The crumbling state of the empire, perhaps. "Hey we know you can't afford to have kids or healthcare and homelessness has risen like 500%, but LOOK, ALIENS!!!" Same thing with the "woke" culture war shit. It gets the working class riled up about something other than their real problems.
This just seems like a psyop that the DoD is using to justify more funding for the Space Force and/or Skunkworks projects.
Man I used to love Thunderbird back in the day. Time to give it another go!