Cassini Watches Mysterious Feature Evolve in Titan Sea
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
The linked article is one, and various Martian phenomena are another - @varelse linked the landslides, but there are also dust devils, winds, and ice caps. The geysers on Enceladus are another example.
Nighttime astronomy has also had these surprises -- supernovae (leading to the discovery of dark energy), gamma ray bursts, blazars. All because we had the computational and data-gathering machinery to compare observations from surveys.
In retrospect, it perhaps wasn't surprising, but I think discipline scientists have indeed been surprised by the variety of phenomena observed.
We've also built an awful lot of rockets for war, to bring the power of the stars down on our enemies as H-bombs. The Gemini series launched on top of a repurposed ICBM. I don't know if developing nuclear bomb delivery vehicles falls under cynicism, but it's not part of reaching for the stars.
Simply because nuts misinterpret evidence and refuse to change their minds when their errors are pointed out doesn't mean that all interpretations of all evidence pointing to alien life is nutjobbery.
And simply because scientists have been wrong before about features like Martian canals (which were less generally accepted within the astronomical community than they were without it) does not mean they will always be wrong.
In particular, the Martian meteorite micro-fossils are fascinating if not completely compelling as ab initio evidence for life. The important thing to remember is that if you handed one to a competent authority and told them it was a fossil-bearing rock from the appropriate locale on Earth, they would very likely say the structures were (uncontroversial, terrestrial) micro-fossils.
The debate is about how much the meteoric micro-structures raise the plausibility of the claim "There was ancient microbial life on Mars", not whether they either a) exist or b) are consistent with terrestrial micro-structures. The skeptics say, "Interesting but not compelling", the non-skeptics say, "If it's good enough evidence for ancient life on Earth, it's good enough evidence for ancient life on Mars."
The difference, as tends to be the case with these things, is in their prior plausibilities. The skeptics (rightly, in my view) are saying that terrestrial micro-fossils are more persuasive than Martian micro-fossils because we are virtually certain there was ancient life on Earth, whereas it's still a wide open question on Mars, so we never really use the micro-fossils to answer the question "Was there ancient life on Earth?" but rather to make some claims about what kind of life it was.
As for the Titan images, any time-varying process could be due to life. It might be a shoal of hydrocarbon herrings, or some Saturnian Kraken being woken from its long sleep by the alien emanations of the spacecraft overhead, although I can't see any reasonable prior that would give such propositions greater plausibility than the more geologically-oriented suggestions in the article.
After that, when it gets refuted with clearer imagery and it turns out to just be something really interesting and cool, they'll say we nuked it to hide the evidence. Just wait. Or have I just channel surfed past the "History" channel too many times?