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I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
The one I linked in the second bullet point in the OP.
They chose to reveal some photos and not others, which leads me to believe that the content of the photos is one of the determining factors.
Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.
If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".
But that just moves the question back a step. Why did those specific images make their way to declassification and not others? No way to know until we actually see all the redacted images.
This isn’t an unfalsifiable “we haven’t seen aliens yet, but it could be that they’re out there and we just haven’t found them, so let’s keep looking”. This is, there’s a box right in front of us labeled “UFOs”, and I want to see what’s in the box.
Sure, I don’t disagree. But that has no effect on the fact that I want to see the rest of the unredacted document.
Well...
It wasn't clear what the "4 videos" was supposed to be referring to. If all the pics in what I linked were leaked before they were declassified then my bad, I was wrong.
The four leaked ones I was referring to were Gimbal (included in the FOIA release of the briefing), Flir/Tic-tac (included), GoFast (not included) and a fourth one that hasn't been declassified. However checking the Wikipedia page footage of the Pyramid one was actually recorded and leaked by Navy personnel as well, though I think that footage was different from the official footage of the same incident that was later officially released. So it turns out all 3 that are uncensored in that PDF were leaked and then later declassified years later.
My point, even before knowing that all 3 of those were leaked, was that internal pressures like people wanting to declassify the more compelling footage or people outright leaking it makes it pretty difficult for the government to deliberately only declassify unconvincing footage if they have anything dramatically better. So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.
I agree that in a vacuum, this is a sound argument. But people who have seen still-classified photos/videos claim they're more impressive than what's been publicly declassified so far.
Here's Matt Gaetz back in July 2023 on the Eglin incident, after he was shown a classified photo:
AARO later released their own public report on the Eglin incident, but Gaetz claimed that AARO's report was incomplete, and that he thought it was important that the classified materials he was shown should be made public.
(Rep. Tim Burchett has made similar statements about classified photos as well, although I don't have the link handy.)
Now, it could be that Gaetz is simply not a very discerning individual. It could be that all he saw was just another blurry point of light, and he mistook this for "something beyond any human capability". Or it could just be a picture of a Chinese spy drone, or it could be that the image was just entirely fake. ...But we won't really know until we get to see it ourselves.
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