While I don't think these are aliens or represent some sort of advanced military technology based on previously-unknown principles of physics, I can't really ge

While I don't think these are aliens or represent some sort of advanced military technology based on previously-unknown principles of physics, I can't really get behind the article's "Nothing is going on here, this is just people misunderstanding how cameras work" explanation either. There is some sort of reason that the US military has been oddly open about all this. My thought would be that it's some sort of disinformation campaign, though it's hard to tell who it's directed at and what the exact purpose would be. But if the US military was seeing stuff they can't explain and they thought it might be an adversary (or aliens, who would fall into the category of "potential adversary until proved otherwise"), the last thing they'd do is publicly admit to being bamboozled. My thoughts on what this might be are, in descending order of probability: - An attempt to convince US adversaries that we have developed some sort of advanced capability (see the various odd patents filed by the Navy and Salvatore Pais), and that we're falsely claiming we're seeing these things as part of a disinformation campaign to draw attention away from it. "No, we definitely don't have any secret glowing, non-ballistic hypersonic drones we're going to defeat you with in the next conflict. You definitely shouldn't spend billions of dollars trying to counter something like that". - An attempt to convince US adversaries, who have developed some sort of advanced drone which we have been able to identify and counter, that we have not in fact identified and countered it, and are completely incompetent and clueless. "Oh no, what is that terrifying and confusing thing that we keep seeing? Definitely not that new advanced Chinese drone that we stole the plans for in 2016 and can shut down remotely with the press of a button. Nope, no idea. Please don't improve it, since we clearly have no idea what it is". - An attempt to draw attention away from actual aircraft we've developed whose capabilities are similar to (but probably more in line with established physics) the aircraft seen in the released videos. "Yeah, we're seeing those things too. No idea what they could be. Let us know if you figure anything out" I guess there's still a possibility that it's actual aliens, and they're trickling the information out to avoid a panic, but that would be so far down the list that it's not really part of the same list anymore. But even in that situation, it would only happen after there was contact and they were reasonably sure of their motivations; if they were still unknown, then this information would be classified at the highest level, and we would probably not know about it.