If the truth is out there, the Navy apparently wants to know.

A “number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space” in recent years has prompted the service to update and formalize the process to report suspected incursions.

Can you say UFOs?

A Navy statement on the effort doesn’t mention “unidentified flying objects,” or what are now called “unexplained aerial phenomena.” But Politico, which first reported the new measure, said the previously unannounced move comes in response to a string of incidents involving unidentified highly advanced aircraft being spotted by Navy strike groups and near sensitive facilities.

A 2004 case in which Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilots took video and expressed shock at odd-looking and acting aircraft off the coast of San Diego is one of the better known.

“For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the (Air Force) take these reports very seriously and investigate each and every report,” Joseph Gradisher, a spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said in the statement describing the new reporting effort.

A message to the fleet will detail the steps for reporting each incident, Gradisher said. In response to requests for information from congressional members and staff, “Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety,” he said.

The step is just one in a long line of government examinations of unexplained aerial phenomena, which include support in one case from former U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who died in late 2012.

Politico and The New York Times in 2017 revealed the decadelong existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was pushed by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, with the help of Inouye, also a Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican.

The program investigated reports of UFOs, the Times said, but this past January it was revealed the effort had a broader scope.

The Defense Intelligence Agency said in congressional correspondence released through the federal Freedom of Information Act that the purpose of the program was to “investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapons threats.”

Studies looked at futuristic technologies such as invisibility cloaking, traversable wormholes, warp drive, dark energy and the manipulation of extra dimensions.

The Defense Department previously released 2004 cockpit footage from an F/A-18 Super Hornet from a case in which multiple pilots witnessed a strange oval aircraft at 25,000 feet that at one point rotated and seemed to defy normal flight physics.

One of the pilots from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz remarked over radio that it was a drone.

But then a second pilot states, “There is a whole fleet of them.” At one point, a pilot states “Look at that thing. It’s rotating!”

Defense contractor Raytheon in 2017 took a little credit for the imagery, saying it was captured by its advanced targeting forward-look infrared sensor mounted under one of the jets.

“We might be the system that caught the first evidence of E.T. out there,” Aaron Maestas, a Raytheon chief engineer, said in a release. “But I’m not surprised we were able to see it. ATFLIR is designed to operate on targets that are traveling in excess of Mach 1. It’s a very agile optical system with a sensitive detector.”