There could be two issues...real alien operations the Deepstate can do nothing about and of course the use of ‘aliens among us” motifs as a convenient screen by the deep state to hide the high tech stuff you mentioned in your posting.
I agree there are “real alien operations” as there have been throughout human history, but there is no way the New York Slimes will write about those.
It they write about it, you can be absolutely certain it is an intelligence disinformation operation.