The DOD is being accused of abusing the classification of information to hide anything it doesn't want to admit. And a lot of that comes down to how the DOD spends our money.
I would offer the following observation, over the effort to halt disclosure and where this is going.
If you were a aerospace company that was ‘gifted’ the crashed ships back in 1940s, and cleared ownership of the ships, technology and control from 1970s on (which appears the case), then continued to have the Pentagon pay you several billion a year to reverse-engineer things....the one thing you wouldn’t want to admit after 70 years, is that you haven’t accomplished much of anything.
Your reputation as a Fortune-500 company is gone....billions came in and you never got anywhere in all those years. So they are protecting their reputation mostly here and really can’t admit that the program is a vast failure with nothing much to show.
If you wanted to shake this up...hire a audit crew to browse the Pentagon budget top to bottom. Black budget? Give the black budget guy sixty days to show accomplishment of function. If nothing...dump the budget line. It’s not our job/purpose to pay for zero reverse technology.