If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful?
The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security.
Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.
You're talking about a different interpretation of the word "UFO" than I used above. Ever since those reports came out some years ago of pilots reporting UFOs, the implication has been very strong that "UFO" doesn't just mean "here's something that showed up on the sensors that we don't know what it is".
Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piece of equipment from a foreign nation. I assume they've done that before releasing the footage to the public after figuring out what it is they actually detected.
The current furore, from the more reasonable heads in Congress, is that the military has historically not done that.
They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with investigations (afaik, only the Navy had an office, and it was ~3 bodies with other duties), & (c) no periodic review.
They essentially ignored it as a potential problem. So Indiana Jones, "top men" type stuff.
Unfortunately, a lot of the public debate is "aliens", because media and idiots. But there's a serious underlying problem.
If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful?
The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security.
Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.