Why make up stupid shit? The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all said they saw UFOs.
You are very correct. The phenomenon is as old as documented history and even shows up in cave painting and rock art. In 1561 we have a very solid documenting of the 'celestial phenomenon over Nuremburg', which happened in Germany where the community witnessed what they thought was a battle taking place in the heavens. In fact, in 1605 there was also a mass sheep mutilation in England during the time when Shakespeare was writing Macbeth.
It's wrong to say it is definitely aliens from other planets, but it is also just as wrong to say that it is all man made. There is no doubt a ton of disinformation and wild speculation passed off as fact but there is also 100% something there, and the deeper you dive, the more you discover, the larger the mystery becomes and you eventually feel the less you know.
Yes, the Ariel School Encounter is one of the best. The wildest part about that encounter is not only how many children saw it, but how differently their interpretations were of the events. They tend to leave this out in the movies, but some children never saw the 'alien'/entity, some saw multiple aliens, some never saw the UFO land and said it remained in the sky, some heard mind speak while others did not, some thought it landed far back in the field and others said they were ten feet away from the being. One could chalk this up to kids not being reliable sources of information, but this very subjective and almost custom made interaction experience with this phenomenon is the hallmark, like it tests our conceptions about the state of realty itself.
In fact, Bob Bigelow decided to buy Skin Walker Ranch as when he went there to check it out after Terry Sherman became desperate to sell it, he had a very intense and personal interaction with an entity that no one else around him saw. It was like it somehow tapped into his consciousness and gave him a unique presentation that others were not privy to. This then convinced him of not only the realness of the phenomenon but how complex it was. And those that have followed the disclosure on this subject know that to get to the bottom of what is going on here, the government spent 22 million to study Skin Walker Ranch; they did not study the skies or outer space to get to the bottom of it, they studied a paranormal and poltergeist hotspot in the desert. Just in that little bit of information we can deduce alot about what this phenomenon is not.