I just think that experimental aircraft can be small and unmanned, like drones, so I don't think comparisons to a manned F-18 are meaningful.
As small as a hummingbird, which is what started this? Can we agree that even a SMALL experimental aircraft will have many, many orders of magnitude of inertia to overcome, and that inertia will have to be negated, not simply overcome, in order for an object to move the way these did?
OK, maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to say, or maybe we just interpreted cichlidfan's post differently. I took it to mean that a hummingbird can perform certain "maneuvers" because of how it's "built," allowing it to fly in different ways than jet aircraft, but still adhere to physics. Looking at the footage on the CNN link in the original post, I don't see any movement that I would compare to that of a hummingbird. The closest is the end of the second video on that page, where the object moves quickly out of frame to the left. The text in the article and overlaid on the video says it moved to fast for the pod to follow, but I didn't see any official statement to that effect. But even if that were true, it would only show the object accelerating in one direction very quickly, something some unmanned aerial vehicles do all the time (missiles).
When you see stuff flying around without any reference, and from another moving object, it is difficult to accurately discern motion. If the FLIR pod was quickly moved to the right, it would produce the exact same image that we saw in the video, even if the object wasn't moving. Without some sort of solid, static reference, I don't think we can really make any definitive statement about how these vehicles were moving, but maybe there's other video that I missed that has that.
I think when you combine a smaller aircraft that has no pilot, with a video from a moving vehicle that has no fixed reference point, you can easily get footage that looks like it's doing impossible maneuvers without it actually performing impossible maneuvers.
