The alternatives are described as outside “conventional science”. Too advanced, esoteric and human for simple closed off scientists to understand. That red herring should tip off immediately, there’s no convencional and unconventional science. There’s just research following the scientific method and everything else. If you’re following the scientific method and other people can verify your results you are in the field of science. If you formulate an hypothesis, design an experiment which can objectively produce data to confirm or disprove the hypothesis and then publish your full results so that other researchers can analyze your experiment, replicate it, generate their own data and arrive at similar conclusions you established new science. Any other process doesn’t generate scientific results.

Scientists don’t need to understand a proven theory and agree it is in fact good thesis. That’s a fantasy propagated by media as it generates a much better story than the drudgery of work. One particular human deeply understanding an effect has no bearing on it being real or not. Strictly, we don’t deeply understand gravity but that doesn’t stop apples from falling to the ground and the earth going around the sun. More spectacularly, it doesn’t stop us from having models of its effects which were refined over centuries and allows us to go to the moon and have GPS. Either those models are true and anyone can use them to predict the future or they are false and anyone can prove they are are false. Astronomy predicts reliably where the planets will be. Astrology reliably predicts nothing. Astronomy is science, astrology is belief.