Let's look at this as rationally as possible:
People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped dramatically.
Now, what has changed? We have several videos, that are public knowledge, that show objects moving in ways that no level of technology we have now can demonstrate.
This video and the other two related are the only official videos we currently have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWLZgnmRDs4
These objects were recorded as early as 2004. These objects were recorded not by a loony bin boy cried wolf UFO-ologist but by US Navy airmen.
Ok, maybe they are a camera issue? e.g. one can imagine it's a bird or a balloon or an object that shows up as moving much faster than reality, or something to do with parallax/tracking error with the IR (infrared)? That would be believable, especially if it's a single recording, solo pilot, new equipment. The issue with this is that in addition to the declassified IR videos, we saw this happen multiple times, in multiple locations, on different aircraft, with multiple pilots present in the aircraft at the same time making the same visual (with eyeballs) confirmation, radar confirmation, IR.
Ok, maybe it's an advanced hologram program/electronic warfare test/drill or something? Which was my next guess, but the visual confirmation rules out electronic warfare and in addition to visuals, IR, we also have radar bouncing off - not just recorded by the aircraft, but recorded by the entire USS Nimitz carrier group that was in the area at the time - hence real, physical objects. And, again, it wasn't just one signature, in fact the reason they were up there to begin with was because of the unidentified objects in the airspace.
Ok, maybe it's just a balloon or an experimental drone by the US or its rivals. The issue here is that the physics described are not just "next-gen" a la F35 but some sort of groundbreaking physics that would change the way we do anything.
From The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
"For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."
Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet long. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared. Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.” The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance. They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft. “Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.” “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
Thus, they are able to move on their own, not just floating in the wind (balloon, birds, launched radar reflectors), they're quite large, and can move large distances in short amounts of time. Additionally, no exhaust ports, no exhaust fumes, no control surfaces of any kind were observed. If we actually break down and analyze the movement based on the recording, we get results that are beyond physics. From the University of Albany - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
Even the most conservative and minimum models for acceleration give us ~70g with maneuverability, which is more than double what we have, and only in a rocket-like manner. Not without exhaust, control surfaces, and non-linear movement.
"It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft."
Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about. The issue with this is that we'd see a ton of people "disappearing" from public life and essentially vanishing, similar to what happened during the Manhattan Project. Physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists would seemingly end their career, stop publishing, and go off the grid to live and work at some facility. Currently, we haven't seen an exodus/brain drain of any level in the fields we would expect towards "nothing" - if anything, everyone's going into finance and adtech. Not to mention, this kind of stuff would be "Theory of Relativity" tier, not just cutting edge stealth tech.
The only other thing I can imagine is that it's a coordinated government attempt to spread disinformation regarding our military capabilities to our adversaries. Even then, it doesn't explain what the objects were.
I really really don't want to be a "UFO guy" but maybe even this mindset is part of the problem. Given all of this information, I don't understand why so many are so quick to dismiss any sort of theory, because as far as I see it anything terrestrial is exponentially more likely than aliens, but I can't come up with any ideas for these objects to have originated on Earth.
PS. there's also the the whistleblower which the article references: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/ex-intel-official-go...
and a 2017 NYT article describing the program itself: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog...