I hesitated to use the term strawman, but yes, that’s exactly it. I don’t think skeptics are intentionally attacking a strawman; they just aren’t remotely familiar with the subject, so are attacking what they think UFO proponents actually think without realising that there are good reasons why sober and serious thinkers (Hanson, Hynek, Vallee) who overcome the stigma to actually examine the evidence end up tanking complexity penalties to generate pretty out-there-sounding hypotheses to explain the bafflingly compelling (relative to ghosts, Bigfoot etc) data.
I hesitated to use the term strawman, but yes, that’s exactly it. I don’t think skeptics are intentionally attacking a strawman; they just aren’t remotely familiar with the subject, so are attacking what they think UFO proponents actually think without realising that there are good reasons why sober and serious thinkers (Hanson, Hynek, Vallee) who overcome the stigma to actually examine the evidence end up tanking complexity penalties to generate pretty out-there-sounding hypotheses to explain the bafflingly compelling (relative to ghosts, Bigfoot etc) data.