They are cultists because they want to believe, they need to believe, and they react violently to anyone who doesn't believe. Friedman's rant against the SETI people is prima facie evidence of this. It is an attack; not because they believe something he doesn't, but because they refuse to accept what he believes. People who persist in anointing themselves as "researchers" in this field are precisely those who have the most to gain by lying about it. At least, a real witness MIGHT have actually seen something.

No one "studies" UFO evidence. They only study UFO reports. It's a masturbatory exercise, an endless daisy chain of people who have never seen anything arguing about what others have claimed to see. It's ghosts and astrology and Loch Ness and Bigfoot and Bermuda Triangle in space, with a dose of the Virgin Mary in potato chip patterns thrown in for good measure. Once a report surfaces, it never dies, it is just endlessly recycled and resurrected, and the longer it persists the more it is accepted as "evidence", the more it becomes part of the literature, the more it achieves credibility simply by its persistence.

You can't study Roswell because nothing ever happened there, and even if it had, all the "research" on it would show is just more and more commentaries on the commentaries. Read the "evidence" on who REALLY killed JFK, on the Masonic plot to conquer the world, or Nazi
research on how evil the Jews are and how inferior the non-Aryans are.
After a while it all sounds the same, because it is all the same. It's talk about talk. Look up the denialist websites that tell us oh-so-convincingly the Holocaust never happened, they sound scholarly too, they drip with footnotes.

The UFO phenomenon cannot be studied because it is dominated by flakes, all the evidence comes from flakes and is endlessly circulated by flakes. If there were anything to it it would be impossible to evaluate it because of the fog of nonsense perpetuated by flakes; just as it is now impossible to seriously re-evaluate the Kennedy assassinations because of all the conspiratorial rubbish that is now clouding the issue in our documentary evidence.

Until the UFO "scientists" show us hardware or some reproducible and publicly verifiable hard phenomena it is all just talk. The UFO movement has tolerated so much crap from its adherents that no one can take anything they say seriously anymore. It's like arguing with any cultist: even if they are right, they've cried wolf for so long no one will ever believe them now.

All I ask is that we apply the same critical standards of skepticism and reasoning and suspicion that we do with our political opponents, and that we concede that some kinds of things cannot be proven or disproven by logging on to the internet or listening to indignant testimony from self-proclaimed authorities. Sooner or later you have to tell us where to point the telescope so we can see for ourselves. And right or wrong, if you can't do that, we are under no obligation to believe you.