That's a personal favorite of mine as well.

I was going to bring up the same. I feel like a lot of art particularly from Renaissance on took some artistic liberties and we may be applying our views and perspectives to mold what we're seeing. There's still intriguing art there that makes you wonder why the choice was made for certain objects to be included, so we shouldn't dismiss it.

However, the incident in the art you cited of Nuremberg was supposedly witnessed by many people. What it was is still up for speculation. But, this event and art are what come to my mind first when thinking of pre-Roswell potential sightings.

That's a great example. I've seen it before but forgot how detailed it was and how many saw it.

There’s a surprisingly good chance that the whole aliens thing is a phantom in the human gestalt

Absolutely. And it doesn't even have to be a social phenomenon, I'm not dismissive of social engineering as cover ups for i.e. hyperadvanced but very human military technology.

There's a long line of explanations based mostly in the knowledge or superstition of the time, revised with every new bit of knowledge or commonly accepted superstition. My conclusions might very well be a product of this.

I'd still argue there's a difference in the approach of "modern" historians, investigators and the likes. Where we used to have a belief, confirmed by observable phenomenons, we (or at least more than before) now have a lack of belief with our worldview built upon observable phenomenons and verification through reproducibility.

Yet we're in the intersection between the differing worldviews; I think those who hold the possibility of extraterrestrial, intelligent origins for unknown phenomenons are closer to the truth than those who know it's aliens.

There's still a lot of superstition in modern Ufology.