Just to pick a range I'd say the cases from 1940 - 1965 represent a different sort of animal and ones I find more interesting. We like to cherry pick things out of the past without proper context. I was just watching some old movies - Destination Moon, Forbidden Planet and War of the Worlds. Certainly 'flying saucers' were part of the zeitgeist at the time and that's really, really important. This is why when one person today puts on an evil clown outfit and capers around town and before you know it there are evil clowns all over the place.
There's an old episode of M*A*S*H that shows a clip of a ping pong playing cat. Nothing gets past it - you whack a ping pong ball anywhere near that cat and it'll fire it right back at you. I feel that way about UFO cases in general when a YouTuber thinks they've Solved The Mystery and especially about ones that want to go on about the Hudson Valley. Easy to fall into a pattern of knee jerk dismissal that way. Pointless really, it's like trying to hold back the tide with a broom.
Even factoring in the 'fog of war' regarding foo fighters and the dearth of real documentation on that subject I still can't help but find the reports compelling. I can even understand how Capt. Mantell could kill himself pursuing a Skyhook balloon. But even factoring out all the military activity, misinterpretations, outright fakers, hangers-on, the hoaxes, the lunatics there are just too many eyewitness accounts to ignore. I certainly believe that in many cases people are honestly reporting actual events. In others you have people buying into a narrative that is flawed but they believe in it sincerely - I think that's what Robert Hastings' missileers are all about. Col. Halt too. Unless someone develops a method to sort the wheat from the chaff I don't know what value they have in proving the presence of ET here. They do keep interest alive though.
I like that period because no, there really wasn't any human tech around doing any of that. Nazi bells and all that horse**** notwithstanding. Today, all bets are off. I recently heard someone speculate that we have been a 'protected species' for some time and I find that interesting. It would explain a lot of historical sightings, it would explain a peak in interest during the period I mentioned and the fact that (I think) it has sort of fallen off since then.