From today’s Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/08/11/stop-ufo-mania-no-evidence-of-aliens/

Right. It’s not ET, it was never ET, from Kenneth Arnold in 1947, to the Washington, D.C., saucers in 1952, to the rural Illinois encounters in 2000, to sightings over the Hudson Valley and Belgium during the 1980s and 1990s and the Chicago O’Hare sighting in 2006, etc., etc. … it was always Uncle Sam. So, what we have is likely a series of propulsion breakthroughs. Purely terrestrial. Entirely dreamed up and executed by earthlings. Entirely shrouded in secrecy. That makes it EVEN A BIGGER story than if it had been space aliens because that means someone right here on earth has achieved this capability. We have the radar data. We have eyewitness descriptions from credible observers (military and commercial pilots, law enforcement officers, etc.) There is no question that UFOs exist. The Pentagon never intended to release those now famous Tic Tac ufo videos and only did so, grudgingly, after they were leaked to the media. Then, by insisting that these objects remain of unknown origin, officials have added more fuel to conspiracy theories about space aliens.