Ok, so this is a beautiful example of the Pentagon’s legacy of UFO disinformation.
You want to prevent the public from figuring out that the UFOs are above-top-secret weapons designed, built and operated by the U.S. military, so you concoct all manner of fantastical stories to distract the media and society at large.
You enlist bona fide experts with excellent credentials. You expertly construct your products, whether they be, in this case, a research paper, or a book, or a program for the various broadcast media.
You effectively promote said product, a vehicle for your disinformation, to the media. And then you sit back and watch the coverage.
The reason? To confuse the public at a time when people are desperately seeking the truth about UFOs. You don’t want the public to know that the most sensational of these encounters are above-top-secret U.S. weapons that employ a different type of propulsion technology, a field propulsion system. You don’t want the public to figure out that this conspiracy has been going on for decades. You don’t want the media to finally grok that this is orders of magnitude beyond Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. A conspiracy made possible by the fact that knowledge of these weapons is so compartmentalized, even the military pilots who encounter them do not understand what they are seeing. Congress, the White House, all lack a “need to know.”
In fact, keeping this secret is so critically important to national security that you develop a professional disinformation program that produces all manner of media. Books by retired military officers who purport to have encountered aliens, aerospace mavens who claim to have worked on projects to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft at Area 51, etc., etc.
But, hey, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. It’s all in Flying Saucers!