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I have been experimenting with different camera settings, trying to get a clearer picture of my "night swimmer". If I increase the shutter speed there isn't enough light and all I see is black. Increasing or decreasing the frame rate doesn't get it either. I have optimization settings for clarity, motion, or combination and those don't help either. However, tweaking the settings has gotten rid of the waving "fins" and in this video they are pretty clearly wings — at least to my eyes. Try playing the .mov in full screen mode.

My night swimmer is here nearly every evening. If it is a nighthawk/lbullbat as I suspect that is good as we are having lots of mosquitos infected with West Nile virus in the area and a single nighthawk will eat several hundred in an evenings hunt.

I talked to a friend who has done a lot of wildlife photography and he told me a clear image was probably going to require a sensitive camera with a fast strobe to freeze the action at night. Well beyond the capability of my video cam.

that's the first shot we've seen of it moving vertically rather than horizontally. I think it's looking a lot more like a dragonfly shaped body and quad wings, fast-beating wings that are creating the impression of a long rippling wing.

My take is the relatively long exposure time the camera requires to capture an image using IR lighting and the speed of the object creates the impression of a long body because of the distance the object travels during a single exposure. (My camera offers exposure times from 1/15 to 1/450 but the IR only provides enough light for exposure settings in the 1/15 range.) Likewise the quad wings are the top and bottom of the object's rapid wing beat where there is a brief, very brief, pause as the beat changes direction. All of this together with what has appeared to be a forked tail in previous still images and the somewhat erratic flight path which is typical of the common nighthawk informs my guess as to its nature.

I think this is much too small to be a bird. also too slow moving

Whatever it is I am capturing five and six videos of it every night.