that would likely attract attention of some of our satellites and maybe even optically by the aircraft operator, if it was present. So we are left with a alien who does not want to make contact at this time, got detected, took no evasive action for a while, was spending a lot on energy, and then decided to veer off? Why would they be traveling at 19,990 ft at that location, wherever it was? The whole alien aspect to this sighting does not make any sense to me. This leaves the final consideration I was able to come up with: Intermittent anomaly of equipment operation. Notice as the operator changed views, how the object changed position. After one particular view change, the object moved in a semicircle. Was the operator appling pressure, heat, or some other input to part of the display? Soon after, the object “zoomed” off to the left, almost like what one would see when changing the objective on a microscope. Again, there was no explanation of any action taken to reacquire the object. Seems to me, the operator may have just been playing...
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In the 15 years since Chad Underwood recorded a bizarre and erratic UFO — now called “the Tic Tac,” a name Underwood himself came up with — from the infrared camera on the left wing of his F/A-18 Super Hornet, he’s become a flight instructor, a civilian employee in the aerospace industry, and a father. But he has not yet spoken publicly about what he saw that day, even now, two years after his video made the front page of the New York Times. As he explained before speaking with Intelligencer, Underwood has mostly wanted to avoid having his name “attached to the ‘little green men’ crazies that are out there.” The story of the Tic Tac begins around November 10, 2004, when radar operator Kevin Day first reported seeing odd and slow-moving objects flying in groups of five to ten off of San Clemente Island, west of the San Diego coast. At an elevation of 28,000 feet, moving at a speed of approximately 120 knots (about 138 miles per hour), the clusters were too high to be birds, too slow to be conventional aircraft, and were not traveling on any established flight path, at least according to Day. In a military report made public by KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, Day would later observe that the objects “exhibited ballistic-missile characteristics” as they zoomed from 60,000 feet to 50 feet above the Pacific Ocean, alarmingly without producing sonic booms. All told, radar operators with the Princeton spent about two weeks attempting to figure out what the objects were, a process that included having the ship’s radar system shut down and recalibrated to make sure that the mysterious radar returns were not not false positives, or “ghost tracks.” Eventually, David Fravor, commanding officer of the Black Aces, made visual confirmation of one of the objects midair during a flight-training exercise. An hour later, Underwood made his infrared recording on a second flight. “That day,” Underwood recalls, “Dave Fravor was like, ‘Hey, dude. BOLO.’ Like, be on the lookout for just something weird. I can’t remember the exact terms that he used. I didn’t really think much about it at the time. But once I was able to acquire it on the radar and on the FLIR [forward-looking infrared camera], that’s kind of where things — I wouldn’t say ‘went sideways’ — but things were just different.”... http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html
I don't think there's any doubt the video is authentic or that the pilot's saw what they saw. As someone who spent 20 years flying around with similar equipment though, I think there are plenty of far more reasonable explanations that range from something as simple a bug on the sensor that eventually slid off in the slipstream to a combination of EMI sources in the plane that messed with the equipment just so and is nearly impossible to replicate. If I cried "aliens" every time I saw a phantom TCAS hit or wierd display pattern I'd be institutionalized by now. I never saw anything like this, and don't fault the pilot for making a big deal out of it like he did. But I have seen enough glitches to know that they can be strange and sometimes convince you of something that isn't real. It makes complete sense to me that out of the hundreds of millions of glitches that occur over the hundreds of millions of flight hours we fly, that one or two will end up just right to manifest as compelling stories like this one.