And everything that we hold dear happens after that.

I don't object to this explanation of the world, but I reckon it's an uphill battle convincing people that all of the living natural world, and all of human history, their culture, their religions and their science and all the beliefs in-between had their origin in some electrostatic forces. I'm of the opinion that even well-informed people of science haven't had time to fully adjust their world-view during the handful of decades we have known this much.

indeed, people like Dijkstra wrote quire a bit of code on paper before the hardware to run that code existed.

This. Ada Lovelace wrote programs for Babbage's analytical engine long before anyone succeeded at constructing one.

The source code of life is recorded and transmitted using physical matter.

Physics very much matters to matter.

For development of any information storage systems made of molecules, there must be a supportive development environment.

To even start the process of doing anything like what we see happening in a cell, homeostasis must be achieved first, and not inelegantly, its not good enough to have a complete cell wall if it has no ports for entry and exit of nutrients and waste product, thats also known as a coffin.

Both the walls and the gates and the information / physical systems to reliably exploit those features must be present at the same time to enable abiogenesis.

If it was merely that, why is it being presented to congress? How would the US military not know the origin of a cruise missile they are tracking? How many cruise missiles out there can take a broadside from a hellfire at 1000mph and continue on its direction of travel?

The information you claim to want isn't accessible to you. The US government has "platforms" with vast arrays of sensors and data collection capability - redundant, multiplicative platforms measuring things you and I might not even know about - and they use this data to get a pretty good idea of what they're looking at.

You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required.

So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know.

That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well.

Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.

>I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence"

This is precisely the point. You aren't aware of these mysteries, despite the earnest attempts of many to bring them to your direct attention.

There is no longer any attempt to hide the mysteries categorically, so this lack of information is now on you.

>I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.

Yes, that's why the correct scenario is wide declassification of the premises that are asserted in this regard, i.e. to make general knowledge of unidentifiable phenomena which have no definitive known cause or origin, communication with these entities, capture of their technology, etc. All of these things could be explained by various competing theories, some of them "simple" (funny how Occam's razor is always just what I prefer), but this information, which has been trickling out from credible sources, needs to be brought into the public space and then we get to decide what it implies or doesn't imply.

Right now there is a deliberate veil of secrecy and serious mysteries that aren't denied by anybody serious. They definitively exist.

Where do you draw the line for sufficient evidence? Are congressional hearings on recordings from US armed forces insufficient? It isn’t like the videos lack provenance like something random from youtube.

No, that isn't possible.

Note that my post was designed to be agnostic. Leaking a psy-op, or leaking the extensive, close-up details of UAP phenomena which we do have (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic), is still a Snowden style leak, especially if they continue to do this dog and pony show in congress and elsewhere.

There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?

By that logic there was nothing to leak before snowden