BIG agreed! There’s numerous sightings that nobody has ever been able to explain, most notably recently the 2004 USS Nimtiz sightings, and as evidenced by this paper I linked elsewhere in the thread (https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939/htm) it is incredibly unlikely for some of the objects being sighted to be experimental military aircraft or otherwise human-made, it’s just far too big of a technological leap.

It should also be noted that the current status quo of ‘UFOs aren’t real, people are stupid and misidentify shit and that’s all it is’ (not to say that people don’t misidentify shit, that’s anywhere from 90-75% of sightings depending on which analysis you prefer) was deliberately cultivated by a USAF backed scientific ‘study’ that was working to ‘prove’ UFOs fake from the moment it started, the Condon Report. Wikipedia has a great summary of all that bullshit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee) and I urge you to take a look at the actual report itself, as it blatantly ignores it’s own data in order to come to the preset conclusion of ‘UFOs ain’t real’. (https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/contents.htm)

I do want to stress however that I don’t believe there’s some giant cover-up going on. My personal research on the subject suggests that it’s fundamentally a matter of the authorities involved falling victim to the same environment of ridicule and dismissiveness that the CIA cultivated with the Robertson Panel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson_Panel) because they believed UFOs weren’t real, and considered UFO sightings clogging up reporting lines for unknown aircraft to be a national security threat. In the academic world thinking that UFOs should be studied means you’ll be considered a total quack by nearly everyone, and your career will be ruined, and in the military world doing anything but ignoring UFO sightings and reports has been a good way to get ridiculed and passed over for promotions. This has only started to change very recently, as it seems like the US Navy has been taking something of an interest in the subject after multiple high-profile very credible sightings, and there’s been a concerted effort from some former members of the US Intelligence Community to lift the stigma surrounding the subject.

I think they are real; some are definitely man-made experimental craft. But the rest? Idk, if you think these are physical nuts-and-bolts objects piloted by alien scientists trying to study us or something it just doesn’t add up; their behavior is too weird, nonsensical, dreamlike, and seemingly intentionally misleading/disinformative. I’m more amenable to Jacque Vallee’s hypothesis that something much weirder is going on; UFO encounters/alien abduction reports bear an insane amount of resemblance to archaic accounts of contact with gods, angels, and the fae, and contactees sometimes have visionary psychedelic experiences of divine revelation, cosmic information downloads into their minds, and other cognitive alterations. It all seems like different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Whatever is happening to these people is clearly a psychological phenomenon on some level at least, similar to states like near-death experiences or shamanic trances/psychosis happening to people with no history of mental health problems, but sometimes physical evidence is present too. So what is it? Fuck if I know yo, but I would be absolutely flabbergasted if UFOs are literal spaceships that broke the light barrier to come visit us.

UFOs are all helicopters and planes & completely explicable atmospheric phenomena. Literally just funny clouds & lightning.

If you were looking for the utterly boring counterargument

I think they are real, because human perception is terrible at the best of times and the sky is full of weird shit like airplanes, birds, and those green flashes that happen at sundown.

I do not think they are aliens because there isn’t anything especially interesting on earth unless the aliens are really in to beetles, but lets be honest they probably already have beetles on their home planet because that seems like a really good, solid evolutionary body plan.