The lack of confirming evidence is a strong sign the Bloomberg reporters were played. It's interesting to wonder who might have done that though -- US businesses who might gain? Those from within the administration?
Regardless of the truthfulness of the report, the damage is done and the hack story fits in well for the protectionist trajectory the US is taking.
It's certainly not the case that the US government has been above disinformation campaigns aimed at its own citizens even in the recent https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mirage-menhttps://www.dailygrail.com/2013/06/a-fractured-hall-of-mirro... or very recent https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog... past. Though of course there would be much more political risk in lying to Bloomberg News than in using up and throwing away an old ufologist loser like Paul Bennewitz. (Still, it's even a little suprising how, in a country which avows military patriotism as strongly as the USA, the USAF can contribute to the destruction of a patriotic WWII veteran, then publicly gloat about it afterwards, and absolutely no-one gives two shits.)
What evidence do you have that AATIP was a disinformation campaign? The UFO story was extremely weird, but I've seen no evidence that the Pentagon fabricated the footage, or somehow coerced Fravor into lying on primetime TV.
Moreover, what would the Pentagon gain by running a UFO psy-op?
> Moreover, what would the Pentagon gain by running a UFO psy-op?
I've always wondered whether the magnitude of UFO sighting reports make it more difficult to glean intelligence about US aircraft/reconnaissance research. If, for example, Area 51 was responsible for cutting edge stealth aircraft research, it would be much more difficult to spy on the program through the civilian population if real sightings are indistinguishable from the flood of alien UFO sightings.
I've read that during the Project Blue Book era, the CIA was worried the Soviets might fuel rumors of UFOs, so that civilian observations of Soviet aircraft would get chalked up to aliens by a gullible public, and reports of unusual activity would be discredited.
I don't have the citation on hand but the declassified PBB files are available on the Internet Archive.
You'd mused on how bad the PR disaster would prove, of Google's YouTube/G+ integration, back in November of 2013.
Five years later, that integration has been reversed, and Google are in the process of killing off G+.
Trust in Silicon Valley as a whole is low, Apple's CEO has just called for a national data privacy law in the US, and the idea of adopting a new Google product doomed to be killed shortly after is now a cheap punch line.
Google itself doesn't appear to be financially damaged, but that can take a long time to set in.
There's no need to think so big. The people who thought they might gain might have very well been Bloomberg reporters, who really wanted to believe their story was true because it would have been the scoop of a lifetime. They really should have done their homework properly instead of trying to craft a story.
Of course, if it turns out they deliberately mislead, then that makes it worse, and it was very imprudent thinking that they wouldn't be caught.
Unless Bloomberg are really amateurs it had to be a very credible source to make them publish the story even though Apple & friends had told them multiple time that it wasn't true. They trusted their source more that the word of the putative victims. And since then they haven't shown any hint of doubting it either.
Regardless of the truthfulness of the report, the damage is done and the hack story fits in well for the protectionist trajectory the US is taking.