I was curious about all these alleged witnesses, so I looked a few up. I'll give my subjective impressions of what I saw.
First I watched that influencer Layah Heilpern and personally I don't buy her story. The first reason is that it seems to be too general, not enough details. For an experience that was quite out of the ordinary like what she said she witnessed, I think most people would be saying much more specific things like 'I was on such and such street/corner/shop and I talked to a person around this age or that with this description, then came another person who said this and that, and then there were 1/2/3 police officers who told me exactly this or that so I had to delete the video and then they ushered me away in such direction', etc. If I think of witness accounts of UFO sightings or abductions or 9/11 survivors they do tend to be quite specific about what they lived through - where they were, with whom, at what time, the sequence of events, how much time, etc.
The second reason is that people who are telling the truth don't change the details of their story. Those who make things up either add more colorful or impressive stuff later or simply tell it differently. In the video, she said that helicopters were shining light down as if searching for something and that she got a 'glimpse' of something that didn't look like teenagers and looked non-human. Then on the comments of her post, someone asked her if she had actually seen an alien, and she said 'not directly'. Appart from the fact that I don't know how she could have seen an alien 'indirectly', this was a chance for her to repeat or clarify along the same lines what she said before, that she saw 'something' that gave her the impression of being non-human from a distance, but she wasn't sure or whatever. Instead it's as if she realized she couldn't really commit to that statement and stepped back on it.
Then I watched this other video of another alleged witness. Again I don't buy his story, as he too talks in very general terms. Additionally, he starts the video by stating that he 'just got out of the basement' after a few days because the experience was so freaky. Really?? Somehow that strikes me as an attempt to dramatize the story with a detail that's just not true. Someone in the comments mentioned that houses in Miami don't have basements. I don't know about that - maybe most don't but some do. But still, his story doesn't sound real to me.
There is also this video of a guy who claims his father is high up on the police department and he was even running for sheriff. So he calls him on the phone while recording and straight asks about the alien story and the father says he can't talk about it and he won't comment anything at all. That's kind of interesting, but we would still have to believe that the guy on the phone was indeed someone high up on the police department. And if he is, that just points to something rather abnormal having taken place - not necessarily aliens.
Finally, there's the video that Puma posted about the guy who claims he saw a portal opening up. That one has the merit of being much more detailed and specific, saying things like 'I was standing on the second floor looking at this angle and then people came from this direction and then someone fired and people ran in that other direction and the portal/entity looked like this', etc. However, the guy does sound like he is on drugs. He also claims that he is a graffiti artist and that's why he went to Miami for some sort of event. Yet when he draws what he saw, the quality of the drawing on paper is doodles and stick-people. So it seems to me that he is yet another candidate for someone having made stuff up.
On the other hand, there's this video from a cop which I find to be quite spontaneous and sincere. He strikes me as being genuinely exasperated with the whole alien thing, so I believe him. Granted that there may be room for him thinking it was only teenagers and nobody telling him something different took place. Another cop here, he doesn't sound to me as lying, but he is more measured and 'studied' in his talk, so perhaps I'm wrong.
So, based on what I've seen so far, I don't think there were any aliens. What I'd really like to know now is who came up with the alien story in the first place, and how it caught fire like that. I mean, the very first reports we saw were already claiming that 'lots of people say they saw critters', but we didn't really watch witness testimonies until days later, once people saw an opportunity for their 15 minutes of fame.
That's my take on it at the moment but I'm open to change if further data comes up. :)
