yeah i heard that skeptics idea of your number 8 before where people think harry reid just gave money to his friend bigelow, what you're not mentioning in this post is that Robert Bigelow runs a space program in tandem with NASA launching his habitats into orbit, so he's not just some eccentric billionare and they not only had 24 videos, 2 of which had been released, they also claim to have this unexplainable metal they imply they've somehow retrieved from the craft. Also those wolf and creature and portal studies bigelow did were in the 90's so the money he got from reid wouldn't have been used on the skinwalker ranch. By the by the guy making those claims was former CIA and had his life saved by secretary Mattis who he claims he's in contact with. My broader point would be they want this reaction from you where you flippantly ignore, the same thing happend in roswell, claimed it was alien then pulled it back for doubt, same thing with Bob Lazar when he let the secret out on are 51, then the story went away. There are a lot of these patterns in history where the government does this weird sort of confirmation and lumping in a legit story like the NYT, one with actual sources and leads to be followed up on, is a little much for me to be compared to flat earth or fake news in my humble opinion.