Editors suck. The author is clear to distinguish that UAPs are not what we think of as UFOs, and then the editor goes with that misleading name in the headline anyway.
To the military/intelligence/air traffic control, a “UFO” is a flying object without a transponder. “Unidentified” doesn’t mean it’s mysterious, only that it hasn’t identified itself to us. The Senate isn’t concerned with extraterrestrials; they’re concerned that our adversaries are flying all sorts of crap all over the place, and the military/intelligence communities are incurious about what’s happening.
In the words of Cdr. David Fravor (a pilot on record), whatever these things are, they are beyond just being "unidentified."
“To the military/intelligence/air traffic control, a “UFO” is a flying object without a transponder”
Not exactly.
Many aircraft fly all over the US, outside controlled airspace, and they don’t have a transponder. I takeoff from an uncontrolled field and don’t squawk does not make me a UFO as commonly understood.
A transponder is a code that if flying VFR the pilots dial in 1200 and that means nothing until the pilot identifies himself to ATC, either through squawking ident or through verifying location via ground reference or some other identifying maneuver.
UFO means Unidentified Flying Object, meaning just that. . .it was flying and unidentified.