NASA has been pretty bad about showboating in recent years, and I sympathize with them, because its not just funding, NASA is one of the major ways we get scientists, or got them, along with computers most people who turned to the physical sciences for a life pursuit in the 60s-90s had been inspired by NASA to a large degree, so there is some excuse for this kinda media whoring. Still, its become so common that pretty much everyone in science rolled their eyes when they heard about this press conference, because there's been so much of this sort of showboating. It's bad enough that every few months the media locks on to something and next thing you know an experiment in which someone has succeeded in getting 100% capture of a given frequency in a device - a genuinely important discovery - is getting passed around as 'artificial black hole made in lab', but its worse when some science agency does it on purpose, instead of an accident in explaining a project to a random journalist who ignorantly warps the explanation into the plot for a scifi movie. NASA was very irresponsible in deliberately putting this out to the public with ominous hints of ET, just to drum up viewership.