And what are us plebs to do with this information? I accept the plausibility and likelihood that everything you say is true. It’s no great shock to me that the government lies.

It’s also no great shock to see that people largely act within their ideological bubbles and accept whatever theory empowers them most. Check out the theories that Thomas Jefferson concluded from the discovery of an indigenous burial mound that his slaves dug up. Of course it was made by ancient white men, and couldn’t possibly have been made by the ancestors of the native Americans that he wanted to push aside.

I’d be happy to see some new tech that isn’t just another iteration of the iPhone. Even AI is over-hyped. There’s nothing special about a large language model. There’s already 8 billion ChatGPT’s running around, mostly dying for stupid reasons, and not accomplishing much except mutually assured destruction. And if that’s the best we’ve been able to come up with from those reverse engineering endeavors… Aliens, you can have your shitty tech back!