Growing up I was really into UFOs and watching UFO documentaries is still a guilty pleasure of mine. One of the things that struck me is that people who investigate UFOs are their own worst enemies. Often, while watching documentaries, people will say "I've never believed in UFOs until I saw one". For the longest time statements like that really confused me. How could you not believe that people sometimes see things that they can't identify? Then I realized that to most people UFO means alien spacecraft. UFO people have pushed the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's totally aliens" narrative to the point that the entire field is tainted.

As the article mentions, it seems like the idea of aliens visiting the Earth has become almost some sort of religion. The other thing is that actual science isn't very sexy. I'm reminded of the Hessdalen lights, unidentified aerial lights that have been appearing over a valley in northern Norway for several decades. There's a monitoring station there with all sorts of instruments, but there still isn't a definitive explanation for the lights. "These are alien spaceships" is definitely a much more thrilling explanation than "we have several possible explanations, mostly involving some sort of plasma in the atmosphere".

One of the documentaries I was watching was by the History channel and it was really bad. They didn't even attempt to present prosaic explanations and took everything at face value. One episode even talked about native Americans being descended from aliens and being able to summon UFOs. I know the History channel is complete trash, but this series was apparently done in collaboration with MUFON.

The entire thing has been tainted so completely that it can actually interfere with real science. The study of upper atmospheric light was likely held back for years because pilots who saw it were afraid to mention that they saw lights in the sky.

These things are almost certainly worthy of study, but the entire field of interest needs to be completely cleansed of the woo and pseudoscience that plagues it.