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These types of stories seem to pop up around major election years. I've begun to see them as requests for more funding or justification for current funding.

I'm waiting to see if they release a dossier of the Chupacabras when things get direr. Maybe also dossiers on ghosts and paranormal activities for better effect.

Isn’t that crazy if it’s true?

Yeah we had to self-confine for super long and it exacerbated all our societal problems, but at least it made the US government admit there were aliens!

I've read conjecture that it is likely one of two things. Either the US is wanting to hint to its enemies new advanced technology that we have, or the US military found that pilots weren't announcing mid-flight UFOs so are working to change the culture to allow such announcements without fear of reprisal.

Who knows what the truth is though.

>If I was in charge of disclosing to the world that there were aliens, this is how I'd be doing it.

The way I would do it is a slow drip of indoctrination through decades of science fiction pop culture, books, movies, television, and spreading rumors about alien abductions and UFO sightings so that the public is already at least subconsciously comfortable with the premise. By the time they start a flash-mob to raid area 51 and rescue the anime girls then humanity might be ready.

The transition from that to actual disclosure might still be a bit of an existential shock.

> If it was a foreign military's advanced aircraft, this is them admitting that, yep, your stealth/whatever technology works great, and we are baffled by it.

Or you want foreign military leaders to think you are baffled by their stealth tech when you can actually detect it just fine.

> Or you want foreign military leaders to think you are baffled by their stealth tech

That doesn't seem conducive to that mutual deterrence which is usually desirable.

I mean, they are detecting them, we’re talking about pilots detecting them. They just don’t know what they are.

To paraphrase Bostrom, there is a lot of interest here, regardless of the the ground truth of UFO phenomena.

This perspective is a good one: what would a slow-drip/evolving story be good for? What might its objectives be?

That is a useful question, regardless of whether we ever get ground truth.

To wit: our government has a very long (now 70 year) history of exploiting UFO reporting for various ends and for murky reasons.

De rigeur disclosure: I am related to one of the authors :)

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A different angle: one of the more interesting perspectives on UFO phenomena comes form Jacque Vallée, VC and real-life model for Lacombe, the civilian expert played by François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

He has hypothesized that whatever the ultimate nature of UFO phenomena, it is consistent with a very slow period (think Long Now-scale) inoculation/inculcation of–for lack of a better word–contact.

Between humanity and what exactly he does not claim to have any answer.

I would suppose that longer the period, the weirder / dangerous the alien species are to us.

Think about some highly intelligent reptile predator species, with a taste for mamal meat.

Yeah, the creeps are there.

I think not everyone - not anyone - would be kind of having much of fun discovering we are not alone, in that case.

>Think about some highly intelligent reptile predator species, with a taste for mamal meat.

I mean, let's be realistic, we could still do business in that scenario. Maybe trade a few million tasty human popplers for a stargate or zero-point engine or something.

Exactly, why everyone would need two hands all their life?

Shit I have a bum leg, hook me up with some advanced prosthetics and they can eat their pulmonary organs out.

We probably would've already been taken out in that case. If this is about aliens, maybe they're chill dudes just observing. Maybe they're on vacation or doing research on the evolution of various civilizations across the galaxy/universe. Who knows? I just hope the reptilian scenario isn't the reality we face.

In any case, whatever we find out will likely be interesting, extraterrestrials or not.

> If it was a foreign military's advanced aircraft, this is them admitting that, yep, your stealth/whatever technology works great, and we are baffled by it.

I have an alternative explanation that also matches with history. They know what it is but don't want to tell the public. They can also feed bad information to adversaries like China and Russia who may interpret this is over confidence in their technologies.

Here's a simple analogy. My cat is really dumb and will step right in front of me in the middle of the night when it is dark because she thinks I can see her (because she can see me). So at night I over exaggerate my inability to see in the dark. Now she thinks she is super sneaky (she's not) but also gets out of my way at night.

All wars (especially cold wars, like the one we're in) are about information control. There is lots of propaganda, misdirection, lying, etc. An adversary having over confidence in their technology means that they will use it with that confidence. Think about WW2 and when the Enigma encryption was broken by Turing's team. They didn't reveal that they broke the encryption and let some people be attacked and prevented others (this led to some of the big foundations in game theory as well).

Now we know this is a possibility, so do the Russians and Chinese. But the pentagon could also be telling the truth. These videos could also be complete fabrications or lucky shots that are natural phenomena that fool instruments. If Russia has the tech and doesn't tell the Chinese and the Chinese think we don't know what it is then China gets more afraid of Russia (and vise versa). Because sometimes the pentagon says the truth, sometimes they lie, sometimes they misdirect. By doing all of these it makes it very difficult to tell which is happening, and that is exactly the point. So my alternative is just a potential alternative that needs to be added to your list. There's also a bunch more, complicating matters even more. This is an information campaign.

The simple and likely answer is that it isn't aliens.

There's also strange examples, like how this video[0] is actually a weapon and Dustin became a semi-knowing participant (and you could gather that others are unknowing participants in information campaigns).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE

Edit: I wanted to add another alternative. The military knows what it is and aren't trying to trick Russia and China, but garner support for weapons development from the public and politicians. "We don't know what this is but we do know it is spying on us" is a great way to get people to freak out and throw money at the problem. Or they don't know and it still has the same result.

My personal bet for the "UFO phenomenon" are in this theory since like, decades ago.

I think in the next century or maybe in 200 years, this stuff would be like the hunt of witches in the medieval europe.

A precise advanced for that time, disinformation campaign targetting an interest for several actors (like kings, the church at that time), and eventually triggering a justification to embrace some nation-state sponsored actions.

Coud be probably a not military interest, like further advance the space career, to try to get to asteroid resources first (like in the 22 century). Long term thinking, ala Bezos.

GPT, is that you?

Hah, that was my first thought too. I've become so much more suspicious of HN comments in the past weeks.