First of all, it's important to distinguish very clearly between UFOs and "aliens from another world visiting us". The two are not at all necessarily related an

First of all, it's important to distinguish very clearly between UFOs and "aliens from another world visiting us". The two are not at all necessarily related and the public discourse, especially in mass media, UFOlogy dogma and literature, only weakens arguments because of this forced connection based on tenuous leaps of logic. By definition, any unidentified object in the sky is a UFO unless it's clearly identified, as many here have already mentioned. Thus, for one thing, many UFOs can simply be this: things that may or may not be natural but which have some rational explanation and have not been clearly labeled as such. However, and more importantly I think, is the possibility that even a genuinely inexplicable UFO event (such as the 1978 nuclear storage events linked to in another comment here [1], the 2004 Nimitz UFO incidents and the 2014 and 2015 events among others) may not be the classical aliens in the sky concept that gets pushed despite little substance, though it might indeed be a case of unknown objects moving around human installations with a certain frequency. The latter is a highly documented, definitively observed phenomena, the former is very shaky assumption and absolutely nothing more. Evidence of unknown objects moving in seemingly incredible ways abounds. There is no evidence at all of those objects being ships from another world in the galaxy or Universe. What this boils down to is that UFOs as a genuinely, currently inexplicable phenomena could very well be completely real. They might even be corporeal expressions of an intelligent nature. This however doesn't have to mean that they came from space or from aliens in any classical sense. They could have come from a completely unknown source that doesn't get nearly as much attention as the UFOs = aliens supposition. Certain authors have covered this with their own speculations and arguments, such as Jacques Vallee, Micheal Persinger, and even others with more sensationalist arguments like John Keel. None of them are necessarily less likely to be wrong than those who argue that we're dealing with aliens, and at least some of these arguments seem more plausible than the dogmatic skeptic stance of completely disregarding all sightings as anything except humans being confused by normal, known phenomena. An important sub-point to the previous paragraph is that the government might seem to be playing stupid not because of some giant coverup of secret knowledge or much less clandestine contact with extraterrestrials, but the (to me) much more likely possibility of a general attempt to cover up that they also have no clue what's going on whenever they come across cases that none of their resources let them explain. It's possible that (as is common with any kind of organizational thinking) they detest looking stupid and prefer looking ambiguous to admitting ignorance of something completely outside their ability to control or monitor clearly. 1. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-inventor-of-the-navys-bizarre-ufo-patents-finally-talks https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in...