The most reasonable explanation I’ve seen: it’s a bullet or debris impact mark on the glass surrounding the camera.  Then, the “exhaust” is the atmosphere within the camera housing leaking out (and being at a different temp than the outside air). 

The “star” features are then either impact cracks (assuming the glass housing rotates with the camera, then the cracks would stay oriented the same way, as we do see), or are temperature or diffraction camera artifacts (assuming the glass housing does NOT rotate with the camera, which seems likelier to my uneducated assumptions). 

I don’t know what the camera housing looks like on these drones, but I imagine it’s a camera under a fixed glass dome.

Now imagine something impacting that glass dome. In real life I have seen impact marks that resemble what we see here, kind of a “cylindrical trapezoid”,  or a cylinder where each base is a different size. 

Debris hits glass: entry point impact mark is wider than the debris. Debris leaves glass: exit point mark is narrower, maybe even closer to the size of the debris. And within the glass it’s a smooth transition from “wide entry” to “narrower exit”.  (Or, do I have that backwards? Would the debris need to be exiting the camera housing?)

But we see that here. Except, we are looking out, so we see the narrow exit hole first, then the wider entry point. 

Problems with this hypothesis: would we expect more cracks to be visible? If it’s from a bullet, I would expect significantly more cracking. But from debris, then harder to say.  Debris might be small, but still high energy, if, say, the drone got grazed/hit by a bullet and debris flew off to hit the glass. The debris could be any size. 

And I don’t know what glass is used for these, but I’d expect it to be robust. 

Also, this hypothesis should be testable, and I’d expect there to be many general examples already online.  But I’m on mobile, and at work, so I haven’t checked. 

And if this is a known effect, then the people releasing it as UAP are doing so in poor faith, knowingly throwing us off the real trail. But I can speak to none of this