We've heard Congressman Tim Burchett and several commentators argue that the latest releases are being manipulated, alleging that “Deep State” actors are mixing genuine anomalies with mundane or even fabricated material to confuse the public and neutralize the disclosure movement.
Why would they do this?
The U.S. government has used UFO mythology for information operations in the past, and this latest release could create fresh opportunities for foreign adversaries and domestic actors to spread disinformation using deepfakes, AI imagery, and spoofed government portals.
Given that background, there are four big strategic reasons a government might knowingly let disinformation ride alongside genuine UAP material:
Operational security:
Blur which incidents reflect real capabilities (new sensors, drones, platforms) and which are noise, so adversaries cannot easily map or exploit them.Confusion and paralysis:
Saturate the information space so the public, media, and even some policymakers throw up their hands and assume “it’s all lies anyway,” making serious oversight hard.Topic and witness discrediting:
Make UAP as a category look unserious, so real internal documents or honest whistleblowers are easier to dismiss as cranks or dupes.Narrative control with plausible deniability:
Release some authentic records to show good faith, but embed them in a broader mix that nudges the public toward preferred explanations, while always being able to say, “We published everything; if some of it was wrong, that’s just the nature of old reports.
Defense guidance says: we are committed to transparency, but only to “authorized recipients” with a need‑to‑know; anything beyond that can trigger discipline or prosecution. So even during a transparency push, the default culture and rules still push toward withholding, sanitizing, and shaping information.
Safety in Confusion
Security and information‑security doctrine are explicit that even unclassified data has to be controlled if aggregating it might reveal sensitive patterns. That leads to heavy redactions, odd gaps, and “context‑free” dumps that technically fulfill a transparency promise but leave the public with partial, sometimes misleading pictures. In practice, confusing releases are safer for officials than fully clear ones: they reduce the odds of giving adversaries useful intelligence and limit the legal/political risk if something was mishandled.