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.
