"What the fuck is that thing?"

I was surprised to see an article on UFOs in the London Review of Books, since the academic/intellectual community has usually either scoffed at or ignored the subject. 

The writer refers to the video above from the To The Stars Academy site, though it's not clear enough to be convincing to my skeptical and untrained eyes. The reaction of the pilots, based on both what they're seeing and their instruments, however, is more impressive.

Nick Richardson in the August 2 edition of the LRB:

In December, footage of UFOs taken from US military planes, officially declassified and approved for release by the US government, was published online by an organisation called To The Stars Academy. The first video of two---a third was released in March---was captured by a US Navy Super Hornet fighter plane using an infrared camera. It’s only about thirty seconds long, and the date of the footage and the plane’s location have been withheld. 

As soon as it starts one of the pilots can be heard saying, ‘It’s a fucking drone, bro,’ as the camera locks onto a small white blob (the camera is in ‘white-hot’ mode, so hot things show up as white), longer than it is wide, flying over the clouds at a steady distance from the Super Hornet. The other pilot replies: ‘There’s a whole fleet of them.’ ‘My gosh,’ the first pilot says; the other points out that the ‘drones’ are flying against the wind and that the windspeed is 120 knots. In the last few seconds of the video the object rotates 90º about one of its axes and the first pilot splutters, ‘Look at that thing!’, to which the other replies: ‘It’s rotating!'...

From the Washington Post in March: The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?