According to Leslie Kean, the journalist who broke the news, this is only the beginning—genuinely important discoveries are coming from the research that the government is doing by investigating pilots' close encounters.

"This is no laughing matter," Kean recently told WTOP, before going into greater detail about how the government's ongoing program is producing results:
"The researchers in this area have always speculated and wondered what is going on behind the scenes. Is there a government investigation into this? And now we know that the answer is yes. It just establishes a credibility for the topic for people to know that our government takes it seriously enough to have put financial resources into it and to have studied it for all these years. We know that this program existed, it still exists, and it investigated military cases and very significant cases of pilot encounters with these objects."

Referencing the genuinely puzzling phenomena that the government is investigating, Kean mentioned a 2004 incident in which military pilots in the skies above San Diego saw a fleet of Tic-Tac-shaped UFOs that moved in a bizarre fashion. "These objects in this one incident in 2004 were actually observed coming in from outer space. They came in and then they went out, up into the sky. So whatever that means, that's what happened. They were also seen able to move very, very, very fast from one space to another. Way faster than any airplane could do."

This is an incident that comes up pretty much every time the subject of UFOs is discussed; it's a rare example of a phenomenon that can't be explained away by questioning the observer's credibility. Pilot David Fravor has gone on record multiple times, insisting that he saw proof of advanced alien weaponry that could kick off a real-life War of the Worlds.

That said, it's important to note that not all experts are convinced. Many believe this is more an Orson Welles War of the Worlds situation, in which a benign incident spreads the rumor of mass panic. One expert believes that the San Diego sighting is the result of a fixed camera angle that makes the UFO look more impressive than it actually is, while another sighting of a similar UFO ultimately turned out to be a birthday balloon.

If the most compelling UFO case in history is also subject to speculation and skepticism, it's probably not wise to assume that the US government is making as much headway as Kean would like people to believe.

The subject of UFOs is very polarizing. Some people genuinely believe that they exist (sometimes in the absence of adequate proof), while others refuse to entertain the notion that these reports could be real (despite an occasional lack of an adequate alternative explanation).

For now, we'll just have to keep watching the skies, and hope that, one way or the other, we'll eventually figure out what's going on up there.