It's always just US spy craft, foreign spy craft, foreign craft of unknown purpose, weather balloons, weird atmospheric shit. Also: instrumentation fucking up/data corrupting. When you combine the instrumentation with any of the former, it doubles it.

I think it's bogus and they're using it to distract from something else, just like they used the culture war

Absolutely agreed here but I wouldn't even consider that conspiracy, I think documents showing UAPs even admitted that. It being extraterrestrial would be the true WTF moment.

some of the OG UFOs were in fact prototype B2, alien technology is just catchier story than (boring for most people) new warplanes

It's the intersecting lasers making plasma thing they were working on, all the same physical properties and it's probably what they were testing at that exercise where the tictac was filmed.

My guess is it half works but it impractical so they're doing this poor cover up attempt to make China think it does work so they'll invest r&d into it and waste resources, they used to do that to Russia all the time