“That does not make them any less “real”—if anything it shows how smart they are...”
Or, it shows the relative ignorance and later learning by the humans making up the abduction stories. Maybe people named Venus as a point of origin because they didn’t know better at the time. Now they know better and their stories have improved as a result.
There is zero evidence that people are “making up stories” to any significant degree.
John Mack destroyed that myth.