Bingo. Group dynamic, hoaxers with bigger audiences, easier to spread stories, more people so consumed by myth or fantasy sold as reality stories on the net, the old archetypes people have of always wanting to have secret or forbidden knowledge to make themselves fell a little bit than 'less' to their peers. It is a perfect storm for stuff like this.
A quick search and you'll see other absurdities are being treated as real, just because of more and more exposure (and better writing) like this. Bigfoot sightings, chemtrails, vaccine conspiracy theories, buildacheeseburgers and illuminutty. You name it, and the internet made it blow up. Even things that were just recently 'made up' as a prank, like the Mandela effect, are believed by millions to be true.
I really believe most of it is due to, as the world becomes more interconnected, people feel smaller and smaller as a person. There is a feeling of a lack of importance, and in a sense, almost a loneliness of being just another cog, so they seek out something to make them feel special and 'above' others. Believing they have tapped into forbidden knowledge is a storyline about this as old as history.
imho,
you are ignoring vast chunks of valid data.
Certainly the topic is complex and convoluted.
However, it is NOT NEARLY as . . . suspect . . . as you seem to assert. Particularly in terms of the more reliable reports by the more well trained observers of the more truly unique and 'other' types of sightings.
You sound almost grossly uninformed.
Bias is not the same thing as evidence or lack of evidence.
And, the better stats by the better orgs control for the stuff you were talking about.
Just my own moderately informed gestalt awareness would indicate that valid 'other' sorts of sightings have been climbing. Some of the recent years, they've climbed dramatically within one year.
Net usage has been a fairly huge percentage of the general population for years now. I don't think there's anything near a 1:1 correlation between increased sightings in recent years, and increased net usage.
Certainly you don't have to believe the evidence of strange goings on.
However, TO THE DEGREE THAT your bias, normalcy bias, raw irrational disbelief or whatever such--to the degree that such motivations cloud and/or blind your perceptiveness to true facts, sooner or later that false negative error will likely bite you in the rear.
I do confess that after studying the topic for 55 years + . . . I've grown more than a little weary of folks who seem to simply refuse to believe the better evidence and the changes in the better evidence over the decades.
My close relative who had a Q clearance and worked at S4, IIRC, and saw the craft routinely . . . was not lying.
The excellent top flight researchers that I've spoken multiple times with face to face--Timothy Good, Stanton Friedman, and a half dozen other similar, internationally acknowledged folks were not blowing smoke up anyone's rear.
Given the raw data--and certainly the sifted, sorted, ranked data, Occham's razor is on the side of the 'other' explanations vs on the side of the skeptics.
As to your other seemingly glib broadsides . . . George Washington verified that the Illuminati were active in the early years of the USA. He asserted so in his personal letters correspondence. THOSE are considered to be PRIMARY SOURCE materials of the highest levels of confidence. Disbelieve to your own ultimate chagrin.
Vaccines are a bit more complicated. However, the evidence is piling higher and higher explaining why the CDC and the secret courts involved have paid out more than $1 Billion in damages because of harm the vaccines have caused. And the proven destructiveness is growing virtually daily.
Chemtrails . . . I don't know what's up with that. However when there have been reliably taken air-samples, they've not been innocent by quite a margin.
Big foot is certainly a realm full of hoaxers. However, not every report is hoaxed. Not every report is from some looney toons. AND, there are above average reliable reports asserting that some Big foot sightings have involved UFOs with the creatures exiting or entering the craft.
I don't know why so many skeptics are so blithe about the destructive bite of a false negative error. They make it sound as though only a false positive error is hazardous. That's SCIENTIFICALLY UNTRUE.
WHEN an addiction to clinging virtually only to the side decrying a false positive error becomes even half as lopsided as it is with most skeptics, that AUTOMATICALLY results in a huge risk--actually, a virtual certainty--of a false negative error biting them in the rear eventually.
I have yet to read hardly any skeptics acknowledge that SCIENTIFIC FACT.