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Now, I completely agree with you (as a card-carrying Trekkie!) that it’s highly probable that alien life forms may exist somewhere out in space.  But the question of whether they exist somewhere is entirely separate from the question of whether the UFO’s that people frequently witness actually are aliens.  I don’t think that’s anywhere near proven, because as you say eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when the witness WANTS to see aliens.  A lot of paranormal encounters are white noise. They’re ambiguous things like lights in the sky, things seen out the corner of the eye, or in the dark, or just at the limit of resolution. You can’t be sure exactly what you’re seeing. But under certain circumstances, a person’s brain will happily fill in the blank spots with whatever they were hoping to see. If they were hunting ghosts, they see a ghost.  If they’re hunting aliens, they see aliens.  They’re not lying or making it up; the experience is just passing through their filter of belief.

You and I could be shown a picture of the so-called “Palenque astronaut”, and we would just see a human figure in an awkward pose.  To me it looks a little like a man hunched over riding a motorcycle.  We think it’s mildly interesting and let it go.  But a believer in Ancient Astronauts sees a man at the controls of a spaceship, because that’s what he’s been primed to see by Von Daniken.   He doesn’t stop to think how ridiculous the idea is.  If you tried to point it out to him, he’d just talk about another strange inscription somewhere on the other side of the world, showing something that looks superficially like some modern technology.  To him, all this is cumulative evidence of something that he wants to believe anyway.