According to some researchers, over the past five decades or so the U.S. government may have been able to acquire advanced technologies from crashed, donated or otherwise obtained extraterrestrial vehicles.
It seems unclear if this could be true or if various kinds of exotic devices might also have been procured that could vastly enhance energy production, health care, aviation, space programs, manufacturing, electronics, engineering, agriculture and other economically-significant activities.
Reports about the UFO situation often note that one of the reasons for security on this matter was to obtain advanced technologies that could give the U.S. an advantage over adversaries and keep knowledge about them top secret.
Once obtained, these technologies were then possibly incorporated into the pipeline for application in highly-secure defense programs and other efforts.
The tight security was to ensure that adversaries did not obtain these advanced developments, as the story goes.