So the X Files were true stories.
It looks like some variation of this stuff (”crash retrieval”) has been going on at least back to the 1940s—there are rumors even before that..and not just in the US but all over the world including Russia and China.
It is a gigantic error to think this is just a US issue.
The Russians have several of these things—and as far as we can tell they still have no clue how to reverse engineer or operate them.