Another part is that people don't realize how within the government, and especially the military, there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified. You do this because there are spies and they will steal shit. You want to make that process noisy. It's also beneficial because you may get your adversary to spend millions or billions studying a thing that isn't even possible. Sometimes they even have people "working" on these things (sometimes even unwitting fools that are true believers) because it makes it look more legitimate (and you can funnel money through these). See the ridiculousness of the US and Russian psychic programs.
There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors. It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself. That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all of them, just enough).
To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets declassified, that is purported to be evidence of aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed.
For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distributed as evidence of psychic phenomenon, but upon further inspection, you'll find isn't the case. What you instead see is documentation along the lines of "someone made a claim about X, here's what they say about X" where X can be "I can read minds" or whatever. At no point is there an actual scientific test of this, the document is just acknowledgment that someone said some outlandish things to government investigators. Then years later those notes are declassified and somehow become evidence that X really happened.
It's like reading a police report about someone who took too much methamphetamine and ran around claiming that they could fly, and then using that police report as evidence that the government knows people can fly.
When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."
The government threw a lot of money at that and did direct experimentation, but dig deeper into the weird claims some of those that were adjacent to remote viewing were making/continue to make outside of that and you start getting into that territory. Things like aliens, teleportation, levitation, pyrokinesis, etc.
I remember seeing one document that was about a person claiming to being able to do some kind of teleportation of objects through containers, so the investigators went to see them do it and it appeared that it happened. That's more of a magic show than a real experiment, but because the investigators described what they appeared to see on government letterhead, believers in the paranormal upgraded it to fact instead of field notes.
Same thing happens with reports of UFOs or aliens, their portrayal of evidence of conspiracy rely heavily on twisting testimony, descriptions and appearances in the text into "facts confirmed and approved of by the government."
> there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified
Exactly this.
I saw a youtube video a while ago about a recently declassified document from the US Navy which says the USS Seawolf reported hearing signals from survivors on the USS Thresher more than a day after the Thresher went missing. The sonar operators on the Seawolf, no doubt well trained professionals, had themselves convinced they heard the Thresher and there were people still left alive. The guy who made the video about this document was very excited; "the US Navy hid this from from us! They told us the Thresher guys died instantly."
But the problem is the Thresher sank in about 2.6 km of water, far deeper than any military submarine can possibly withstand. Furthermore there is declassified video footage of the Thresher's hull on the sea floor, shattered into numerous pieces. There were no pings from the Thresher's sonar; the Seawolf crew were simply mistaken. The report was classified but that doesn't mean it was true.
[Video link deliberately omitted, but you can find it by searching "37 pings"]
The only way for the story to make sense is if they weren't resting on the sea floor, and were instead at or above crush depth with neither propulsion or spare ballast capacity to rise to the surface.
It's possible, I suppose. It seems pretty far-fetched.
"While working in Moscow, Ufimtsev became interested in describing the reflection of electromagnetic waves. He gained permission to publish his research results internationally because they were considered to be of no significant military or economic value."
Well that's why disinformation works so well. You have to explore stolen material even if you think it might be misinformation.
But also military misinformation is so prolific that it even infiltrates public knowledge. Often on purpose. Many people still believe that eating carrots will help you see in the dark. It's definitely true that the vitamins in carrots can help eyesight, but they aren't _that_ good. Good disinformation has a mixture of truth in it for people to latch onto. Just a sprinkling can give something a lot of validity. Should also say something about how you take in information, especially from YouTube university.
There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors. It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself. That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all of them, just enough).