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Honestly, "trying to mislead foreign countries about what capabilities the US has" doesn't seem like a terrible explanation. It's certainly within the capability of the CIA to take whatever our most advanced technology is and recruit a few pilots and former spooks to exaggerate what they saw in front of Congress (or just lie). Maybe some of the Congresscritters are even in on it.
It would be pointless to involve any Congresscritters. Their incentives are heavily misaligned with maintaining a government conspiracy, and their knowledge of the conspiracy wouldn't help in furthering its aim.
The big issue with this explanation is... Why? If we have the capabilities and want them to act as a deterrent, it's better to just display them. Then there's no risk of miscommunication about them, and we accomplish our aims, at the expense of giving up information that would allow development of countermeasures. The only reason to invent capabilities and launder them through UFO stories to gullible legislators and media is if you don't actually have those capabilities, which would be immediately obvious to adversary intelligence.
That said, it doesn't have to be a good plan for it to be an explanation; it just needs to be a plan that some group of people in government would hear about and go "hey, that's brilliant!" That's a much lower bar. So I land on "it's a dumb group of government employees undermining social trust in pursuit of a plan that's completely counterproductive to its imagined goals." Human stupidity is a more parsimonious explanation for the entire affair than any kind of intelligence, human or otherwise.
Could be that they want to hide the exact capabilities we have and how we got them. Once everyone knows what's possible, they'll immediately try to replicate it? We have some super secret research lab but want the Chinese look for alien storage facilities instead?
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It could be about hiding the program in plain sight.
If you’re testing something in the real world, given the ubiquitous cell phones with video capabilities and instant connection to the internet, it’s pretty much a given that such video would be online within fifteen minutes. Having such individuals believing it’s aliens means that it’s going to be tagged UAP/UFO not aircraft. Which in most social media and on YouTube is going to sort it into a large bucket of useless fake and blurry videos (and the new on is likely blurry as well) making it much more difficult for China to tell for sure which of these grainy blurry videos have intelligence and which ones are fake. They all look similar, especially if you don’t know what the craft looks like.
Just make some fake videos, put them online, and get some celebrities to retweet them. Don't drag Congress into it by having a patsy go there and accuse you of misappropriating funds.
The congressional theater helps to give it the veneer of credibility. When congress is involved in the the matter this isn’t just something retweeted, it becomes an official thing. Then those looking will at least know this story is what the Americans want the world to think.
Who cares? All you're trying to do is fill the infosphere surrounding the subject with bullshit. If you could somehow create a program where taking pictures of random airborne objects and posting them online earned people free tacos, that would pretty much do the trick.
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The problem with this theory is it would seem to weaken the US significantly too. Everyone I know basically believes the government is lying to us. So if you fake this and it comes out then any trust in our government disappears.
Of course these conspiracies haven’t all been a bunch of people colluding in all of them. They’ve been a certain group like Anderson trying to push lab leak etc. So maybe it’s just pathological where every conspiracy thinks they won’t be found out but what they are doing is good so they will do it.
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