At first it was that in 1947 it was only 2 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so many people were emotionally and physically not doing well that is was sort of like the whole world had a serious case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. If you were an adult in even 2001 you also saw a case of the public having about 1/100 as bad post traumatic stress disorder after 9/11. So, you can imagine how nuts the average person was after World WAr II (pretty nuts). In 1950 I was 2 years old and I can personally attest to just how nuts people were after world war II in the 1950s. However, many of the worst cases likely died or were institutionalized before 1960 so things weren't as bad after that until the Viet Nam War.
Because of this climate in 1947 Truman and then Eisenhower realized just how (upset) people already were around the world so at first Truman looked at the "War of the Worlds" dissertation by Orson Wells in I believe 1939 or something when people thought it was real on the radio and they panicked and at least 7 people died in the panic. This sort of taught the government how "fragile" the American public was in the U.S. at that time.
So, the original idea was that though the intelligentsia of the world might be able to deal with aliens, the uneducated rabble of superstitious people around the world might destroy human civilization if they found out about aliens from other planets or from other times and spaces than ours.
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