Form whatever idea you will of all this chaff, one thing is indisputable. You yourself can file a FOIA request at the Pentagon requesting "cockpit videos cleared for release to Louis Elizondo in the Fall (September-October) of 2017" and you'll get a copy of those videos directly from the horse's mouth.

As an ultra-skeptic who is drawn toward primary sources, I've been following the cluster of these stories closely for years with an eye to their provenance. More I thought about all this, I think the whole thing collapses to two life-changing possibilities, rationalizing my way down directly from the videos:

1) No new physics.

Cockpit videos - faked by military for a psyop campaign, coordinated with patriot testimonies by credible individuals. Navy patents filed by the US Navy on behalf of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais and document leaks added to effect more confusion. There's a precedent for this type and scale of operation going back to the Star Wars program days, where Reagan himself participated in attempting to drain the Soviet Union's R&D budget.

If the videos were planted for personal gain by a soon-to-be-laid-off employee, Elizondo, and then engineered into credibility through the FOIA chain of custody - it explains why and how, but doesn't explain everyone else's participation, unless the military chose to exploit the incident and launch a psyop campaign in its wake. If the Navy patents were entirely unrelated to all this, perhaps an innocent case of fraud, incompetent bosses doubling down on made up claims by an employee yoked to their own careers.

2) Discovery of new physics.

Cockpit videos - show maneuvering capabilities we're plainly unfamiliar with.

Leaked Carrier Strike Group report details that behavior and those capabilities in far greater detail than speculating at potato-quality camera smudges will: https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...

Pilot's testimony of the encounter - shared by Insanity in comments here - demonstrates the pilot's expertise and credibility in greater detail: https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4264

Patents filed by the US Navy on behalf of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais - imply expensive engineering of impossible inventions without being able to adequately explain the physics behind them: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in...

Reports of other unknown craft stalking secret nuclear depot sites - imply someone remotely observing neutron emissions, which I understood is beyond our ability to detect or pinpoint at distances over a few dozen yards: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35674/the-bizarre-myst...

Tangentially related, we have two claims to a technology that if proved working will revise physics as we know them, Mach Effect thrusters and the famous EmDrive. The lesser known one is a result of Dr. Jim Woodward's divergent theory of inertia as a result of gravitational interactions of everything in the universe. He started work on his theory and prototype drive after claiming to have seen a flying object that violated known physics and therefore he knew they must work somehow and started working it out backwards: https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters-interstell...

Partial resolution:

There are two papers by Dr. Martin Tajmar out of Dresden due to be released in February 2021. He's tightly lipped about what's in them, but he's an expert on the matter. He and his team built and launched a solid state gallium ion drive into space and demonstrated their orbital correction capabilities. Over the years he tested several prototypes of both the EmDrive and the Mach Effect thrusters and dismissed them in various iterations of his thrust measurement experiments, the latest published works describing the observed miniscule effects as thermal vibrations and interactions of the Earth's magnetic fields with power lines in the test chamber. But they were inconclusive.

This time around, Tajmar built a magnetic shielding chamber meant to exclude those effects. One paper is for analysis of the conventionally microwave-described EmDrive, and other one is for its laser version. Mark your calendar and the papers might put a nail in parts of this coffin.

The publication date is somewhat telling. The papers were meant to be released in the Space Propulsion 2020 conference this month but due to Covid-19 they were delayed until March. It's a stretch that a significant scientific breakthrough would be delayed, but, on the other hand he is a German.

Tajmar himself wasn't hopeful prior to the latest measurement experiment: "This is such an extraordinary claim that you must, as Carl Sagan said, have extraordinary proofs. You must be really super sure on that. Without that, it's just a fairy tale.”