None of us may have any idea what the hell is going on with the Navy and UFOs anymore, but I’ll tell you one thing: the Ferrero candy corporation must be loving all of the free publicity this whole Navy UFO saga has given to one of their flagship candies: the Tic Tac. Could all of this be some genius and far-reaching viral marketing for the diminutive candies? It’s perhaps as good as any other theory.

The now-infamous Tic Tac UFO incidents have shaken the ufological world like few other accounts have, and the ensuing media frenzy seems to have even prompted the Navy itself to revise its protocols for how personnel document sightings of anomalous objects. Over the last two years, everyone with an interest in UFOs or the unexplained has speculated about who or what might be controlling the objects, with theories spanning the entire plausibility gamut: aliens, interdimensional beings, an underwater race of intelligent humans, mother nature herself, private aerospace firms, the U.S. military itself, or perhaps some other superpower. I’m sure I left some out. The point is, nobody has any clue.

While we’re no closer to understanding these incidents or the recent media blitz surrounding them, strange rumblings have been happening lately which seem to suggest that someone knows who or what may be flying Tic Tacs around America’s airspace. Many have speculated that the entire Navy UFO saga may somehow be a misinformation campaign or psychological operation based on curious coincidences that keep adding up and strange statements made by U.S. government or military personnel. Could the Tic Tacs be ours?

The latest strange statement came this week via Quora, an online question-and-answer site that sometimes draws input from experts in various fields. In a Quora post from this month, Lockheed Martin staff physicist Ibteesam Reaz replied to the question “What are the most plausible explanations of Navy pilots seeing hypersonic objects at 30K feet, objects with no visible engine and sometimes described as a cube within a sphere?” In his response, Raez says that after all the reported circumstances are taken into account, there’s only one likely answer: the Tic Tac UFOs are American.

Update 6/21: Raez’s response has since been deleted, as has Raez’s Linkedin account. An archived version of the post can be found here.

It’s important to point out that just because Reaz is a physicist at Lockheed Martin, he doesn’t necessarily have any insider information we’re not privy to concerning this truly confounding and still-unfolding saga of the Navy and weird objects bouncing around the sky, ignoring the laws of physics. The truly spooky top secret research projects are so tightly compartmentalized that few souls are ever made aware of them. Still, in his Quora response, Reaz says that based on the circumstantial evidence surrounding these sightings – the conspicuous location and timing of the sightings, the plainclothes personnel who confiscated recordings of the incidents – he feels we are “left with a stronger impetus to speculate that the US government does indeed have something to do with the Tic Tac.”

Reaz is quick to note though, that if the U.S. government or American private aerospace firms are indeed flying these beyond-next-generation aircraft, “the aerospace engineers who are not privy to the details of how the craft works are being played for fools” and wonders “why are we wasting so much sweat, hard work, money when some select group of people literally have technology that is beyond the reach of modern physics?”

Does that question really need to be answered? Think of the billions of dollars of wealth that would be redistributed once the next truly paradigm-exploding scientific breakthrough changes everything about human transportation and energy generation as we know it, not to mention the far-reaching geopolitical ramifications such a breakthrough would have. Could the Tic Tac indeed be a secret U.S. aerospace project that is too dangerous to reveal as many have speculated?