As such, analysts named journalist Seymour Hersh's report on the US allegedly attacking the Nord Stream pipelines.
'Spy' Balloons Drama
The US shot down at least three unidentified objects in American or Canadian airspace over the weekend. The Pentagon said the new approach is due to "heightened" awareness after the US detected what it claimed was a Chinese surveillance balloon gliding over Montana earlier this month, which was shot down over the Atlantic on February 4.
Beijing said the balloon was an airship engaged in scientific research that blew off course and, in turn, accused the US of sending balloons to spy on China.
The US said the objects were not related to alien phenomena, although at first it did not rule out the possibility.
'Psy-op' to Distract Attention?
Rising Tide Foundation Vice President Matthew Ehret doubts the new policy was triggered by any actual threat.
"It is a psy-op to deflect the minds of thinking people away from the real issues [such as] the systemic meltdown shaping their dismal future and setting the stage for a new set of 'great narratives,’" Ehret said.
US and Western intelligence, he added, has worked carefully to fan the flames of public hysteria on this in recent years, including Pentagon efforts to declassify UFO files.
Former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi suggested Joe Biden and his advisers wanted to exploit the incidents to bolster dwindling domestic political support.
"[The] Biden administration is hyping them as a threat to demonstrate how it is protecting us," Giraldi said.
Political commentator Alex Krainer, founder of Krainer Analytics, observed how the high-profile coverage coincides with developments like Hersh's explosive article alleging that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines.
"I suspect that it is all a contrived emergency to distract the people from real crises and issues and/or something else that's being slipped under the radar," Krainer said. "I think we must pay attention not to where the illusionists want us to look, but where they want us not to look."
Krainer also indicated that train derailments in Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas are among events the US probably wants to downplay.
"At the moment there are so many candidates, from the ignored environmental disaster in Ohio, to the fallout from Seymour Hersh's bombshell," he said.
Historian and foreign policy analyst Jeremy Kuzmarov thinks it is very possible the US deliberately stoked UFO fears to meet its own political purposes.
"I would say false flag exercises. I don't believe there are any aliens coming to Planet Earth," he said.
Most of the alleged UFOs were in reality military vessels of some kind being tested by different governments, including often the United States itself, he said.
"They are trying to ratchet up a pretext for war with Russia and/or China, like in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and using these incidents to make the public believe that the Chinese or Russians are sending spy planes and futuristic weapons to potentially attack the US," Krainer said.