External shaping without changing anything else would be working on only one or two of those non-noob skills. So I'll give you some different advice: check out ye olde list of articles and spend some time reading whatever looks interesting - the "mysterious answers to mysterious questions" sequence probably being the most useful.
If people down vote out of a prior idea that alien visits just don't happen, then it seems a bit like prejudging. What i present here is huge amounts of evidence from government military studies, and people who hasn't studied the case starts by downvoting? How is that not prejudging?
Recently I've been struck with a belief in Aliens being present on this Earth. It happened after I watched this documenary (and subsequently several others). My feeling of belief is not particular interesting in itself - I could be lunatic or otherwise psychological dysfunctional. What I'm interested in knowing is to what extend other people, who consider themselves rationalists, feel belief in the existence of aliens on this earth, after watching this documentary. Is anyone willing to try and watch it and then report back?
Another question arising in this matter is how to treat evidence of extraordinary things. Should one require 'extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims'? I somehow feel that this notion is misguided - it discriminates evidence prior to observation. That is not the right time to start discriminating. At most we should ascribe a prior probability of zero and then do some Bayesian updating to get a posterior. Hmm, if no one has seen a black swan and some bayesian thinking person then sees a black swan a) in the distance or b) up front, what will his a posterior probability of the existence of black swans then be?