I have been bouncing around a theory for a while about the whole UFO discussion of the last... five years? It's interesting how it has ebbed and flowed in US, even getting a fair amount of discussion (and true believers announcing themselves) on the predecessor forums to this forum. I think the most important and interesting thing is not the phenomenon - how many times are people going to get excited about hazy videos that may or may not show small specks moving in unnatural ways, but the discussion itself - and I think there's a specific reason why the system might foster this discussion.
We certainly know that the US government takes a great interest in social media and has done so since the beginning, as demonstrated by articles like this one. The effective voluntary surveillance abilities offered by Facebook and other security-state-connected social media means that there can now be what amounts to a voluntary distributed vast civilian surveillance operation by the security state.
If media successfully rekindles interest in UFOs, there's going to be photos all over social media, and they might be of some use, as there's timestamps and location data, and you can use rapidly advancing machine learning abilities to, for instance, give credence to pilot sightings by checking if there's relevant civilian sightings, or photographs.
By stoking interest in UFOs, having people photograph or otherwise talk about whatever strange lights in the sky they have seen, they will receive data that they can now categorize and utilize – true open-source intelligence. They can then figure out whether there is a cause for further interest and concern.
Such civilians might not do this just voluntarily. Indeed, many of them are exactly of the suspicious type that would actively refrain from watching the skies if the government directly told them to do so. And it is not just Americans. A successful operation would provoke sightings all around the world, even in enemy countries (as far as those allow the penetration of American social media). And as automatic data analysis capabilities improve, so would the capabilities to use that data.
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Could also being leading to soft disclosure. Now, when conspiracy types talk about soft disclosure with UFOs, they are usually talking about the government basically priming the public so they won't be shocked to find out aliens exist.
But we've soft disclosures before, but usually they make the thing more farfetched than the truth, so that the truth looks mild in comparison.
A good example is chemtrails. This conspiracy popped up around the early 90s, and quickly went into the mainstream, with cable networks having all sorts of 'documentaries' about it. It would later turn out that congress was secretly investigating the use of chemicals, sprayed from airplanes, over the US (and other countries, like Canada, the UK, Mexico, etc). Also the spraying of chemicals on the military, predominantly US Navy ships.
By the time a report was published publicly, around 2000 iirc, it made little impact. Chemtrails were a 'crazy' conspiracy, 'debunked' by the media, and had largely been framed as being about mind-control (and the spraying on the Navy being connected to time travel). I believe the real purpose of the spraying was to test fallout patterns. But they were using chemicals (and bacteria) which may (or may not) cause cancer, and sprayed it over American citizens (primarily the west coast) for a couple decades (which coincided with the rise of crime and serial killers, though I doubt they are related; but maybe the chemicals/bacteria could trigger violence in certain folks? Though I doubt it..)
Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage) was one of the largest.
But if you mentioned to someone that the US government was secretly spraying potentially harmful chemicals over American citizens for 30+ years, most would connect it with the chemtrail conspiracies and immediately consider you to be a crazy loon.
So my feeling is that the UFO/UAP thing is simply a soft disclosure. People have aliens and craft that break physics in their minds. A few years from now congress will publish some random report that fully explains UFO/UAP (though the report will likely not contain ANY terms related to that), it'll be so dry and unexciting that the media will barely be able to stomach giving it a blurb, and the public will remain largely unaware of its existence. If you ever brought it up to a random person, they'd label you crazy and think you were talking about UFO/UAPs (which will get 'debunked' over the same time frame; it'll fill the public discourse and inoculate them against the truth, keep conspiracy theorists focused, instead of snooping into other shit looking for something; and basically get 'believers', particularly ones with an ounce of credibility, to take positions that they will be unwilling to abandon for a less tantalizing truth - and even if they do change their position, the machine can simply point to their old positions to discredit them among most of the populace, especially those in the media and academia).
One might guess that the governments kind of like the spread of extreme and extensive COVID conspiracy theories for a similar reason; softens the blow if a final reckoning comes showing that they just kind of didn't know what to do with COVID, did a lot of counterproductive stuff to chase public support or because they themselves were personally scared and just want to go away, or because they believed in oversold promises by pharmaceutical companies, zero-Covid influencers etc.
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