Before flying saucers became pop culture, people reported "phantom rocketships" or literal sailing ships in the sky. When people claimed to encounter the aliens in such craft, they would claim to be from Venus or Mars, until it became common knowledge that neither Venus nor Mars contain advanced life. Once the "greys" became popular, everyone reported greys. Before that, aliens were far more diverse in appearance (notwithstanding the common appearance of "space white people".)

If you study accounts of alien encounters and abduction, none of the technology abductees report seems extremely advanced, much less alien. Recognizable computers with buttons and dials. Levers. The aliens never bother to offer any equations or technical diagrams to prove their technology. In the whole centuries-long span of avowed alien encounters, no one has ever come away with anything we didn't already know. Of course, one could say the same thing about prophecies and Nostradamus. Encounters with angels, or demon summoning. Always just a hall of mirrors, always maddeningly subjective, never anything to hang one's hat on.

Even in the very first recorded modern abduction scenario, Betty and Barney Hill, the aliens gave Betty a book to take with her. Evidence! Oh, but later another alien just look it back. Womp womp. Oh but there's a star map. Oh wait, it turns out it doesn't stand up to actual scrutiny. It's just dots and circles on a piece of paper, and so simple one wonders why an advanced civilization would even find it useful.

And here we are in 2024 being told about city-sized craft and black pyramids and "non human biologics" and still not a damn bit of proof.

And even with the weird outliers like the Falcon Lake incident or the Phoenix lights or Shag Harbor, where there is evidence of something weird or multiple eyewitnesses (not that that necessarily means anything,) things still don't make sense. Tell me how the Falcon Lake UFO makes sense. The witness looks like he pressed a waffle-iron against his chest because the UFO (allegedly) hit him with its weird grid of exhaust ports before taking off. The technology being described is both advanced and ridiculously quaint, as it so often is.

The thing reported by Japan airlines 1628 - a weird spinning cylinder covered in flaming tubes and random lights. Obviously not Venus unless the pilot was deranged (which can't be taken off the table,) but if not, then what? You'd be surprised just how many UFOs seem to incorporate flames and rockets and that vanish in bursts of sulfur and flame as if they were demons returning to Hell. Almost as if they draw from the same subconscious archetypes.

None of it makes any sense if taken at face value, and so much of it is obviously folklore, as it follows the structure of folklore.