This is what they do Everytime things are going really bad. "Oh btw aliens!?". It's a psyop so people appeal to higher powers and feel that the government is keeping them safe. Truth is if aliens ever made contact with the us, the representatives would be trying to sell us for alien weapons they could use to go kill whatever remains that they don't like at any given moment.

Not only that, it's always done so poorly. At this point I'd be more impressed and outraged with a psyop done well, with a clever (i.e. any) strategy and quality execution. This is not it.

What are they distracting us from?

Seems like distractions ...I can't convince you there that the administration's focus on what I would consider low hanging and unimportant ways to make the world a better place not a distraction from the Epstein files and the idea that we have people who are actively in power in our Western societies who are child molesters and human traffickers.

The amount of coordination it takes to release these files, coupled with the incompetence of government.

The prosaic explanation is the more likely one, meaning the events are unrelated.

It has no purpose to release militarily. This only weakens the US position. Know their enemies know their detection capabilities.

You sound invincibly unconvinceable - but the way I see that argument is the media power of the narratives against the admin are all currently weak, there's no tidal wave of pressure from which to distract - and even if there were, it's not like Trump has ever needed that, he's always been able to dispatch wave after wave of narratives, undefeated.

Would you like to know more? The timing is viewed more naturally I think in a trajectory from the 2017 NYT article, through the series of congressional hearings, whistleblowers and attempted UAPDA legislation, to recent statements by Obama and Trump re "classified info", that seemed to lead directly to here. Through all this, the chorus of increasing public interest and demands.

More starkly - it's odd to see this issue in anyway partisanly or linked to a particular administration, or even news cycle. It's a persistent topic of human interest, across cultures and decades. The Trump intersection I think can be explained because he's the most "renegade" (yes, a pun), least controlled and most effective. These latter claims themselves are deeply controversial for some, and may contribute to making it hard for such folks to see any such prosaic explanations of the timing and reach for something a little more out there.