> “If you’ve got to go through all those contortions to make your story work, you’re not doing science anymore,”

Adam Frank, quoted in the article.

Whats the deal? The deal is "I want to believe" embedded in the system, grifters, and politics.

You have to distinguish between a view on possibilities and the acts and evidence presented. Drake equation aside alien life has a basis in reasoning about scale in the universe, no UFO evidence is either compelling or even tending to suggest we've been visited, as the Occam's razor choice.