Have you read D.W. Pasulka's "American Cosmic"? If not, I highly recommend it. She's a religious studies scholar who started out studying angelic appearances to medieval saints and was struck by how similar they were to modern UFO narratives. So she did an ethnography of scientists and government officials who are big "believers" in UFOs. Her basic argument is that we should understand UFOlogy through the same methods we treat religion, with the guiding premise that all religions are systems of thought that respond to actual experience, whether or not they interpret it "accurately." I.e., something's going on, has been going on for a long long time, and our ways of explaining it have changed significantly over time.
Have you read D.W. Pasulka's "American Cosmic"? If not, I highly recommend it. She's a religious studies scholar who started out studying angelic appearances to medieval saints and was struck by how similar they were to modern UFO narratives. So she did an ethnography of scientists and government officials who are big "believers" in UFOs. Her basic argument is that we should understand UFOlogy through the same methods we treat religion, with the guiding premise that all religions are systems of thought that respond to actual experience, whether or not they interpret it "accurately." I.e., something's going on, has been going on for a long long time, and our ways of explaining it have changed significantly over time.