Why are so many conservatives so eager to believe in UFO stories?

One of the key characteristics of the left (not with every single individual, of course, but on average) is their trust of authorities and the government. Leftists are always the ones who not only want to obey government mandates, but willfully try to make others obey those mandates as well. (Perhaps no better example of this was the covid-19 pandemic and the governmental restrictions and recommendations about it: The people who most furiously defended and enforced those mandates and recommendations were overwhelmingly leftists. And that's just one example.) 

Conversely, one of the key characteristics of the conservative right, especially in the United States, is their distrust of authorities and the government. "Don't tread on me!" is one of their slogans. It's a message to the government: "Leave us alone." Where the left wants big authoritarian government, the right wants small government that interferes as little as possible and leaves people and businesses alone. 

Naturally this reflects on how much people on either side trust what the government is saying: On average people on the left are very trustful of the government, and people on the right are very distrustful and skeptical about anything the government claims. 

Given this, I find it highly ironic that when it comes to the modern UFO claims, a good portion of the conservative right, at least in the United States, seems to just blindly believe what governmental officials are saying. In fact, and astonishingly, they often make outright arguments from authority ("high-ranking government officials are saying it, it must be true!") which is extraordinarily uncharacteristic of right-wing conservatives. They are supposed to be skeptical of the government and distrust and doubt everything they say! They are not supposed to outright make arguments from authority! It's extraordinarily ironic how in this one particular issue the roles are completely reversed: The left doesn't really believe the government, while (many of those on) the right trust the government blindly and without question.

Ask pretty much any American conservative if the government is composed of nothing but deceitful liars, and they will answer with a resounding "yes!" Yet, many of these exact same people are making appeals to authority, how governmental authorities are claiming that UFOs are real, and suddenly they aren't deceitful liars.

How did it come to this? It may be that when it comes to conspiracy theories, those tend to be more prevalent on the right than on the left. The eagerness to believe in conspiracies seems to have a higher priority than the lack of trust in the government.