If they aren’t bringing evidence, it’s a waste of people’s time. Taking a big risk that is most likely a very bad decision shouldn’t provide any credibility at all. Do that when you can show evidence, and then you have credibility.
It would not matter if the most credible source alive said it, I would still ask this question: if what they are saying is true, then it's possible to prove it without needing to take what they or anyone else says on faith alone. If you remove what he or people in general from the question, to date I have not found the evidence in support of extraterrestrial visitation of earth very convincing. Plenty of plane-recorded footage capturing strange visuals, but an absolute lack of anything that does not also have a plausible non-alien explanation.
In either of these cases if he has decided that these programs are an existential danger to the world and need to be discussed, one way to out maneuver both of the above constraints is to pose as someone who believes they have been convinced the government is concealing "alien" technology, and can use his credentials to push the story farther than any civilian could. He has found that this tactic has given him access to people he otherwise couldn't reach (outside the limited context of his position/rank etc.)
tl;dr talking candidly about actual top secret research because he suspects it may constitute an existential threat to humanity if it is developed much further (similar to some early physicists' speculation that testing the H bomb could trigger the earth's atmosphere to burn up as well), that could get him in serious trouble very quickly because he's clearly crossing a line that has been clearly drawn around that information. But revealing it in terms of alien tech, he'll either get dismissed as a crank after his 15 minutrs are up, or he'll have gained access to high ranking civilian legislators long enough (with whom he can discuss the actual details directly in private), until he can find enough sympathetic ears that he feels safe to dispense with the "omg alien tech" camouflage.
Program names mean nothing unless you can look up their details as they're usually fancy codenames that spark everyone's tin foil hats. Makes for a great news story and a conversation on HN about "what it might be" but apart from that its useless.
What the average person can do with this information is not the point as far as I can tell. This information is being shared with people who are not the average person, and who do have the ability to investigate further.
The technologies alleged would transform human existence, and would mean trillions or more commercially. Effortless exploitation of asteroid resources being the low hanging fruit. Even if it isn't an instantaneous interstellar drive, it would imply freedom from gravity wells and practical inter-system transportation.
And how is it that there is one pilot that sees UAPs on the regular? This is like the UFO abductee that has been abducted a dozen times. If a pilot is seeing regular UAPs, there will be a hundred pilots seeing this phenomena.
Put it to you this way. If we happened to have alien UFOs crashlanding on the planet, it would be of utterly paramount importance that the technological gap represented is closed as soon as possible, for the survival of the species. It would involve every engineer and scientist being read in to get as much reverse engineering probability as possible.
It would mean marshalling worldwide resources for exploitation and development of space resources and defenses.
I actually like the Robotech / Macross take on this, where the alien SDF-1 crashes on the Earth, and a world war is basically halted in shock. A world government is formed, and immediate worldwide financial reasources are poured into reverse engineering and immediate space-based capabilities developed. That is basically what would happen if the world was shocked by the arrival of technologically superior aliens and we got our hands on some of their technology.
As it turns out, the scale of defenses constructed in the ten years after the SDF-1 is a pittance compared to the 4.8 million space cruisers and likely 50+ billion alien soldiers available to the aliens when they arrive.
The only way there would be no usable technological reverse engineering is if the arriving UFOs specifically built landing craft with the technological base of the natives, or somehow the technology is black boxed in some way that it degrades/self-destructs if there is a crash.