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Notes -
I agree with @DaseindustriesLtd that UFOs are a (possibly semi-unintentional) psy-op. It’s not hugely malicious but it broadly serves the US government for both Americans and geopolitical competitors to believe that there are all kinds of unexplained possibly alien craft floating around the place, and for American institutions to be able to manufacture associated public interest. I actually question whether there even is somebody who ‘knows’ it’s all fake; I don’t think it’s like that. Instead, think of a compounding mythos, built on a combination of intelligence strategy, defense’s desire (both in private sector and the military itself) for more funding, and the impact of science fiction (especially on the male nerds who occupy most senior positions in UFO-related fields, in NASA, in defense etc) in general.
One problem with long-running psyops (a topic far less studied and funded than astrobiology, which should inform our priors about dragons lurking in each domain) that I hypothesize is pervasive is they come equipped with mechanisms for manufacturing plausible deniability of the deliberate effort/plausibility of the core hypothesis; and signaling cascades for maintaining epistemic culture that produces the conclusion of enduring plausibility; and social contagion patterns that replace conspirators with useful idiots predisposed to trust that kind of psyop; and become a robust alternative truth. At that stage, it's all but impossible for a critical number of people invested in the psyop to snap out of it and say «this is all some bullshit» upon realizing how little object-level plausibility remains in the system.
After that, the mature psyop's decay is probably governed by equations for very slow dissipative or evaporative processes. It can fade away like a fad if it had never reached certain scale of membership and recruiting and insulating infrastructure to keep up peer pressure; or last near-indefinitely, like a religion. But it will never be deboonked. Not even the High Mega-Pope of the True Church, adorned with every esoteric and exoteric and secular regalia, will be able to come out and convince the faithful they've been led on; they will simply conclude he's been replaced by a skin-suited lizard.
Or alternatively, as Michael Vassar (was surprised to learn he's still around) puts it: «Once you know that taboos prevent the dominant narrative from converging on truth, logical inferences from the dominant narrative to very surprising conclusions should be seen as being of limited relevance». This is his hobby horse (understandable as the «mainstream consensus» with its taboos is so hugely consequential), but in realistically diverse societies it applies to recessive narratives just as well.
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