Texas UFOs Just Jets?

This cellphone photo was taken by trucker Sean Kiel on I-20 near Cisco, TX on January 8th. Kiel was interviewed in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:

"It looked like a meteor entering the atmosphere," said Kiel, who was driving from Louisville, Ky., to Brady. "It looked like a fireball. It had a long tail and it was extremely bright. And then the light seemed to dissipate and there was a dark object, right when the sun was going down.

"It was more like a big cigar with lights all over it that changed colors," he said. "It was at least 300 yards wide. It was being escorted by some type of slow-moving military craft, maybe helicopters."

Kiel said the object disappeared from his view, but reappeared as he turned south onto U.S. 183. It seemed to be rotating counterclockwise, he said, with the lights disappearing one by one on its left side while reappearing one by one on its right.

That photo and accompanying description doesn't look or sound like a bunch of fighter jets, but that's what we're being asked to accept. The military is now essentially saying "Those two weeks we've been insisting there were no military aircraft in the area, we were mistaken. Actually we had TEN F-16's taking part in a training exercise over Erath county that day."

It's hard to believe that the USAF didn't know 10 fighter planes were in the area, but hey, they misplaced an A-bomb last year so I suppose it's possible. However, if there really were 10 F-16 fighters in the area, wouldn't one of the 10 pilots in those planes have seen the news reports? Wouldn't at least one of them come forward and say "don't get excited, it was just us"? I think so, unless there was something covert going on.

I think the military initially tried to deny any activity hoping the story would just fade away. When it didn't, they came up with this "explanation". Some eyewitnesses saw fighter jets pursuing the UFO, but were the fighter jets actually the cause of the sighting as the military asks us to believe; were they intercepting a UFO as some witnesses thought; or could it be they were escorting a secret military aircraft?

UPDATE: I guess I'm not the only one skeptical of the military's claims.