For years I have enjoyed analyzing UFO claims, pictures, and videos. Seems we have yet another common interest there. Sometimes I am able to solve them or at least point out faults in someone else's supportive analysis. I prefer not to speculate on a cause unless I can see some confirmation of it. Unfortunately, most of the time, there just isn't enough data to give a confident explanation.
Confession time, I could easily have been a UFO believer, I used to read a lot of books on the subject. This was something I, "sort of" hoped could be true, but this phase lasted from the age of 14 to the age of 18. Unfortunately as my general level of education increased, my ability to believe decreased. 
I am always drawn to an extract from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.
Same here, and pretty much at the same age as you. I kept getting this sense of dissatisfaction with the books I read. They were titillating but something was missing and I couldn't put my finger on it. Now I have a better sense of what it was.
What really educated me were the books by Philip Klass. He really hit the nail on the head. Unlike the UFO books and articles I had read, I didn't have that sense of something missing with his books. His research was thorough and his arguments eloquent and sound. All those stories I had gotten my hopes up about were fluff. He was the first who really gave me a good sense of skepticism and showed me some of the things to be on the lookout for when people make extraordinary claims and write books about them.
I discovered, somewhat to my embarrassment, that books weren't always true. I had had this naive notion that, "Authors can't just _lie_ in books or make up any stuff they want, can they?" Well, yes...duh...they can, and often do.
