UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas. The obvious reason for this is that the term UFO" is usually assumed to be a synonym for "extraterrestrial life." Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall ... argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms: "UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling." In recent years ... discussion of actual UFOs has been the topic of some serious mainstream media coverage. There was the December 2017 New York Times story by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean about the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was tasked with cataloguing UFOs recorded by military pilots. DoD officials confirmed its existence. This story ... represented the first time the U.S. government acknowledged the existence of such a program. Then, there were the reports last November about Oumuamua, "a mysterious, cigar-shaped interstellar object [that] fell through our solar system at an extraordinary speed," according to New York's Eric Levits. What appears to be happening is that official organs of the state are now acknowledging that UFOs exist. They are doing so because enough pilots are reporting UFOs and near-air collisions so as to warrant better record-keeping.