At this point in time, the very odd focus on the US military (representing mankind? LOL!) having contact with alien technology or aliens could also be seen as sending the message "Oh yeah? You have supersonic missiles? Well we have extraterrestrial weapons and our friends know how to disable nuclear weapons!".
I think there's something to this. Not sure if this is precisely it, but here are a few possible data points.
First, from Lacatski, Kelleher, and Knapp's recent book
Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (which details the history Lacakski/Bigelow's AAWSAP program, which Reid was instrumental in getting off the ground):
Over the years [Senator Majority Leader Harry] Reid had caught various straws in the wind that both Russia and China were involved with, and heavily invested in, UAP-based advanced technology research programs. That chatter had intensified, and by May 2009 Reid was concerned that the United States was asleep at the wheel, that the mixture of bureaucratic fear, careerism, and scientific conservatism at the Pentagon was handcuffing the ability of the United States to make progress exploiting UAP-based technology.
In Reid's mind there was a grave danger that China and Russia, who were not similarly handcuffed, would succeed in taking quantum leaps forward from exploiting UAP-based hardware and thus gain an irreversible technological upper hand over the United States. On June 24, 2009, Reid took the bull by the horns and, in consultation wit the intelligence community, drafted a gold letter to then Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn. (pp. 90-91)
Don't know about China, but Knapp believes (based on interviews and documents from the early 90s) that Russia did have reverse engineering programs prior to that. Then there's this little anecdote, from an
interview with Randall Nickerson, who spent years investigating the famous African Ariel School sighting. Nickerson was talking about how foreign officials and military are much more open about UFOs than in the English-speaking world, especially the U.S. In one conversation, he said African military told him that the U.S. is the country that knows the most (around 59:00 in the interview). In that conversation (with a South African air force base commander and a female Lieutenant Colonel at the base), he said:
She supported him [the base commander] about what they see on radar ... but they said that ... "we can tell the difference between the American version the Russian version and the real thing," really, and I'm like, what are you guys talking about, the American version the Russian version and the real thing, meaning there's technology that we have and that they have and there's technology that someone else controls and you can easily tell the difference, really, these are military guys, like straight laced, him and her, I mean, I couldn't be believe they were so open with me.
The guys around Knapp/Bigelow/Reid seem to think that the U.S. reverse engineering programs have mostly been a failure (along the lines of what Lazar talked about, where they've had the tech for years, but still knew very little about how it actually worked). Maybe that's just their cover story, but it's plausible that they may genuinely think that. It may also be largely
true, to the degree that the program is highly compartmentalized and privatized and no real scientific progress can be made that way. (That's not to say that others haven't been successful, just that these guys might not have access to that level of information.)
