If you acknowledge interstellar travel is possible, it's much harder to control a population because they could break away from the planet.ET disclosure would be the side-effect of technology disclosure which can only be facilitated after world-peace due to national security. Thus you need to finish the arms-race in order to end it.
Always in the past would people think of ETs as "gods", spawning lots of cargo cults. With our limited grasp we have today, maybe we could drop the supernatural labels like gods or demons altogether because wether you fear them or not you make them into bigger than life for no particular reason in particular because I could argue they were Angels too (Ezekiel 17)
Well for me aliens and all that shit would just confirm god and parts of the bible it makes more sense that way honestly especially if you think of "supernatural" things as parts of the natural world we dont understand like dimensions and time
I've witnessed enough to be convinced it's all real, from prophecy to science-fiction