Alien Overlords Protected Earth from Itself

In one of the more far-fetched news stories recently, Edgar Mitchell, an Astronaut on Apollo 14 and the sixth of twelve people to walk on the moon, shared his theory on how the Cold War between Russia and the United States ended: Aliens.

That's right, based on personal observations and from stories he heard from people who worked in Roswell and around missile facilities like White Sands, he subscribes to the theory that aliens visited these locations and intervened in test operations.  The aliens were purported to have disabled the functioning of certain missiles and to have shot down others that were fired during test sequences.  Roswell, New Mexico, has long been known for being a hot-bed of suspicious activity including the sightings of strange aircraft or other light displays that have never been fully explained.  The problem however, is that there has never been any public announcement of the presence of intelligent beings from other planets from a truly credible source of information.  Perhaps I am just too much of a skeptic, but no, I am not willing to accept Edgar Mitchell as being that ever-missing credible source of information.

Perhaps more plausible explanations for the oddities that were blamed on alien intervention could be: these were tests and experiments, that's what they do - fail sometimes; employees of these locations valued the lives of their families and intentionally disabled the missiles in an effort to prevent all-out war; power surges; or static electricity (it is New Mexico, afterall).

The most glaring hole in the alien hypothesis is: how would the aliens know where to find these secret government missile installations?  I have my own hypothesis on this.  They aren't just aliens - that's crazy.  They are TIME-TRAVELING ALIENS!  Yes, it would all make sense.  In a future where nuclear war took place and the Earth was blown to an inhabitable waste, aliens from the future who wanted to make future Earth their home, went back in time to when the nuclear war started and tampered with the missiles and equipment so frequently that neither Russia nor the United States were confident in their ability to blow up their enemy without blowing themselves up, and this ultimately led to them electing to never use these weapons.  Now it all makes sense.

All kidding aside, I do absolutely believe that within the vastness of the Universe, there are civilizations far more advanced than ours (considering the hundreds of millions of years wasted on terrible lizards, and since modern humans have gotten where we have in just tens of thousands of years).  It is also plausible that some of the theoretical concepts for space travel that are currently being explored on Earth, like near light-speed propulsion, have already been figured out by these civilizations.  However it is still unlikely that visitors from these civilizations are just hanging out in the New Mexico dessert, flying around and putting on a show for the UFO enthusiasts.  While it is my hope that in this lifetime we will make a discovery that shows definitively that life exists elsewhere from Earth, the thought that we will establish first contact and form galactic treaties with our alien overlords is, at least for now, purely science fiction.