In my experience the only people using the word “alien” are people like you: the dismissers. My belief is that there is something strange going on, but we do not know what.
Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.
To me, just saying that it's something "strange" would be a hard sell, because I would have to agree that it's definitely nothing mundane shot such that I can't recognize it for what it is. I could agree that we don't know what some of these things are, as long our degree of ignorance is properly bounded. I don't think there's equal chance that they're, say, bigfoots on hoverboards or birds. "Look, this thing here looks like it might be some kind of secret Chinese UAV because it moves like human aircraft move but is too small to fit a person" is something that I think is worth looking into. "This looks like it could be a tear in spacetime" isn't. Nor is "we have no idea whatsoever what this is".
Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.