I meant to mention yesterday that the motive for hiding evidence about NTI is unclear to me. It seems like a great way to get more power (“we need more surveillance to deal with NTI”) and more money (“tax revenue is needed to deal with the alien menace”), and to distract from current scandals (“Forget Watergate - it’s unimportant compared to the UFO issue”). But instead by your suggestion, the government has declined these opportunities.
Again, my interpretation is that intelligence in apes an dolphins is more acceptable because it’s potentially observable and repeatable. It’s less fun to study something that might be an intelligence that is moderately good at evading detection (and always teasingly getting better at evasion as our technology improves) or might not exist at all. If a study of apes shows they’re not able to communicate well, in spite of decades of enthusiastic efforts, at least apes still exist.
As a matter of curiosity, what evidence would establish in your mind that UFOs are not NTI