Perhaps the only thing more curious than the news that the U.S. Navy is establishing new guidelines for reporting UFO sightings is the decision to let the public know. For decades, we have assumed government secrecy on such matters. In Ed Wood’s 1959 film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, it is suggested that even a deadly alien invasion would be hidden, at least if casualties were low. “For a time we tried to contact them by radio, but no response,” says Plan 9’s Colonel Tom Edwards, who is in charge of saucer field activities. “Then they attacked a town. A small town, I’ll admit. But nevertheless a town of people. People who died.”

The subordinate says he missed the news. “It was covered up by the higher echelon,” Edwards explains. “Flying saucers, Captain, are still a rumor. Officially.”

And yet, now, we’re reading about UFOs in the New York Times, seeing footage of them on video, and pilots are putting their names to their sightings. We hear the pilots chattering and laughing in a manner that’s almost ominous, reminiscent of movie scenes depicting similar lightheartedness prior to vaporization. Then again, everything concerning UFOs is reminiscent of some movie scene, which only makes harder to engage with the details now being reported. One of the vehicles in question is said to have resembled “a giant Tic Tac” the size of a commercial plane, and the UFOs were able to “accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds.” Another is said to be “like a sphere encasing a cube.” These UFOs seem to stay airborne all day, despite having no apparent source of energy. According to the latest Times story, they “appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015” in the skies above the East Coast.

What’s going on? Speculation is rife on the Y Combinator forums. Guesses include U.S. drones (a terrestrial craft), “Von Neumann probes” (self-perpetuating extraterrestrial craft), and a “disinformation campaign” (none of the above). Politico reports that advocates of the Navy’s new UFO reporting rules simply want to change “a culture in which personnel feel that speaking up about it could hurt their career.” After all, in an age when “removing the stigma” has become a refrain on everything from cannabis to male postpartum depression, maybe it was inevitable that overcoming UFO shame was next. We don’t want to invalidate your flying saucer feelings.

Whatever the case, this new transparency feels like part of a trend. The 1970s saw a raft of regulations opening up the workings of government to public eyes, and these sprang from a feeling that trust had been abused in the prior decades, when Cold War anxiety was higher. Today, we see similar sentiments, especially following revelations about our counterterrorism policies after 9/11. With less war, or at least with less immediate war, we have the luxury of looking more closely. Ironically, despite the indefensible cover-up described by Tom Edwards in Plan 9 from Outer Space, there’s no great sense of distrust or outrage toward the authorities for their opacity and lies. Today, government makes itself much more transparent, even as Americans distrust it more than ever.

What’s also new is the concreteness of these sightings. When I was a kid, a neighbor of my family in upstate New York claimed to have witnessed an enormous craft touch down on one of her fields, terrifying her and the nearby livestock. She was otherwise a no-nonsense type, but it was her experience alone, and most UFO sightings tended to be of this variety: the product of a lone witness. As the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote, “I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.” The UFO sightings described in the Times, by contrast, are shared experiences, discussed by multiple personnel, and captured on tape. When that happens, covering it up—especially given the human tendency to pass on amazing stories—can cause more trouble than reporting it.