Edit: I am specifically talking about aliens, insinuation of aliens, hinting at aliens, waving one's hands vaguely at something that sounds like it might be aliens, and generally treating aliens as equally or nearly as probable as mundane explanations for various reports.
Mistakes can happen without grift or delusion. A fighter pilot who spends an entire career training against fighter-sized opponents might honestly mistake a small nearby slow-moving drone for a fighter-sized distant fast-moving drone. A radar tech might see returns that fly away at unearthly speeds because that's how jamming works (create fake bait return, fly it away).
But repeated, insistent refusal to engage with obvious dull alternative hypotheses? Yeah, that's delusion / grift.
There’s simply not enough time to run down every single crank rabbit hole.
He goes and gives a summary of this stuff to congress, and random normal people say "oh there's no evidence", but he clearly HAD IT, AND gave it to the ISG. Congress asked to see it, and have been denied. Why are they being denied if there's nothing? How can congress properly perform their function of oversight if they keep getting denied requests?
What's frustrating is there's a sector of the government that seems happy to say "we haven't see any evidence, must be nothing" while at the same time the government is refusing to share the supposed evidence.
I think in 2017 I would have been one of the skeptical people, but the more I watch this play out, it's cystal clear there is something and there is a group of people in our government who want it out there, and a group of people in our government who absolutely do not.
In five years, a "conspiracy theorist" will be defined as someone who refuses to believe the propaganda from on high about UFOs/UAPs.
The problem is that there's a whole conspiratorial ecosystem which has been thriving on the news/testimony.
"this" meaning aliens? FFS...
Honestly it was disappointing to me. Someone with his bonafides standing up, raising a hand, and testifying in congress that they have been inside one of these things, was part of the program revere engineering them, or gave an alien a handy would be an interesting development. Until that time, I chalk this up to simply more of the same blurry assumptive evidence that looks a little too much like a pie plate.
When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".
That may be true, but I the case of interstellar travel, we have mountains of solid evidence to prove it's not possible (essentially all of physics for the last 100 years or so), and some vague claims with 0 evidence claiming it's actually happening. To convince us that all that physics is wrong you have to bring some extraordinary evidence, not claims that you heard someone knows someone who saw something.
The question is what the probability is for an intelligent species to evolve per solar system, and the more complex questions of how long they would survive etc. We only have a single datapoint (us) which only gives us the knowledge that intelligent life can evolve, but no direction whatsoever as to its probability.
In today's economy of attention, grifters are very common and extraordinary claims like "I know for a fact that Aliens have made it to Earth and they have technologies beyond our current understanding of physics. Also there is a conspiracy to hide this fact." can rationally be ignored in the absence of irrefutable proof. At most it's entertaining to hear.
On our journey through life, most people develop a fairly good sense of prior probabilities and that manifests through excitement. Actual aliens? Exciting. People misinterpreting noisy information? Dull. Telephone game stories getting out of hand? Dull. People lying for clout? Dull. Prestigious people doing all of the above? Dull, dull, dull.
Equal-weighting an arbitrary list of options is a terrible prior distribution that does not tap anyone's knowledge of how the world works. Weighting by excitement, however, does exactly this. To convincingly prove aliens you need to convincingly disprove the dull alternatives. It's easy to imagine extraordinary evidence that could do this -- but I don't see any extraordinary evidence here. I see a bunch of ordinary evidence and people who want to believe.
So either we have a strong prior that the data needs to overcome, or we have a sensible null position (e.g., UAPs are the result of natural phenomena or human technology - probably both) that would need to be overcome by strong evidence.
It's still worth getting more specific and learning more about the bucket of things that get lumped together into "UAP", but that doesn't change the fact that I think people are completely justified in dismissing all the alien BS.