You can add another voice from the media and education community to the growing list of military and government figures who are now talking about the potential realities of UFOs, no matter where they’re actually coming from. Daniel Drezner, a writer for the Washington Post, as well as a professor at Tufts University, tosses another log on the fire this week with a provocative proclamation. According to Drezner, we’ve hit the point where everyone needs to get used to the idea that we have things flitting around in our airspace that we can’t yet explain. He then dangles the bait many have been waiting for, asking how much longer it will be before we have to consider the unimaginable as the only logical conclusion.

What appears to be happening is that official organs of the state are now acknowledging that UFOs exist, even if they are not literally using the term. They are doing so because enough pilots are reporting UFOs and near-air collisions so as to warrant better record-keeping. They are not saying that these UFOs are extraterrestrials, but they are trying to destigmatize the reporting of a UFO.

Still, the very fact that this step has been taken somewhat weakens the Wendt and Duvall thesis. This was always a two-step process: (a) Acknowledge that UFOs exist; and (b) Consider that the UFOs might be ETs.

In recent years, the U.S. national security bureaucracy has met the first criterion. What happens to our understanding of the universe if great powers meet that second one?

The first notable thing about this article is that it’s coming from someone of Drezner’s standing and being published as a serious opinion piece in the Washington Post without any of the trappings of comedic disdain normally accorded the subject. As I mentioned when discussing the most recent Navy pilot reports, it was not at all that long ago when speaking or writing openly about such things would end your career. If Drezner had published this piece as little as two years ago it could have spelled the sunset of his academic career and his invitation to write at prominent newspapers.

Now, something has changed. There’s been too much information pried out of the federal government and the military that defies explanation.

Drezner is coming at this question from the same perspective I’ve been taking. We don’t know what some of these objects are yet. That’s why the word “unidentified” is right in the description. We can’t say what they are or they aren’t because we simply don’t know yet. But some of the most credible witnesses possible are telling eerily similar tales of craft performing maneuvers that our current technology (at least as far as the public knows) can’t manage.

That brings us to the shaky ground that Drezner posits at the end of his piece when discussing the “two-step process.” Step one is to admit that there are unidentified objects in our skies that we can’t explain and our government and military either can’t or won’t explain for now. We seem to be there. Step two is to consider the possibility that the technology on display is beyond mankind’s current capabilities. If that proves to be true, what answers are left? The government isn’t willing to go there and most of the rest of us who have to write about this aren’t either. But picture how the world might change if the powers that be reach step two. Who built that?