I personally lean towards the latter idea that our world is a simulation run by higher beings. It explains a lot of things that don't make sense in physics (especially quantum mechanics). We are basically one of millions of ant farms for these higher beings run on a giga computer. Our lives may be as insignificant as an ant we walk past each day. I don't know for sure but this is definitely possible. Elon Musk thinks so anyway. He said the chance we are living in base reality is 1 in a billion. Whenever I'm stressed out I try to remember how meaningless and insignificant my life might truly be.
You should definitely check out John Keel’s books in which case as I think you’ll get a lot out of them.
I believe he was the ideological pre-cursor to Jacques Vallee in coming to alternative theories to the “UFO’s must be ET’s!” hypothesis.
Both of these men seem to of discovered through their own intense research that UFO’s, angels, demons, various gods, leprechauns, fairies, sprites and various other reported supernatural phenomenon and widely spread myths and legends of humanity over time are all a part of the exact same phenomenon and are again likely not the work of extraterrestrial “space aliens” at all from other planets but rather beings either from other dimensions of reality or earth based beings who became so advanced they for whatever reason decided to go into hiding from future beings such as ourselves ie humanity that would arise and for whatever reason are doing these things to us ie creating myths, legends and beliefs for reasons unknown.
I believe both Vallee and Keel have also pointed out how the UFO phenomenon fascinatingly seems to change form from age to age ie our not so distant past human ancestors from maybe 100 or 200 years ago say would see what they described as massive flying airships and I mean that quite literally ie think of those flying ships in the Final Fantasy games that look like old style ocean tier vessels except that they are flying around in the sky.
That’s the kind of things our not so distant ancestors reportedly saw flying around instead of the common UFO disc shaped objects of today.
Also closer ancestors of ours from like a hundred years back or so apparently saw the phenomenon as ghost rockets before rocketry of that sort was even invented and others saw craft resembling modern day blimps/dirigibles.
Not only this but people have also encountered strange beings over time like Indrid Cold, the Mothman and others.
The accumulative effects on our society or rather simply parts of it encountering these beings creates for us enduring myths that I’m sure serve as some kind of social engineering for our civilization at the hands of these “others” as Richard Dolan refers to whatever these beings are as.
