I think if there is any intentional misdirection going on, it's for a far more mundane goal. Governments and militaries are flying all sorts of weird, but perfectly terrestrial, craft, for all sorts of purposes, benign and some probably malicious. There will be less public discussion of strange flying things if reporting one gets you automatically assumed to be a crazy alien nut. Commercial airline pilots see a lot of things they don't report through the usual pubic channels. I think some may prefer it that way. </tinfoil hat>
This has always been my pet theory. The supposedly alien craft are laid out to intimidate and or misdirect foreign opposition. These could be actual craft our totally fabricated illusions. For me this felt the most plausible. As with everyone else speculating here, I have no practical way to test this hypothesis.
As a disclaimer, I am aware that seemingly implausible things happen regularly and that this pattern of analysis would fail under those scenarios.
My favored hypothesis is that the videos released by the government are known by the government to be mundane, and they were publicly released because they got sick of responding to FOIA requests about it. The demand for the release and subsequent narratives around the release have been driven by true believers, who are more than a little kooky. See: "Skinwalker Ranch"
