I agree with you on that. I know there are aliens, and that we're being visited by them, but the fuzzy pics are a shameful debacle. I've heard video testimony (Richard Doty, on Gaia) of people saying the AF Office of Special investigations recovered objects and crystal clear civilian photos of UFOs and beings that landed. They took them from the people who had the photos and classified them.
Of course, Doty could be just a paid shill (part of his counterintelligence role was being a paid shill for a long time). But other people have said it. But "other people" are not necessarily credible.
I think it's 30% the "government" is purely "trolling" us. And 62% it's not just trolling, but deliberate deception to cover some truth they know. And 8% they actually have no idea and this is the best they can do.
So given that I think it's useful to come up with theories about "why" would they be doing deception and why this kind of deception. Why do a limited hangout that provides equal feed for the triumvirate of skeptics, debunkers and believers? AFACT, in intelligence the reason you feed both sides of a conflict is to create a chaos outcome. The strange thing is the net effect of this is to cause people to be confused, to lose faith in all of the government, each other and in any extraterrestrial reality. It seems only the archetypal "adversaries" would want that for a country and its people. So who is really pulling the strings of this elaborate disinformation campaign? My bets are corporate special interests that control any actual reverse engineered technology and interactions and who make the government the whipping boy, or other countries.
Going down this road I think the point is really to create a "narrative denial system" to keep people in a cordoned off area in which they are safe to speculate, hate each other, and argue about these things, and far away from the real truth. I really think that whoever is controlling this narrative is doing this to protect the truth. Not that I agree with their tactics, but I can understand the motivation, and recognize the tactics from other operations against "conventional" threats.
In light of this theory, the upcoming, "sanctioned release" of information requested by the DNI, seems likely to simply be more fuel for all rival camps. An alternate theory is this is not deception for confusion, but deception for "acclimatization". A drip drip "disclosure" that both protects existing incumbents (corporate utilizers of the tech) and slowly (and seemingly begrudgingly) accustoms the public to the reality of its existence. The drip rate is chosen to precisely minimize the actual information release, while maximizing satisfaction of the public's growing thirst for this info. I have a feeling we've been here before, and it's the same game. Which is kind of sad.
It would be good to see other arguments from other thinkers taking as a premise the existence of aliens and the special compartmentalized intelligence world's knowledge of that, that explain the motivation and tactics of the utterly bizarre psyop running around the release of this information.