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[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
The mood in the UFO community has been pessimistic since Schumer's UAPDA was gutted at the end of last year, and the release of Volume I of AARO's Historical Record Report today isn't helping:
The report affirms the theory advanced publicly by former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick that rumors of US government involvement with recovered alien technology were originated by a small group of government insiders who ultimately lacked verifiable evidence to substantiate their claims. Furthermore, these rumors may have been grounded in short-lived and/or proposed programs that actually kinda were meant to study aliens, even though none of these programs ever actually found any aliens:
Most sane people would be content to leave things here.
Nonetheless.
There are multiple tantalizing loose ends in this saga that remain unresolved. After a classified briefing in January, multiple members of Congress indicated that they learned information that substantiated the claims brought forward by David Grusch in June about a secret UFO reverse engineering program. Immediately after the briefing, Republican Rep. Tim Burchett stated "I think everybody left there thinking and knowing that Grusch is legit" and Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz stated "Based on what we heard many of Grusch claims have merit!". The "skeptical" interpretation of these remarks would be that only some of Grusch's claims have merit, namely the more mundane claims about the DoD's misuse of funds and the personal reprisals against him, while the claims about UAP reverse engineering remain unsubstantiated. Regardless of what the appropriate interpretation is, I think that the full contents of the January briefing should be declassified and made public so that we can decide for ourselves.
We also know for a fact that many photos and videos relating to UAP incidents exist and remain classified. A recent FOIA request revealed details about a USAF pilot's encounter with a UAP, and it included the pilot's drawing of the object, but we weren't allowed to see the video:
The reference to Gaetz here is due to remarks that Rep. Matt Gaetz made in July to the effect that he had seen an image of a UAP that seemed to demonstrate "technology that we don't posses anywhere in our arsenal, and none of our adversaries posses either". It's unclear to me if the case Gaetz was referring to is identical to this case that was uncovered by the FOIA request, but regardless, I would advocate for this video and for the image that Gaetz saw to be declassified and released to the public.
It may be surprising to people who haven't closely followed this story, but there actually is a culture war angle here.
Redditors with a vested interest in UAP disclosure have become uneasy over the fact that the Congressional effort for transparency has been spearheaded by Republicans of a decidedly MAGA variety (Burchett, Luna, Gaetz), and the few Democrats involved (Moskowitz, and to some degree AOC) have been generally more reserved and tepid in their support, or have simply withdrawn from the issue altogether over the last few months. This has fueled concerns that everyone has been swindled into supporting a "fringe right-wing conspiracy theory"; there's a desperate plea for more people with respectable left-wing credentials to come forward and lend credibility to the movement.
Which has me wondering: I think it's clear that the whole idea of a "conspiracy theory" has become firmly associated with the right. But is there any validity to this? Are people on the right more prone to believing in conspiracy theories? And if so, is this a recent historical development, or does this reflect something that's more deeply-rooted in the right-wing personality?
To be clear, I'm using the term "conspiracy theory" in the most neutral way possible, even though it's typically used as a pejorative. Even though I'm (somewhat) sympathetic to the possibility that the US government actually has concealed evidence of extraterrestrial life, that belief is, in the most literal sense, a conspiracy theory: it necessarily depends on the allegation that certain individuals conspired together in secret. The same goes for other popular beliefs on the right, like the allegations about improprieties in the 2020 presidential election. Even though I'm relatively neutral about the truth of those claims, it's hard to deny that they literally do constitute a conspiracy theory.
Alex Jones? Yeah, I'd say he's a conspiracy theorist. If you bring up Davos or the UN in any right-wing circle? Someone will probably insist that they're conspiring at some point.
Again, I don't view any of these claims as pejorative because I have no trouble thinking that some conspiracy theories might simply be true! I reject the Generalized Anti-Conspiracy Principle; I've never heard a convincing argument that made me think that substantial conspiracies are impossible, or that it would be impossible to get people to keep a secret for long enough (obviously some people can keep some things secret some of the time, otherwise your bank would have leaked your SSN by now).
For historical examples, many people would point to conspiracies in fascist states about ethnic minorities, although this would have to be counterbalanced by potential left-wing conspiracy theories: the paranoia about counter-revolutionaries in communist states and during the French Revolution, and potentially the foundations of Marxism itself (is it a "conspiracy" to say that the capitalists run everything?).
I do have to wonder if the tendency among right-leaning people to be more religious primes them to be more accepting of the possibility of unseen forces acting in the world. A surprising number of people in the UAP space have a Christian background (including certain highly-placed people in government), in spite of the general perception that belief in extraterrestrials would be incompatible with religious faith.
I'm going to reiterate what I've said the last couple of times this has come up...
Guys like Bob Lazar, David Grucsh, and John Podesta, strike me as smart but also kind of on the spectrum. IE the sort that might not realize they're being messed with.
I can assure you that the guys who work at Groom Lake, Tonopah, and the various other test facilities scattered around the western US are well aware of the memes and not above posting a few themselves. When you're a service member or defense contractor assigned to a special access project, telling the truth when someone asks "what are you working on?" or "where've you been for the last 3 days" can get you into some serious trouble, but if you say "I've been collecting xenobiology samples out at Site-4" everyone chuckles and goes on with their day.
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Ironically these UAP videos just make me have a higher respect for fighter pilots in general.
I look at them, and I can't tell what the hell I'm seeing. Is that a UFO, defying the laws of physics? Or a normal plane? Maybe a fishing boat, a bird, or just a ball of static? It all just looks like a grainy grey mess to me. Somehow these fighter pilots are able to look at it and instantly distinguish all those things, and tell me that "something ain't right with this one." But then there's the debunkers, who claim it's all perfectly normal and just gimbal effects or whatever. I have a degree in physics, and I have no idea what the hell is going on in any of them. I feel like I would need to spend a long time flying military aircraft to really know.
In the meantime, "UAP" seems like a good acronym. There's a lot of weird shit in the atmosphere. ball lightning, for example, is famously real but hard to explain. There's probably other stuff like that too. Or it could just be a pilot who's tired from flying too many hours and starting to see things, combined with a sensor glitch, I don't know.
I'm not totally a skeptic. I think the Fermi Paradox is a real, interesting problem. So maybe it is UFOs! I just don't know.
A more "medium" explanation might be classified military experiments on something like maurader a plasma gun that can shoot projectiles at 3% of the speed of light. That would certainly look "weird" on any normal sensor equipment.
I'm a moderate believer in the electric universe theory, to the degree that I think it can explain a lot of strange celestial phenomena. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles
Combine those with the fact that it's hard for people to judge the size of things in the sky without knowing what it is. The limit of stereoscopic vison is about 215m. After that your brain just making an educated guess about the size.
this is the first I've ever heard of electric universe theory, but I gotta tell you it sounds very crackpotty. The first result I found is this: https://briankoberlein.com/blog/testing-electric-universe/ which seems like a thorough debunking.
The strong version gets pretty crackpotty, but in a fun way. It's a guilty pleasure to read.
However there's a weaker take. Astronomy of the solar system was developed before electricity was understood and assumes that everything is electrically neutral. The argument is that electric charges are important with things like asteroids and planetary weather can be affected.
They predicted the first astroid lander would fail due to a difference in charge and sure enough it failed due to a mysterious flash. The one that succeeded orbited the asteroid for a few days, which would have given the charges a chance to even out.
In terms of atmospheric effects it's not a well respected theory because it hasn't developed any predictive models that work on that scale.
which one? (I am pretty sure that it is not what happened, but...)
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When it comes to the UFOs, there has existed a longrunning conflict, if you can call it such, between UFOlogists who subscribe to the "nuts'n'bolts" explanation - there's nothing supernatural here, they're beings from some other planet flying physical ships - and UFOlogists who subscribe to theories as UFOs as interdimensional creatures, ie. offer an explanation not covered by our current understanding of science, a supernatural explanation.
There's also a longrunning trend of nuts'n'bolts ufologists eventually becoming interdimensionalists and starting to include all sorts of woo in their spiel - the current congressional effort seems to be leaning that way already, and it's understandable that secular lawmakers, which Democrats would generally tend to be, would be leery of this direction, since there's a short skip, often barely disguised, from "UFOs are interdimensional creatures" to "UFOs are demons, let us pray".
Personally, I've argued for some time that this whole flap has other explanations already, but frankly, if I had to accept that the UFOs really represent something extraterrestrial, I'd go with an interdimensional explanation, too, since the interplanetary one doesn't really make sense logically at all. Why the heck would the ayyys be sending ships here just to... do stunts? Where are the promised goods?
Also, regarding conspiracies, I'd say that there are two separate reasons why different fractions of the left are leery of them. The more mainstream liberals have adopted a trust-the-science, trust-the-experts sort of a worldview, which doesn't really offer that much space for conspiracy theories, especially considering that most conspiracy theories usually just boil down to the supposed experts and technocratic governance just being a smokescreen for some sort of a sinister plot to tell lies to take power.
This doesn't mean a complete aversion to conspiracy theory - you can still decribe conspiracies by dark forces seeking to dethrone the benevolent experts to take over, like the idea of a Trump-Russia plot - but it's also not particularly necessary to do so, you can always just blame the forces of stupidity for the fact that the best and the most scientific advice is not being listened to.
Meanwhile, on the socialist left, where there's more distrust of the experts (particularly of the mainstream economic and foreign policy set in the West), there's an aversion to conspiracy theories, since it's seen as an "easy", lacking explanation for things that have deeper structural causes. Ie. socialists find it weird when right-wingers bang on about the WEF, specifically, despite WEF representing a group of capitalists, since the suggestion seems to be that the problem is just that there's this cabal of bad capitalists and if we just expose them and... somehow... get rid of them, then capitalism will start working properly and all would be good again.
Between these there has traditionally existed a populist left that's too left-wing to be liberals but not really socialist enough to be socialist, and this crowd has generally been more amenable to conspiracy theories, but there just seems to be less space for them than previously.
I don't believe in Aliens, I think there would be evidence the government and academia working together can't hide even if they do manage to work together, but I don't think this is a very good argument. After all, we went to the moon basically just to show off. A civilization capable of interstellar travel is probably using a similar portion of capabilities; we don't know how to travel between stars, we're civilizationally in 1865, when From Earth to the Moon on that question. It took another hundred years to be able to do it. Our civilizational capacity in the 1960s was orders of magnitude beyond what it was in the 1860s, and no doubt in another hundred years it'll be orders of magnitude more than it is now assuming we don't collapse before then.
Right, but the ‘UFO phenomenon’ is seen by most Ufologists as mostly pertaining to involvement beyond simple scientific or recreational activities on behalf of the so-called ‘Ufonauts’, or the intelligence behind the phenomenon at large, given the fact of how intricate the deception and psychologically-based operation of this intelligence seems to be. This seems to be indicative of something beyond simple probing for the sake of another intelligence understanding a lesser one (especially since, if these things are actually aliens, and could engineer the space-time metric like no-one’s business, something like nanotechnology or ancestor-like simulations wouldn’t be too far away in the tree of technological development most likely, and having nuts-n’-bolts style data-collection would be too ‘clunky’). Jacques Vallee formulates a handful of arguments against the hypothesis that these are actual interplanetary spacecraft here if you take the data seriously. As a corollary of this, the ‘control system’ that Vallee describes the UFO phenomenon as being (some sort of atemporal ‘higher-dimensional’ memetic phenomenon attempting to manifest its existence to us through manipulation of our mental, spiritual, and physical faculties) also seems to be very hard to distinguish from some sort of intelligence operation done on behalf of the US government, as some of the first abduction experiences also seem to point to some psyops entirely. The issue is that the intelligence community also seems to have some sort of belief in these things (as shown with Grusch et al.) and also seem to consider themselves as ‘superior’ to the rest of the population due to their knowledge of such things ultimately.
So we’ve come to this weird impasse where elements of the intelligence community are attempting to manipulate phenomena like this, while also ostensibly believing in it, to the point where the so-called ‘gatekeepers’ consider themselves incumbent to manipulate the rest of humanity with this given technological advantage for the ‘greater-good’ in a mode of absolute secrecy, which coincidentally is very reminiscent of the top-AI labs and the idea of ‘pivotal acts’. Also, the whole ‘this memetic structure from a higher atemporal dimension is attempting to manifest itself through us without direct causal actions, mentally and physically’ idea is an antecedent to the Landian accelerationist idea of AI & capitalism as a basilisk which has itself been succeeded in this community by e/acc people. So it’s interesting to see how that plays out.
EDIT: some links fixed.
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Every single explanation for why actually existing socialists states have been failures and horror shows rests on a giant conspiracy theory. Sanctions, reactionary forces within the state, take your pick. Hell conspiracy theories are a good part of the reason why said states became horror shows to begin with, since they resorted to conspiracy theories about kulaks and speculators as an explanation for their own failures, and punished these people accordingly.
Yes_Chad.jpg
"Systemic" explanations are a cope of the autist. Libertarians think they can create a good system by drafting just the right constitution, that will keep the state small for sure this time. Ancaps think they can create a good system by just abolishing the state. Socialists are scattered across a similar spectrum with regards to capitalism. Hlynka's Cat is laughing at them all.
The fact that we've been stuck so long acting systemic explanations are better because they're systemic probably says something about the usefulness of our academic elites, but that's another story.
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Without very strong evidence it does not make sense to treat aliens as a serious possibility.
Why not? Given the fermi calculation, I'd say it takes very strong evidence to not treat aliens as a serious possibility (evidence arguably provided by modern telescopes etc. not picking up any signs)
The Fermi calculation is a multiplication of numbers most of which have an uncertainty that spans several orders of magnitude. One can derive any outcome from "there's a civilization in 99% of star systems" to "one civilization every 10,000 galaxies" just by using more optimistic or pessimistic numbers.
I know, but it's commonly used the way I used it since even very pessimistic estimates seem to contradict what we see in the universe.
I'm not convinced of that; pessimistic estimates quite easily result in fewer than 1 advanced civilization per galaxy.
We can see hundreds of billions of galaxies and have not yet discovered one advanced civilization. Fewer than one per galaxy is one thing, but fewer than one per hundred billion galaxies is quite another.
Depends how long you think it takes advanced civilisations to emerge. Most of those hundreds of billions of galaxies can only be seen as they were billions of years ago - and the Cambrian explosion was less than a billion years ago.
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I am not claiming that we are sole intelligent life in universe. In fact, this seems unlikely. See Hubble Deep Field.
I am claiming that it is ridiculously unlikely that any of UFO described or depicted are aliens. I expect that either interstellar travel is effectively impossible or that aliens would be undetected by us or would just stomp over us.
Rather then fitting into that weird narrow span where there is no real evidence but there are blurry videos and reports about alien abductions. Treating that seriously seems absurd.
Poor Grusch is deluded or deliberately misinforming people. Maybe he took some joke too seriously? Or is just crank.
As it stands, Lord of The Rings is about as likely to describe events that actually happened as Grusch claims being matched by reality. At least in my opinion.
That sounds about right to me.
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Because there’s an issue with Fermi’s Paradox. For the most part it’s a guess, we simply don’t know enough to estimate the numbers and the only thing we have solid data on — how many planets support life — the answer as far as we can tell is exactly 1/(number of planets). Zero times any other number is zero.
It’s already leading to weird speculation about why we haven’t found anything yet. Dark forest theory is a weird cope. We don’t find any signals, and based only on some very speculative math, we should. Clearly the aliens must be hiding from other more dangerous alien species that are also hiding. Or you know, aliens don’t exist except for Hollywood sound stages and in the minds of people who watched Captain Picard host aliens on his starship as a kid.
At the same time an alien society on the level of Ancient Greece or Rennaissance Italy would likely pass unnoticed at interplanetary distances nevermind interstellar ones, so we could be facing a situation such as that in the Path Not Taken where intelligent life is reasonably common, but Homo Sapiens were the only race in the local galactic cluster to develop radar and radios.
That's very lucky for us that we were the only ones! I mean, sure, that could be the case, but it really would be an astounding bit of luck.
It also tends to faceplant directly on Occams Razor. We keep spinning ideas about why we can’t ever find a sign of intelligent life, when the most obvious answer is that we might well be the only ones like us send out signals and thus there’s nothing to find.
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Or not, that's kind of the problem with the base assumptions behind the Fermi paradox even if one sets aside the whole young universe theory.
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It makes me have less respect for them. Who watches a super zoom of a mylar balloon and then claims it is an alien spacecraft? Morons do.
It isn't aliens, it is never aliens. They wouldn't be spotted if they did exist. Unless you think they can cross light years and not negotiate earth. Plus, look at us now, it would just be a robotic probe, and it would NEVER crash or be noticed. It is all bullshit.
I haven't seen any pilot claim "this is aliens" just "this is something that I can't explain." is there an example of a pilot explicitly claiming aliens?
I don't recall them saying anything but "wtf is this thing" but you walked into alien stuff by referencing UFO as synonymous with aliens and fermi's paradox etc... It is never aliens...ever.
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The term 'conspiracy theory' is a piece of psychological operations deployed by the CIA in the wake of the JFK assassination in order to discredit people who didn't believe the official story.
You should not believe the official story of the JFK assassination, and you should not care about the words games people play with the phrase.
You also didn't bring up the other biggest conspiracy theory, one with a particular left-wing bent: 9/11 was an inside job. LIHOP or MIHOP, whichever you prefer, dancing israelis and fireproof passports.
9/11 conspiracy theories weren’t originally right coded, but nowadays they seem like they are? More evidence for my ‘woo swims right because creation scientists will happily lend their expertise to it when it jumps into the Christian community’ theory.
Of course on the other hand ancient aliens seems like it’s as left wing as ever.
The left wing seems like it has a perpetual conspiracy theory about Republican plots to institute an actual hard theocracy, the handmaid’s tale is just around the corner, the hallucination that right wing elites are plotting to bring back teen marriage, even some of the farther hysteria about project 2025. Not sure how you’d count this; every piece of publicly available information points to that idea being false, but is political blood libel in a different category? If so why should the same thing not apply to right coded beliefs like pizzagate?
Not every mistaken or unsupported belief is automatically a conspiracy theory. There has to be some sort of criteria to distinguish between them.
I think left wing fears about the coming theocracy are better explained as just generalized anxiety about the opposition, or perhaps false beliefs about the views of individual Republicans, although I agree that they easily could become conspiracy theories with the right narrative.
An unsupported idea about a plot by a powerful group is a conspiracy theory.
You can drop "unsupported", as the COVID experience with respect to lab leaks shows.
Obviously conspiracy theory doesn't have an actual definition- it's a snarl word- but some things labeled as conspiracy theories are corer to the definition than others. I think there was an ACX post about words with expanding definitions somewhere and this seems like a good example- a theory, with no evidence behind it, that there exists a plot by a powerful group to do something evil is pretty core to the conception.
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Why would this not be a conspiracy theory? A powerful group plotting to do something bad is the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory.
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"Ancient aliens" was never really left-wing, and it isn't popular with leftists now. The idea of precursor races who taught man secret knowledge and left their crumbling monumental works behind* comes out of the fin-de-siécle welter of new spirituality, Blavatsky, Steiner, Liebenfels, etc. which was in turn tied up with the Völksich nationalist movements of the day.
*Really it goes back to stuff like the Watchers in Hebrew myth and the Golden Age of the Greeks but that's it's modern permutation.
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At this point, anyone who has anything to say re: UAP is presumed to be a hostile bullshitter. I'd not believe in UAPs even if videos of them were shown all around mainstream media.
I'm willing to give a pass to people who say "come and see this crazy plane on saturday, it can pull 50 gees" or "here is 50 gigabytes of top secret data showing anomalous craft, here are military personnel who collected it".
I'd love for the idea of (peaceful) interstellar contact to be a reality, but the problem is that it just really isn't feasible unless several major widely accepted parts of physics are actually false. The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of aliens) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.
IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?
Supernatural entities would presumably operates by rules separate from those of the physical universe. Aliens have to follow the same rules as us.
What is the difference between "rules separate from those of a physical universe" and "following the same rules as us yet exploiting the parts of them that we haven't discovered yet"?
Relativity and the speed of light put a pretty hard limit on things
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I mean, I get where you are coming from, but the main objection to interstellar travel isn't energy (you could do it with Voyager 1 amounts of energy) it's just time. Which humans have very anthropocentric ideas about that may not generalize to any other entities out there.
Most of the barriers on interstellar travel are barriers on human interstellar travel, that vanish if you have a relatively long time horizon and are fine sending GPT as your ambassador instead of a human. We could almost certainly send a (very small) spacecraft to another star in my lifetime via a starwisp if we really wanted to (and maybe we will!) Relatively fast nuclear-powered travel is also theoretically possible (it should be within the laws of physics, but obviously that's a huge engineering challenge!)
With slightly more advanced technology than we have now, it should be possible to send some sort of a small constructor (not grey goo, or anything crazy like that) that could construct larger devices. Iterate to even more advanced technology, and it could even construct lifeforms ("biologics") in artificial wombs, or, even if not from scratch, from frozen embryos.
Thus you could have a situation where there are little green/grey men crashing spaceships in New Mexico like all the most far-out theories claim without breaking any physical laws, or really any novel technology that humans haven't already considered and mathematically sketched out since the early Cold War.
Frankly, I think the weird reported behavior of some of the objects (e.g. instantaneous acceleration) is much more of a problem from a physics/materialist view in my mind than the problem of interstellar travel. And of course ironically is that we have much better reasons to believe there is something out there engaging in eye-wateringly fast acceleration within Earth's atmosphere than we do that it came here from Over There. So while I'm sympathetic to the "it makes more sense for it to be supernatural" approach, I really don't think interstellar travel is the barrier that some seem to think it is. It's just that interstellar travel might not look like Star Wars.
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I’d be willing to entertain the notion if anyone “convinced that Gorsch is legit” had any background in the hard sciences. Or if we had any sort of evidence of life in space. You find me a JWST image of a spaceship, we have something to talk about. If the head of the astrophysics department at MIT hears what Congress just heard, then okay there’s at least some reason to begin considering the idea. What we actually have at best are weird photos taken by the general public, statements by a few airmen, and a bunch of Congress members who haven’t taken physics since high school.
None of that in my view constitutes either someone qualified to make a judgement about what is or is not alien, or whether or not the data collected is meaningful. And none of the evidence we see is considered even interesting by anyone who is an expert on space.
I’ll say what I said when this little sideshow started. I don’t believe because there’s nothing that makes it plausible. We don’t have any evidence that interstellar travel is remotely possible, we might, maybe, have a highly speculative theory if negative mass and negative energy can exist. We don’t have evidence of life in deep space. We don’t have signals that are unambiguously artificial in origin. We don’t have images of anything artificial in space that we didn’t put up there ourselves. Until we have even one of those things there’s no reason to consider aliens a reasonable hypothesis.
There are people like that (e.g. Jacques Vallee, Eric W. Davis, Hal Puthoff, Jack Sarfatti, to a certain extent Eric Weinstein) but unfortunately they’re all pretty much ‘unhinged’ to the point where it doesn’t really matter. They all believe (besides Weinstein) in things like remote viewing and parapsychological phenomena which would disqualify any materialist from taking what they say seriously prima facie, and coincidentally, all of them besides Weinstein have worked for intelligence services (ONI, CIA, NSA, etc.) before. Weinstein is a bit of a wildcard since he doesn’t believe in things beyond the materialistic paradigm he was taught in, but he also is totally divorced from academia and many people think he’s a crank since he indicates that people like Ed Witten are intelligence operatives and String Theory is a psyop, etc.
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Would you support declassifying the information that was shared in the January briefing that convinced the two lawmakers I cited that Grusch was legit? Then people with a background in the hard sciences could take a look at it (whatever "it" is).
Depends on what gets declassified and why. I’d at minimum want the information looked at by an outsider with a background in the relevant sciences so that we aren’t left with “Marjary Taylor Green sat in a closed session, came out and said Gorsch is telling the truth.” She has no background to let her determine what she’s seeing.
With classified stuff, even if it’s UFO stuff, it might well reveal things of use to other military and spy agencies. In order to study the airman pictures properly, you need a pretty deep understanding of the systems in the aircraft. Which would also be very interesting to China. Giving an astrophysicist clearance is probably safer.
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Depends on why it is kept secret.
If it is coverup of secret weapon/sensor tests by USA military? Then probably better to keep it classified.
Is it an attempt to get Chinese to waste enormous pile of money chasing aliens? Keep it classified if it helps.
I think it's just a lot more mundane than that - the US just over classifies everything as a habit.
Also if a UAP turns out to be some PLA wunderwaffen or technical gremlin, then that's something you really shouldn't publicise. The thing about unexplained phenomena is that you don't know what they are, so better not take the risk.
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and even then...
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