It's sad for science, that the "science balloon family" turn out to be broke actors looking for attention. People who really believe in reptile people and other nonsense, not science - radical inquiry.
Science is one of those things storytelling just can't understand - one of many. Increasingly, our world depends on things that stories have a hard time making sense of. The market and science being two of them. We have trouble with it as people too - so there's a discipline there to follow that separates the stories from the radical inquiry, and pushes us from wishful thinking to knowledge.
But that discipline does not work at all on television or in the news, only the stories work - the result we convince ourselves - through the discipline - that we can reliably use to generate ideas for more radical inquiry. So why not cut a corner and find some telegenic people with a knack for telling the story?