The Golden Age of UFO Sightings?

So, right now, I'm watching this film on a streaming channel - it has something to do with UFOs and looks as if it was made, with no money, in the eighties (I came in partway through, so have no idea what it is).  Like all such films, its lack of budget means that it resolves into a series of scenes of people sitting around talking to each other.  The closest thing to action we ever get is somebody wandering around the woods at night.  The lack of budget also means that its alien presence has to remain vague and peripheral, which at least lends it an air of mystery.  Which set me to thinking about how much better stories about UFO sightings were in my childhood.  Now, I know that is partly because I was a child at the time, so anything like that seemed weird and unsettling, but it was also because the sightings back then were just more, well, mysterious.  It seemed that the tabloids were full of tales of motorists glimpsing strange-looking craft in their rear view mirrors, or something shiny or brightly lit in woods as they passed by on the road.  All of the sightings back then (and there seemed to be a lot, especially in the 'silly season' at the end of summer), were vague and inconclusive without much in the way of concrete evidence, giving your imagination far more room to run riot filling in the details.  Even the supposed photos taken of alien spaceships and their occupants were always satisfyingly mysterious - always out of focus and blurry, taken on grainy film stock from, seemingly, great distances.  In truth, they could have been of anything, (and probably were of hubcaps suspended on wires and the like).

These days, however, the supposed sightings always seem to be far too detailed.  Every man and his dog seems to have a tale of being abducted by aliens, then subjected to an examination that sounds suspiciously like some kind of masochistic sexual fantasy.  Too many 'contactees' nowadays seem to be on first name terms with the aliens.  Back in the day, the best you'd get in terms of aliens would be a glimpse of someone in a silver spacesuit - sometimes while they were peering through peoples' windows (another sexual fantasy, possibly).  As for physical 'evidence', well, it now turns up in abundance, whether in the form of  alleged ancient 'alien' skulls or papier mache alien corpses.  It makes me yearn for the days when the only physical 'evidence' of alien visitations would be some dubious looking circular burn marks in a field.  I grew up with what, at the time, was regarded as the 'UFO capital' of the UK - Warminster - up the road from me - but while the reported phenomena there were numerous, they never seemed to manifest themselves as anything other than mysterious lights in the sky, (the fact that Warminster is in the middle of Salisbury Plain, a major Army training area and is home to the School of Infantry obviously has no bearing on the origin of these lights).  But in those days, the UFO spotters who regularly descended on Warminster were all enthusiastic amateurs, mildly eccentric characters who would otherwise probably have been bird or plane spotters.  These days, by contrast, UFO spotting has become an industry, full of professional 'UFOlogists' who carry out 'research' into the phenomena and feature in the media.  That's the problem - now that there's money (not to mention fame) to be had in UFOs, the need for actual 'evidence' has increased in order to keep interest going.  Encounters also have to be more sensational - all the better for grabbing the attention of the media.  Consequently, all the mystery is gone.  More importantly, the fun of UFOs has gone.

(The film itself turned out to be UFO: Target Earth, from 1974, making it even older than I thought).