On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds").
On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?").
The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.
If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful?
The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security.
Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.
Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piece of equipment from a foreign nation. I assume they've done that before releasing the footage to the public after figuring out what it is they actually detected.
They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with investigations (afaik, only the Navy had an office, and it was ~3 bodies with other duties), & (c) no periodic review.
They essentially ignored it as a potential problem. So Indiana Jones, "top men" type stuff.
Unfortunately, a lot of the public debate is "aliens", because media and idiots. But there's a serious underlying problem.
Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.
My personal guess is that there probably are extraterrestrials on the earth observing us but they are competently remaining hidded and have nothing to do with any UFO observation by a human. Of course I don't have any good evidence for that: it's just a hunch.
I'll see your pedantry and raise you my own pedantry. The fact that a hypothetical craft flies around in an atmosphere does not imply that it's not a spaceship. A vessel could conceivably be capable of flying through some fluid at one time and through the vacuum of space at another, and would thus be called a spaceship. For example, the Space Shuttle was a spaceship even when it was operating under aerodynamic forces. Since we're talking about alien ships, they would have to be alien spaceships, because otherwise we would have to accept that these aliens have the necessary infrastructure and facilities to land their spaceships somewhere (some kind of alien spaceport on Earth?), disembark, and board their alien aircraft to fly around Earth's atmosphere, which is an even more ridiculous idea.
Why? It costs almost nothing to just collect data. How do you know they're not witnessing advanced tech from another nation? Or maybe it's a pervasive flaw in our sensors. Seems like those are both well within the military's mandate. Even if it's just an interesting new physical phenomenon, it would be great to have some evidence.