Politics.

I have three ideas here. (I present these as "one or the other or both", not as any kind of a cohesive package.)

1. Many people find the default accepted worldview to be empty or unsatisfying. Aliens or bigfoot give them something else, something "out there" to believe in.

2. Aliens or bigfoot give them the sense of being "in the know", one of the few who "accept the truth". It lets them feel good about themselves, that they are special.

3. Aliens and bigfoot don't ask them to change their life in any way. University scientists and government experts say some uncomfortable things sometimes.

We have no caretakers in society. People that care about and watch out for society. We have only political creatures now. When I was a kid the majority of political people/institution people were caretakers. Even the political pundits on TV put those things above party. Then grifters learned to weaponize being a caretaker against the caretakers by calling them RINOs on the right, and centrists on the left. We've optimized our politicians based on snark and media propagandists that only care about their audience numbers and ran off the RINOs/centrists that were the caretakers of society.

In institutions, we ran off the caretakers/removed their roles and replaced them with optimizers and prioritized max profit/optimization over institutional caretaking.