Well, score one for the crackpots.

The Pentagon has officially confirmed that there was, in fact, a $22 million government program to collect and analyze "anomalous aerospace threats" — government-speak for UFOs.

As The Washington Post's Joby Warrick reported, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was a rare instance of continued government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.

For a specific segment of the population that doesn't need to Google the terms "Paradise Ranch" and "Cheshire cat airstrip," it was a eureka moment —  the first (of presumably many) alien-related secrets that have slipped out of the clenched jaws of the government.

The non-Googlers have it easy, it seems: The admission — and the fact that the government spent $22 million on UFO research — gives any out-there theory a patina of credibility.

But what about the rest of us who have not fully jumped onto the tinfoil-hat bandwagon? What are we to make of 70 years of bizarre stories centered on a secret government base an hour's drive from the Las Vegas Strip?