But yet the object in question is significantly lighter and darker than everything in the background.
But it's not "significantly lighter and darker than everything in the background". In the default state it's somewhere around the middle. It only goes towards the extreme dark end
like everything else in the middle when they ramp up the camera settings in that direction, then somewhat towards the light end
like everything else in the middle when they ramp the camera settings towards the opposite direction.
And it's never even close to being the "lightest" thing in the video. Even at the extremely lightest setting, most of the ground is much lighter than the object
You dont think they even viewed this through regular settings?
Perhaps they were afraid of losing track of the object if they switched away from infrared, and didn't do so because they were already tracking it no problem in that setting. Or maybe they did view it through optical and we just haven't seen that part of the video. What actual evidence do you have that they didn't view it through regular settings?
You keep arguing definitively for extreme, unlikely scenarios despite having no actual evidence for those claims.