Near the end of his 2019 autobiography, Bob Lazar writes, “I’m no kind of hero.”

With each passing day, that seems less true. I know what you’re thinking: Is this idiot really devoting a column to a controversial UFO whistleblower during a global pandemic? Should I stop reading this tinfoil claptrap right now and spend the next few minutes on something more productive?

Answers: 1. Yes. 2. Probably.

OK. To everyone still here, why is Bob Lazar on my mind? Because I just read a New York Times story — “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” — that includes a buried nugget about how astrophysicist and Pentagon contractor Eric W. Davis gave a classified briefing to government officials in March about retrieved “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

I know. It’s nuts. If you ever watched “The X-Files,” the U.S. government has basically done a 180 on UFOs. For nearly a century, intel gathering under clandestine programs — Project Mogul, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, Project Ozma — had one guiding principle: blanket denial.

The stated goal was to investigate UFO sightings. The outcome was official excuses.

UFOs were weather balloons or street lamps or migrating birds. They were illusions refracted by the natural world. They were fantasies of deranged imaginations. They were not real.

All of that has changed dramatically, starting with a 2017 New York Times blockbuster that revealed the existence of the U.S. government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, created a decade earlier to analyze unexplained phenomena. The Navy has since publicly verified three videos that show unidentified aircraft violating the laws of aerodynamics. Apparently, there are more.

What was once the stuff of supermarket tabloids is now taken seriously by politicians and scientists.

So isn’t it time Bob Lazar got a second hearing in the court of public opinion?

The man put Area 51 on the pop-cultural map in 1989, when during an interview with Las Vegas investigative reporter George Knapp, he made claims that would have sent Fox Mulder to a fainting couch. Lazar said he had worked at a top-secret military base, S-4, near Papoose Lake, where his job was to reverse-engineer crashed alien flying saucers. It was like hearing someone casually say they provided dental care to the Loch Ness Monster. I’m sorry, what?

I remember thinking Bob must be smoking crack out of a Bunsen burner.

But here’s the thing: 30 years later, nothing Lazar said has been disproven. Nothing.

Oh, I know the skeptics want to discredit him based on flimsy allegations he falsified his education or previous employment with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But did he? Knapp visited that lab with Lazar many moons ago and they were granted access without showing credentials. Security recognized Lazar, who gave Knapp a guided tour while waving to former colleagues who waved back. I can tell you right now, if I wander into the Globe and Mail newsroom and start waving at people, I’m going to get tackled and escorted out by security. You can’t fake working at a place. So if Lazar really worked at Los Alamos — which officially has no record of him — why should we question his Area 51 claims?

There is also no record of Lazar’s birth. Does that mean he does not exist?

I’d then go several steps further and ask, “Why should we doubt anything Lazar says about UFOs?”

In a video authenticated by the Navy this year, a spacecraft is rotating and flying belly-up, exactly as Lazar described in the ’80s. It’s eerie. When he first talked about Element 115 as a possible power source of antigravitational propulsion, it didn’t exist on the periodic table. Now it does. Is that not a strange coincidence? What about his sketches that could now be blueprints for UFOs?

As far as I can tell, Bob Lazar has been vindicated at every turn. And you know what?

The world owes him an apology.

But if you google Lazar, you get sucked into a black hole that suggests he is a “fraud,” “liar,” “conspiracy theorist” and “UFO hoaxster.” What he was saying in 1989 — we have recovered crashed alien saucers that defy everything we know about the universe — was a stick of dynamite to rational thought. But what he was saying then is now backed up by the official record. Please read Lazar’s autobiography “Dreamland,” or watch the Netflix doc “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” and tell me why you still think he is a deceptive kook. Spoiler alert: You can’t do it.

Lazar has never once tried to profit from the whistle-blowing that ruined his career. He’s not on any lucrative speaking circuits. He’s not selling kitschy T-shirts of Little Green Men. He goes about his business in the shadow of infamy and ridicule. Thirty years later, he just wants to move on and change the subject. He wants breathing room amid the suffocation of terrestrial doubt.

But if, as reported this week, more UFO revelations are forthcoming — and they involve new insights on retrieved meta-materials not of this world — isn’t it time to set the record straight on our most famous UFO whistleblower? Isn’t it time we landed this flying saucer on consensus?

Bob Lazar is either a diabolical liar or some kind of hero. He can’t be both.

But what he could be, now more than ever, is an invaluable tour guide into the unknown.