I was into UFOs as a kid. Read a whole load of stuff from Erik von Daniken to Nick Pope. Crop circles, that kind of thing. X-Files. Some things gradually became apparent:

- the smartphone era produced fewer pictures of UFOs despite everyone having a camera

- crop circles kind of died out

- in order for information to be suppressed, there had to be a conspiracy that was simultaneously worldwide and watertight, yet itself did not leak like, say, Cold War spies

- a whole plethora of new unevidenced beliefs would sweep across the world

So: Occam's razor tells us that there almost certainly aren't any UFOs.

What, then do we do with the eyewitness accounts?

It also becomes apparent just how unreliable these are. People can become thoroughly convinced that things happened which did not and could not have happened. People acquire all sorts of strange beliefs, sometimes to their detriment. Cults come and wait for landings that never happen, but also serious men in serious jobs have one report in their lives that directly contradicts reality.

It can be a little difficult to deal with how unsatisfactorily the sausage of consensus reality is made, but it's the only alternative to wandering back into Carl Sagan's "demon-haunted world".