Man, everyone thinks I believe in UFOs.
I have thoughts. UFOs are linked to the conspiracy-minded because UFOs have always been disinformation. More than that, we started seeing UFOs about the time we stopped seeing angels - I optioned a script about this, and the book I was repped for was on the same subject. Extraterrestrial life will not look like cattle mutilations and sensor glitches. It will look like readily observable phenomena with no easy natural explanation. The core problem with UFOs in popular culture is that "they're hiding" for reasons that only make sense to conspiracy theorists.
I don't think you believe in UFOs, I think you lack an appropriate amount of cynicism around areas of science in which you aren't a scholar. "It was little green men" has been the go-to explanation for American experimental military aircraft since like 1943. You can pretty much time aviation skullduggery around alien lore. Foo fighters = XP-59A Roswell crash = Project Mogul Project Blue Book = U-2/A-12 development Hangar 18/Alien Autopsy = Have Blue/F117A Here's the thing. There's a lot of public stuff from the '90s that's still unexplained. donuts-on-a-rope contrails, weird acoustic signatures picked up on seismographs, strange observations over the North Sea. Boeing even has some seriously suspect, recently declassified advertising art. So I'm all about unexplained shit? But in my armchair, enthusiast opinion this is dudes going "okay let's figure out what the sensors are imagining" for the defense department on the downlow.