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.

Not to defend the gits in question, but I've always been partial to the so-called "roadside picnic" concept, coined by the Soviet writers Arcady and Boris Strugatsky:

In their book "Roadside picnic" (later poorly adapted to movie "Stalker", and later mutilated beyond recognition into a series of video games), the characters are dealing with a site of apparent alien visit, which left behind a whole treasure trove of strange artifacts and anomalies. The original purpose of the artifacts, as well as the nature of the aliens and their visit remain a mystery. One of the characters, a scientist suggests the eponymous theory:

Imagine taking your family on a road trip. You stop by s roadside to take a break, have a little picnic. Afterwards you drive away, never to return, leaving behind leftover food, trash, general traces of your presence. Then the animals come out of the woods and observe your "visitation site" with shock and awe.