It has seemed to me since my childhood that belief in aliens visiting Earth in whizzy space machines is merely belief in angels dressed up in modern garb. We are so easily influenced by our entertainments, be they myths about invisible magical creatures that have "master plans" for us or contemporary sci-fi cowboys-in-space operas that use CGI to compensate for a lack of meaningful storyline. As such, we then "see" what we're primed by our entertainments to see. As the possibility of any technological alien civilization overlapping with ours in time and space is effectively zero, we would require extraordinary evidence in order to take such claims seriously. To date, all evidence has been very far from convincing and so it's just not interesting to entertain the hypothesis. Only overwhelming and irrefutable empirical evidence would change this conclusion.

That said, it's obvious that ordinary people love wasting their time on meaningless diversions whether they be sports events, bingo tournaments, reality TV, or UFOs, and so whatever phenomena lie behind the various sightings will continue to be interpreted as signs of technological alien life until we move on to our next mass-market set of ideas.