For devotees of minutae, last night’s Inception Radio Network podcast debate between retired U.S. Army Col. John Alexander and UFO historian Richard Dolan unfolded with all the revelations of a script reading. Alexander, author of UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Reality, maintained the phenomenon is real and bizarre, although the indifferent feds aren’t hiding a thing. Likewise, Dolan stuck by the premise of his UFOs and The National Security State series, which argues UFOs constitute maybe the most highly classified secret in American history.

To be sure, there were moments of acidic spontaneity. But from those predictable broadsides came a tacit invitation to take this unending circular debate to another level. Exasperated by Dolan’s suggestions that recovered ET technology might be incorporated into defense systems to fight an intergalactic menace, Alexander advised Dolan to “take a decade off to learn the system” of how classified programs work. “(Dolan’s) level of naivete is incomprehensible to me,” said Alexander, a veteran of deep black Special Access Programs.

Few researchers have worked more diligently on the UFO conundrum than Richard Dolan. But this debate — more anticipated than most, due to the presence of journalist-moderator Leslie Kean — might’ve forged new ground had a source in her own book, UFOs: Pilots, Generals and Government Officials Go On the Record — joined the discussion.

Retired Navy commander Will Miller wouldn’t have needed to take a decade off to learn the system. A senior Pentagon intelligence analyst, advisor to U.S. Space Command and U.S. Southern Command, issued Top Secret credentials for Sensitive Compartmented Information, Miller is Alexander’s peer in important ways. Harboring a longstanding interest in UFOs, like Alexander he spent years noodling through the national security bureaucracy to find a pulse. And, like Alexander, Miller was actually alarmed at the ostensible level of disinterest. But his own research led him to a sharply different conclusion.

For her book, Miller told Kean he was convinced there was, in fact, a control group that “cannot allow any information on their closely held UFO research to be accessed by anyone outside of those specially cleared for that Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP). Neither Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence nor the director of DIA himself could get ANY information on the subject: this is a fact. Yet I know that sources within multiple organizations maintain such information. Leadership remains ‘protected’ from such knowledge. As far as I am concerned, the question is answered.”

Kean stressed the need for convincing the official wheels of government “to take this seriously,” and warned “the wrong way to do it is to point fingers.” But an Alexander-Miller exchange could move the bar up a notch. Would it make a difference? Not for the debunkers and the paranoids. But getting two bona fide former military officers, contemporaries who share common experiences, interests and vocabularies, to prosecute their arguments for the vast middle ground of public opinion would be foundational. Both can’t be right. Either a) there are hyper-secretive components of the defense establishment keeping tabs on what appears to be wildly advanced technology plying our skies, or b) Uncle Sam is totally down with the idea of an aircraft carrier-sized UFO loitering without a transponder over Stephenville, Tex., and inviting pursuit by F-16s as it cruises for restricted air space around a presidential residence. The b) option, if officially acknowledged, would constitute a dereliction of duty.

“How is this not an important matter of national security?” Dolan wondered last night about the high strangeness over Texas on 1/8/2008.

It was the only time Alexander appeared to hesitate. “Stephenville,” he said after a pause, “is kind of interesting.”

One might think.