Something I've thought about recently is as a kid who grew up super interested in science and technology and immersed in Star Trek (where interactions with aliens are completely mundane), I always had this tendency to conceive of UFOs and extraterrestrial contact as scientific and technological phenomena, and I assumed that pretty much everyone else thought the same way: aliens coming from other planets was a matter of them having sufficient technology to do so, and us picking up and parsing intelligent radio signals of extraterrestrial origin (via SETI, etc.) was a matter of humans having sufficient technology to do so. Given enough time and will to develop the technologies ourselves, maybe those relationship would even be flipped.
What I've come to realize is that for many people, particularly the new-agey woo-woo types, UFOs are a spiritual phenomenon--they couldn't care less about the technical problems and possibilities, but instead are drawn to a notion of stellar godlike beings who have attained a higher level of consciousness than we, rather than a higher level of know-how. Rather than try to contact Earth along the electromagnetic spectrum, the spiritual-UFO aliens might instead telepathically send messages to humans empathic enough to receive and channel those messages onto paper. While there were plenty of comparatively benign adherents like the Ashtar folks (George Van Tassel et al.), the most prominent and extreme example of this class of UFO belief is of course the Heaven's Gate group.
Either way, whether your flavor of ufology is nerd shit or hippie shit, there's alway's a dual narrative of ascension and extinction. We might receive a 100,000-year leap in technology, or we might be destroyed to free up some interplanetary Lebensraum. We might be raptured to a higher state of being, or we might be neglected and left to destroy ourselves. Although popular fiction runs with ideas of establishing ongoing relationships with alien races, positive or otherwise, I think the deep ufologies have more of an eschatological bent, and maybe that's why politicians like to stay so far away from it--nobody wants to be the Last President/PM.