Pop culture has changed how ufology is seen, and the carnival barker types have indeed run with ball and make up the game as they went along. The basic behavior of UFO's in the sky hasn't changed. But beyond that, are you seriously saying that as a study of something yields information, the study should remain static? The test of science is primarily repeatability, but in new study it takes a while for the transients in the data to settle out. Ufology is much younger than most sciences, I would even grant you that it is merely a proto-science in search of foucs.
There has been a great deal of noise in the signal, as it were.
"There are valid studies, mostly in the field of psychology."
Not funny. And not necessarily true for all of such studies. The recent bunch of articles on "Sleep Paralysis" as a source of abduction reports has been unscientific in the extreme, but pop culture has embraced it uncritically.
That's the sad part: Science tends to debunk Ufology by proclamation, and trends to foolishness in doing so.
True, though. It's about the only branch of science that will look at the phenomenon.
Well put.