Quote:
Originally Posted by Deuces McKracken
I don't know if those ex pilots are representing an institution from their perspective. They were there in an effort to inform the public, but where did that permission come from? They might naturally want to do that on their own. What would stop them? An institution. And what did that institution do? It declassified what it (officially) thinks could be advanced technology of a foreign power. So a gate was opened and, predictably, the pilots walked through it. This isn't something these individuals could achieve alone- not ever, not even a question.
The Pentagon isn't responsive to public demands in the manner you seem to be assuming. The public didn't know about the UAPs of interest here. The Pentagon isn't led around by it's nose by hearsay either. It is trying to achieve an objective, and why that institutional objective involves the media UFO blitz is a major question you aren't answering. Most of the Pentagon's aims are kept secret or lied about. To think that it is just being straight up friendly and informative here is to ignore their whole history- it's poor institutional analysis.
Look, almost everything is classified by default. If you ask someone currently serving where they're going next or what they're doing they'll probably be able to give you a country at best. You ask someone who's served in the past then they'll be free to talk about more as things become declassified. So why do some things become declassified? Typically because someone decides it no longer matters (if it ever did). Sometimes it's a freedom of information request, sometimes it's because it's in the public interest, but mostly it's because it doesn't really matter any more what some Gulf War soldier says about where they were. If you want to read something more into why some nothing video has been declassified then you're going to have to give me a good reason.
Actually, in this case the public did know about some of these UAPs. The big excitement has been that official channels have actually said "Yup, that is in fact one of our videos". I'm not sure that supports either side particularly (perhaps yours more than mine) but it's an important detail.
I think we have to be careful with our framing here. The Pentagon hasn't said about any individual video "This could be advanced technology of a foreign power". The report essentially says that some of the incidents in the report being explicable by some foreign power can't be ruled out. But then as I've said before, intelligence agencies tend not to be in the business of ruling anything out in UAPs. If they say "We know this isn't a foreign technology" then someone will take that to mean either: it's alien, or it's ours. It only drives speculation further. Rather the stance is typically what we've seen in the report, to say "This could be misperception of operatives, sensor glitches, mundane explanations (like a weather balloon), but we can't rule out the possibility of something else in all cases".
I'm not going to rule out the possibility that the various agencies involved are angling for something. Maybe it's as simple as making a bit of a stir continues to justify the US' insane military and intelligence spending in the public eyes. But then that's quite a mundane claim and I think stops a way short of what I'd call a "psy op" as opposed to fairly typical political tactics.