It's really quite surprising what the mind will conjure up when it is in a state of fear. Victims of crimes for example will often describe their perpetrators as much larger than they actually turn out to be. Social experiments have been done to demonstrate that eyewitnesses will often add details that were never present. Not because they are lying, but because as it turns out when your mind can't make sense of something, it will go ahead and fill in the details for you.
When people are shown this picture:
They report seeing one triangle laying over another. But there are actually no triangles in this picture at all. When you point that out to them and analyze it with them, sure they can see it in retrospect, but the first thing their mind does is fill in the blank space and tell them they are seeing triangles.
So here you have two brothers coming up with a hoax. They are driving through a dark, eerie forest at night with their unsuspecting colleagues. In the distance, they see bright ominous lights in the forest. Travis starts saying in the car, "OMG what is that? That doesn't look right!" His brother starts chiming in, "I don't have a good feeling about this. Somethings not right about this." By doing that, they would have primed the minds of the others in the vehicle. They would be nervous (which causes the brain to exaggerate potential dangers, like when you jump at a noise you hear in your house when you are watching a scary movie), and now their confused brains are ready to fill in the unexplained gaps. So when they see something they have never ever seen before, weird colorful lights in the forest sky, it doesn't matter if it is balloons and flares, their brains are already turning it into something for them and that something is scarey because their brains have already been primed to look for danger.
Finally, it's silly to say you are more prepared to believe it is a UFO. The principal of Occams razor says that the explanation that requires the least amount of assumption is A) the most likely explanation. B) should be ruled out first before moving on to different hypotheses. So the explanation I've provided does not fit Occams razor well because it requires a lot of assumptions. But it requires far far far far fewer assumptions than an alien race exists, they created interstellar space travel, they discovered Earth in all the vast universe, they came to some small wooded area in the middle of nowhere, and they abducted a human being. Of course it requires less assumption to say, perhaps human beings did something human beings have been known to do in the past, create a hoax.
BTW, have you ever seen the show UFO Hunters. In that show three "UFO investigators" investigated a UFO sighting in Morris Town New Jersey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morristown_UFO_hoax
After investigating, they concluded it was a UFO of massive size and couldn't possibly have been, as some suspected, flares on pipes with balloons. As it turns out, it was a hoax! And the hoaxers documented the entire hoax in process which they revealed later. So can some loggers in the woods be tricked into believing balloons and flares are a UFO. Sure, heck, UFO investigators can be tricked as well.