I agree with your overall point.

That being said, there is a significantly substantial body of evidence involved in disclosure efforts up to this point. Many government officials have come forward with variations of this story - Grusch is just the latest and the one with the most stature. His accounts are also the least wide-ranging and in my humble opinion, some of the most credible. Secondly, disclosure has been in-process by whistleblowers in other governments as well for multiple decades - there's a lot of credible evidence to suggest this isn't a new phenomena.

Having witnessed a few UAP at a distance myself (including some before drones took over the skies), I think that it's pretty clear that something we don't understand is here, and has been here for awhile now. I think the jury is out on whether or not they are intelligent, alive,or a phenomena related to physics we don't understand, but there's simply too much evidence to deny their reality, and I gotta confess, especially after seeing them in the sky, I really want to find out.

Grusch's actions are the first step in really figuring out if the DoD knows anything. He went through the proper legal routes, and he's whistleblowing on obvious obstruction that prevented him from performing the Congressional mandate of his job. He has everything to lose here, and nothing to gain. I'm inclined to believe him.

If we have had access to technology that can manage the immense distances between livable planets in our galaxy for almost a hundred years and we cannot get a human to Mars, we are beyond hope.

If any of this has even the slightest grain of truth to it, you have to admit that we (humanity) are way to fucking dumb to ever explore the stars.

Fuck that’s a depressing thought. We have been looking at the tech for a century and we got nothing? I suppose that might be driving my bias on this. I am not asking for proof of the programs, I am asking why there is no evidence that humans have been looking at interstellar travel tech for a century. Either it’s horseshit, or we are hella dumb animals.

And yet the very fact you associate talking about UAPs with being a loon is the result of a dedicated effort by US intelligence.

After the front page news of sightings over Washington DC, it wasn't very long until Gene Pope, an MIT graduate and previously part of the CIA's psyops program, went and bought the National Enquirer and later the Weekly World News. Which made UFO news adjacent to batboy or gossip.

I happen to think the notion these are extraterrestrial is ludicrous and there's many more reasonable explanations short of that conclusion. But there is a significant story in how these sightings have been handled over the past century up to the present day.

While I think alien hopefuls will be disappointed, interesting things should come out of this if continued to be pursued.

That got me curious so I searched :

I bet the people who think the government is reverse engineering alien technology in perfect secrecy are also people who think the government is too incompetent to do anything right.

I'm saying it. He's a loon. He thinks the Pope helped smuggle a UFO out of Mussolini's Italy to the U.S.

The Pope and Mussolini were allies, by the way.

It wouldn't though. I'm not saying UAPs are extraterrestrial. I'm saying as long as each person who leaks is met with plenty of, "no, you're crazy." It would help contain it.

Both with pressure and delegitimization. Now... proof is the thing that's required. Not simply testimony.