Obfuscating Bastards

At first, I was all excited at the news that the CIA has declassified a bunch of information about Area 51. I happily gobbled up the LA Times article.

And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel.

Turns out the LA Times article is pretty easy to debunk as well. It claims OXCART was this super-secret Lockheed A-12, and that it's "disk-like" shape would make people think it was a flying saucer. The article concludes that these recent declassified revelations all but put the nail in the coffin of Conspiracy Theory.

Except that:

1. The A-12 isn't disk-shaped. It's shaped like the SR-71 Blackbird (and the lesser-known YF-12 Interceptor, which actually uses an A-12 chassis). It's only disk-shaped at all if it's coming straight at you. That certainly can't be the angle of most UFO sightings, especially since it flies at Mach 3 - if it was coming straight at you from a distance close enough to see with the naked eye, it'd probably hit you before you or the pilot could react.
2. Even if it was a top-secret disk-shaped craft, which it isn't, that does nothing to explain away the bulk of UFO sightings. Many involve cigar-shaped or triangular craft (admittedly, the SR-71 / A-12 do have a triangular section), often passing overhead at low altitudes and slow speeds, or hovering in place eerily in ways the OXCART isn't capable of. A gleam in the sky passing overhead too quickly to focus on is pretty tame by UFO sighting standards.
3. The A-12 wasn't actually secret until declassified in 2007, as the article claims. There was one on display at a museum in Minneapolis until 2007. There's photos of the A-12 all over the net. What's been declassified since 2007 is just that the CIA used this plane to fly over Russia and China, and the details of an A-12 crash in 1963.

Seems the Times didn't do the research it should have, or, it's actively complicit in obscuring the truth for/with the government. I don't know which.