In 1958, Carl Jung published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. He noted at the time that there were a lot of firsthand accounts of individuals seeing alleged alien spacecraft. Yet strangely, testimony was the only evidence we had. Jung wondered: “Considering the notorious camera-mindedness of Americans, it is surprising how few ‘authentic’ photos of UFOs seem to exist.”
That was 68 years ago. Jung was looking around and saying, “Gee, there are so many cameras in the world! Americans really love taking pictures. And not a single good one of a UFO? Really?”
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I work on astronomy data pipelines, including groups of scientists that are literally searching for evidence of aliens. One thing that people really underrate is just how many unusual sensor readings you get when you collect a huge amount of data and filter out to look at the one-in-a-million most unusual things.
For example, the "wow signal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal . If you read the wikipedia page you might think, oh there's some debate about what this is, maybe it's aliens. No, nowadays radio astronomers see similar things all the time. Literally millions of them. A big spike that never repeats again and so you have no idea what it is. Well, there are many ways that instruments can malfunction or something briefly interferes with a sensor and you get a reading that doesn't map to anything physically. With modern data collection volumes there are so many anomalies like this, you just have to throw them out.
So the idea of, what's the explanation for these things. For every video of a weird thing there must be an explanation. No, there just isn't an explanation. The sensor acted weirdly and you'll never know why because that's how massive data collection projects work.
I do support looking for UFOs, because it seems like a reasonable thing to investigate, but it doesn't make sense to take this extremely low-quality data and pore over it expecting it to lead to anything. Instead, the people who actually do have a very high-quality data source should spend a little bit of time checking for stuff they don't recognize. For example one obvious entity to do this is SpaceX since there are so many Starlink satellites and they are going to need a lot of high quality data collection to make sure Starlinks don't run into random space garbage. If they notice any space garbage moving unnaturally, that would be interesting to escalate to human analysis.
People understand now that the vast size of the universe across time and space makes it almost a certainty that we are one of many intelligent civilizations in our universe. What people miss is that same grand scale makes it vanishingly unlikely we will ever meet one. In 3.5 billion years of life on earth, we have had a civilization that could use radio waves only for the last 150. A similar civilization on a planet near enough that we could plausibly even detect them could have achieved radio transmission 3 million years ago and died out 1 million years ago, or may not arise for another 3 million. The odds that two intelligent space traveling civilizations will arise in geographical and temporal proximity such that they can be aware of each other are probably extremely small.