I think there are different types of claims and they require different approaches. For something purported to be factual and experienced personally (eg. did th

I think there are different types of claims and they require different approaches. For something purported to be factual and experienced personally (eg. did the accused assault the victim? did person experience alien abduction?), there's arguably no better way to handle these kinds of evidence except through witnesses and their testimony (and maybe cross examination). Note that whether a single person experienced alien abduction is not a scientific question per se, it is simply a question of a person's subjective experience or memory. There's no hypothesis for this specific factual question, and no laws of nature are involved (yet). On the other hand, questions such as "what is the gravitational constant", or "why do people report alien abductions?" is a scientific question. For the latter, scientists could hypothesize that (a) aliens are real (b) there's some kind of mass hallucination going on (c) some other weird phenomenon, etc. I think it's actually arguable that we don't have enough evidence to provide a convincing hypothesis about the general phenomenon (of abduction reports), but people confuse this lack of scientific hypothesis with the phenomenon not being real. If you actually think about it, there's no reason any scientist could authoritatively say whether a particular person actually experienced alien abduction or not, just like no scientist could say whether a particular person had been assaulted or not. We might not have theories to explain the phenomenon, but that doesn't mean the reports are not true.