A lot of UFO experiences are apparently just human psychological quirks--without any need to invoke a "consciousness-manipulating phenomenon". Just us. Normal us, being us.

A large fraction of reports end up being explicable phenomena that reasonable variation in perception can explain, and some of the most striking things have by-now-well-documented psychological foundations (UFO abduction = night terror).

There are things that are still weird and unexplained, and I agree that we ought to take a more mature approach to their investigation, but it's worth noting that there's a lot less to explain than it might have seemed in, say, the 80s--sightings have declined as the popular buzz has declined, rather than increasing in solidity as high-quality imaging devices have become ubiquitous.