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My position is that if any of this was true, there would have been profound advances in theoretical physics during this time where the US government is capturing and studying alien technology. There haven't been. Unless all these spacecraft have been sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant, which is even dumber. The last claim about UFOs I heard involved "Unknown Elements." It's possible I'm being pedantic, but why is the element still unknown? Do they mean entirely new elements? (which are still going to be somewhere on the periodic table) or just previously-unknown isotopes of elements? Exotic matter? New metamaterials and wacky alloys? Details were not forthcoming, and I'm not left with any confidence these questions would even be understood by the leaker.
Show me the godsdamned Element Zero Drive or shut up.
Ugh, the "unknown elements" quote made me facepalm when I first heard it - because I can imagine how a perfectly reasonable reality got twisted into "woah aliens!" Firstly, there is absolutely research being performed on wreckage of UFOs; literally, flying objects that are unidentified. Zero implication of extra terrestrials or advanced technology. Say US Intel dredges up some scrap from the ocean floor in the vicinity of a North Korean missile test, or collects shards of metal from a Middle Eastern desert where they detected what could be an Iranian drone crash - those could easily (and correctly) be classified as "UFO wreckage". They're going to perform tests to identify what they collected, which could involve classifying what they're made out of - not because it's some mysterious wonder element, but because they want to know if NK is being provided Chinese metals, or they want to estimate how far Iran is in developing composites. Some of the material is inevitably going to be unidentifiable because tests aren't perfect - there's always a chance of false readings and the samples could be damaged beyond recognition or contaminated or many other reasons. Now imagine some bookkeeper with no context reads the report. They're going to see "TOP SECRET", "UFO", and "test inconclusive, composition unknown". They leak that to the whistleblower with aliens on the mind, and of course it's going to turn into "alien vehicles with unknown elements."
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