New crazy conspiracy theory: we’re being quietly targeted for extermination by a hostile alien species.
They could wipe us out in an afternoon if they wanted to, but they can’t just come right in and bomb us from orbit, as that would cause an interstellar relations incident, maybe mass unrest back home. But they also want us gone. We gotta go because we’re an advancing young species, near their territory, and are a potential future problem. We’re not dealing with an alien army attacking us; we’re dealing with an alien equivalent of the CIA. They’re here to do the dirty work quietly.
They know species at our level often run headfirst into environmental catastrophes as their technology becomes great enough to threaten the planet they live on. Instead of helping us, however, they’re throwing gasoline on the fire. They’ve brainwashed/replaced with clones the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. And their behavior was psychologically programmed to maximize the chances of them leading us right into a climate apocalypse. Most species eventually get their removed together and place limits on extraction and pollution, less they all die. But if the right type of crazies are running the place, a species can just slam the accelerator as it drives off a cliff.
And when we eventually do burn ourselves alive in a climate Armageddon, the aliens will run news stories, lamenting the tragic tale of a poor primitive planet that couldn’t right its ways in time. No threat of war between great interstellar powers. No mass protests movements back on the homeworld. Just a potential future rival nipped in the bud, no muss, no fuss. Mass murder dressed up as death by natural causes.
Honestly, if there were alien craft zipping around, I can imagine why no government would want to disclose them. It would basically be an announcement of, “these damn craft are flying around the atmosphere and the space around Earth. They’re utterly beyond anything we’re capable of. We’re not sure if they’re aliens, time travelers, beings from another dimension, literal angels or demons, or something even stranger. But we are utterly at their mercy. They’re spying on us constantly, for purposes unknown. Oh, and occasionally they’ll just abduct people and carry them off for God-knows-what reason. I’m sorry, but there is literally nothing we or any human being can do about this. They’re basically gods to us, and we know next to nothing about them, where they come from, or why they’re here.”
What leader would ever want to give that speech? I don’t consider it likely we are being visited by non-human intelligences. But if we were, it wouldn’t be anything like Roswell and Area 51. We wouldn’t have a base full of downed or crashed alien craft. They simply wouldn’t crash, and we would have no ability to shoot them down. A real announcement of alien visitors wouldn’t be the reveal of some vast secret government project, a revealing of secret strength. It would be us saying, “we’ve been working on this problem for nearly a century, and we’ve learned nothing. All we know is that they’re there, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.” It would a confession of weakness and utter helplessness, a government openly admitting it’s completely powerless to protect its people from an unknown outside threat. Can you imagine a president telling the public, “yeah, you might get abducted by aliens. Sorry, that just happens sometimes. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
It would represent a complete shattering of our species’ sense of value and security. And voters tend not to like politicians who tell them the unvarnished truth.