So the government finally released some of the classified files on UFO’s.
Yawn!
This BBC article describes some of the content :
There are astronauts who reported seeing strange flashes of light, described as possible reflections from ice, or laser beams.
There are military reports and film taken in the Middle East of an oblong object described as a possible missile. (Who’da thunk that there are missiles in the Middle East? 
)
And there are reports from the 1950’s of private individuals who claim to have seen round metal objects. (similar to the flying saucers that were common in popular movies of the time)
So why were these reports classified as top secret at the time?
And why was there any hesitation to release them for publication, say, 20 years ago?
The only reason I can think of is that the photos may have demonstrated high-tech issues (accuracy?, resolution?, focus distances?) that were legitimate secrets at the time.
But the highest tech back then looks totally primitive today.
And verbal reports by individuals of visual sightings would be even less secret, with no tech involved.
So why have there been so many Congressional inquiries over the years, which were always met by resistance to de-classify the material?
Here’s my guess:
Aside from the possibility that many of the sightings will be of real military aircraft on test flights, they probably also didn’t want to legitimise so many sightings in case they’d be seen as endorsements, or maybe they were worried they might cause a panic.
The government tends to classify things as secret by default, especially in the era of Cold War paranoia. Lots of publicly known facts are “secret”.
Given enough information (time, place, weather conditions) 90%+ of “lights in the sky” UFO sightings are readily explicable using publicly available information.
If you’re looking from a military intelligence point of view, you also get to include:
- Things we’re doing that we don’t want anyone to know about
- Things the other side are doing that we don’t want them to know we know about
- Things we spent far too much time and money on that turned out to be nothing so shut up
- Things we can’t explain and we don’t want to look stupid.
So the safest thing is just to routinely classify everything, so nobody can tell what you’re hiding and why.
Whenever they release images, either still or moving, they are uniformly blurry and usually at least a decade old. The whole thing seems like when Nixon released the White House phone -recording transcripts and there were key gaps and erasures. bunk. I have become so cynical over the years and I always thought that would never happen to me.
Let’s not forget Project Blue Book. The government actively encouraged conspiracy theories about aliens, because that makes it easier for them to cover up real things that they want to keep secret. Some of these classifications, they might have actually been hoping would leak, to fan the flames (because it wouldn’t be classified if it wasn’t real, or so the CTers would think).
Because Top Men just operate that way. Whether or not the material in question is actually scandalous in some way or another doesn’t matter. It’s just the Top Men way of doing business.
As long as you keep a mystery secret, the public won’t be hounding you to solve it.
Over classification of stuff is a serious problem, and is to be avoided. It means that the processes and systems that manage legitimately classified stuff becomes overloaded with crud, and that overload compromises protection of stuff that really should be secret. It isn’t cheap or simple. One of the reasons why it makes sense to routinely declassify stuff.
Weird stuff of low volume - like UFO sightings - might fall on the side of caution in classification. But a general routine classification, just to be safe, should never happen.
Where care is needed, especially in the modern information rich world, is information that when aggregated becomes sensitive. So sometimes an individual piece of information might seem innocuous, but when taken in aggregation with other information, it becomes a problem. It requires judgement.
Just a WAG, but the investigation might have used methods that themselves are classified. To reveal the results would reveal information about the methods used.
Because some of the sightings were connected to gov’t testing of early secret drone and weapon technology.
Behind the Bastards did some podcasts about it. Here are YouTube links, but you can find it via where you get your podcasts.
Part One and Part Two: How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man’s Mind
This week we tell the harrowing story of Paul Bennewitz, a simple nerdy engineer who spotted evidence of covert Air Force weapons programs and was gaslit into believing they were alien spacecraft.
… how Richard Doty crafted an elaborate alien ruse to destroy Paul Bennewitz’s mind, all with the goal of hiding the U.S. government’s drone and stealth bomber programs.
Some of them might have been enemy aircraft.
Right.
