Non-scientific explanations of almost any phenomenon are going to be highly culturally dependent. It's not like it's new that people have seen unexplained thin

Non-scientific explanations of almost any phenomenon are going to be highly culturally dependent. It's not like it's new that people have seen unexplained things in the sky -- just prior to the modern understanding of the cosmos, people explained it as gods or spirits or omens or whatever. It used to be, in fact, that many more things in the sky were 'unexplained' (Comets, super novas, aurora, lightning, etc) and now we're reduced to a much smaller number of unexplained things. It's a normal thing for people to look for the intentional action of some entity for anything that's unexplained, and in a lot a people it takes on a religious or spiritual character. For some people, aliens (and conspiracy theories in general) are their religious explanation for things they don't understand. I think for us to have a scientific explanation for any of this stuff that _actually_ lands on aliens, you're going to have to systematically eliminate every other possible explanation, and the eventual theory would have to then go on to explain a large number of other phenomena in consistent ways.