I want to believe (but I kind of don't). That means I spend a lot of time wondering, investigating, digging, reading, looking, photographing, comparing, and making up my own mind.
I can't think of a healthier position to take on the issues raised by conspiracy theories, UAP/UFO sightings, and the world of the anomalous and Fortean. I dismiss nothing out of hand unless it comes from a source with a proven track record of lies (yes, governments and the agencies of state included), but I'm not persuaded by the idea that repetition of a story means there must be some fire behind the smoke. That's nonsense.
Where there's a claim, I look for the original source of that claim. Where an individual is said to have made that claim, I first look to see if such an individual can be proven to exist. Sadly, very sadly, I can often prove that nobody of that name lived where they're supposed to have lived at the time, or that the placenames involved don't actually exist, or that what's being described as a massive coverup operation was routine activity. Sometimes it's not so clear cut and I can see shreds of truth and strands of clear embellishment, but there's not enough basic information to be sure that anything substantive occurred - or that it didn't.
Infrequently, I can identify an original source for a story and prove that person's existence: their birth, their residence, their schooling, their marriage, their occupation, their local notoriety or lack thereof, their death, their burial. Something. For the past 200 years or so, people in the English-speaking world have, more often than not, left verifiable paper trails of their lives and broader movements. It's not hard to check the basics of a wild story and take at least an educated guess that the local press maybe just made this one up. It's usually not for any malicious or suspicious reason, but as creative filler - to sell papers, to entertain, and to pad out unoccupied column inches on a slow news day. Wade through an online newspaper archive on the subject of cattle mutillations and you can spot the filler pieces - and the community-calming propaganda pieces that eventually replaced them - among the live reports from genuinely outraged farmers and genuinely confused authorities.
It's not difficult to research whether or not the places and people described in a modern-day fantastical report exist or once existed. If the layout or landscape is as described. If distances and measurments stand up to resonable scrutiny.
I start from the position that we, mankind of the 21st Century, don't know everything so should keep asking questions; that we have a tendency to cling to what we do know, or believe we know, at the expense of letting new experiences or evidence inform our society. We tend to take challenges to our belief systems poorly and to entrench if we feel we're being disbelieved or mocked. We tend to defend a position on principle and it takes an exceptionally rare individual to back down in public having taken a strong position.
I start from the position that deliberate cover-ups do happen for both altruistic and less savoury reasons, making independent oversight, long-term archiving, and archive audit essential at every level of civil and military administration;
That the authorities and their agents are sometimes that incompetent and bad at sharing information with each other, then documenting it and keeping it safe, because issues like jurisdiction, funding, corruption, competing agendas, bad management, and honest miscommunication are all at least as real as the UFO debris or the cryptid (etc) we'd like to know more about;
That attention and/or profit seekers do perpetrate hoaxes, but that they're often not hard to spot because the alleged evidence never materialises as promised, or doesn't withstand any scrutiny once produced;
That mis- and disinformation is deliberately spread within and handed to the conspiracy community for various reasons, most of them more depressingly mundane than we'd like to believe;
And that beyond all those caveats, there are still genuine, unanswered questions about anomalies and unexplained events that become lost in all the noise.
That's where my personal interest in the world of conspiracy theory lies: in the remnants of possibility and plausibility once the noise and repetition have been whittled away, using as much practical evidence as can be found.