"In following all this, I’ve renewed an old, idiosyncratic gripe..." Me, too! The fact that we can't have this conversation without assuming, enthusiast automatically jump to 'it's aliens,' and dismissing credible witnesses by divorcing their testimony from the evidence.

The government is NOT 'admitting' to confusion, it's creating it. They acknowledge UFOs in one breath, then deny it another. They affirmed UAP's are real with one Pentagon spokesperson, then deny it with the the very next spokesperson not even a month later. They affirm Elizondo worked for the Pentagon at AATIP, and then denied he worked for AATIP. This is either very intentional misdirection, or there are a lot of people and departments doing things without intra-communication and so nobody knows what the heck is going on. That's more scary than the proposition of aliens. That's the kind of NEGLECT that brings down World Trade Centers. Just saying.