Beth Sarim - "Is alien disclosure near and what effect would it have on the Witnesses?"
I'll assume this question is directed at me, since I mentioned Disclosure in my earlier post on this thread (apologies for its off-topicness).
Personally, I have no idea if it's near (although I would love it if it were). However, if one assumes that the governments of the world do indeed possess classified evidence confirming the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, the Information Age/WikiLeaks Era can't help but make it harder and harder to keep it classified. The Pentagon's grudging admission a few years back that Groom Lake Air Force Base really is, in fact, “Area 51” is a testament to that, IMO.
More and more private citizens and (present and former) government staffers from nations around the world are urging their governments to come clean about what they may or may not know, UFO sightings are allegedly increasing, and the attitude among the secular world that extraterrestrials might actually exist (and that it's not that scary a thing if they do) is growing. Hell, even the Vatican has made official statements to the effect that the possibility exists, and that it's okay to believe that.
When I was a JW teenager, I nontheless loved Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, etc.; aliens were cool, and I thought the prospect of honest-to-God peaceful First Contact would be the cat's ass. However, there was something about the possibility that I also found vaguely disquieting. I didn't know why at first, but as I thought about it (and after talking about it discreetly with a few other JWs), I slowly began to grasp intuitively that if aliens came down to Earth (either to make friends, or otherwise), the WTS (as an organization) would not handle it well at all; in fact, the contents of an Awake article published in the 90s – for all intents and purposes - confirmed that for me.
Still, I couldn't articulate (even to myself) why the WT wouldn't like it, and wouldn't understand until learning a few things much later and – after giving it a lot of thought – tying them together.
The way I see it, the US government (the aging Big Dog) is the main obstacle to any potential Disclosure. Assuming evidence does indeed exist (I can't help but find it interesting that the CIA was commisioned only two weeks after the alleged Roswell incident), the American intelligence community has spent some 70 years trying to keeping a lid on it; and if there's one thing that the otherwise fiercely competitive 3-letter-agencies have in common with each other (DHS notwithstanding), it's the steadfast desire to never tell the public anything (in the NSA's case, to the extent of essentially denying it's own existence for the longest time).
A big (but IMO, underrated) reason for this is the old conservative view that human beings are, at their core, inherently bad, and need to be kept on a tight leash for their own (and everybody else's) damn good. This would, of course, include only letting them know what they "need" to know. Unfortunately, the mass panic that ensued during Orson Welles' radio broadcast of War of the Worlds back in the 30s did absolutely nothing to discourage this attitude.
Another (far bigger, IMO) reason is the fact that, thanks to the efforts of the Religious Right over the past 30+ years, there exists a disproportionately large contingent of fundamentalist (i.e. Biblical literalist, and quite authoritarian) Christians that are firmly anchored in the increasingly extreme Right Wing of the US government.
A really interesting university study was done recently, the results of which indicated something the reasearchers found surprising; the vast majority of Americans who self-identified as “Bible-believing” (i.e. fundamentalist) Christians - while often perfectly willing to believe in the existence of spirits, demons, etc. (i.e. supernatural beings) - were quite adamant in their unwillingness to accept the possibility of intelligent ETs*. The reason the researchers found it unexpected was that they had initially grouped “aliens” in the same category as “supernatural beings” - they revised that classification after their initial findings and conducted the study again.
After examining their findings, the researchers concluded that the existence of biological intelligent aliens simply doesn't fit into the majority of Biblical literalist worldviews. By that logic, Disclosure couldn't help but throw the conservative Christian world into enormous turmoil, and this would definitely include the WT; they'd particularly have a tremendously difficult time shoehorning it into their Fred-Franz-scripted End-Times narrative. I suspect the WTS would never recover.
I used to believe that Disclosure or First Contact would spell the death knell of virtually all forms of fundamentalism **. However, I've since come to revise that view.
Peaceful First Contact would still be difficult to deal with for the vast majority of Right-Wing Christian fundies in the United States of Jesusland (they would definitely distrust the alleged peacefulness), but I also now suspect that they might be able to handle an (admittedly far-fetched) Independence Day-style armed invasion; the vast majority of religious wingnuts are quite militant, and would jump at the chance to defend their country, families, and most importantly, faith from the “Godless alien hordes”.
I could be wrong.
* Hack born-again writer and self-styled prophet Hal Lindsay being a noteworthy exception; and even then, he tends to dismiss alleged Third-Kind Encounters as tricks by demons.
** A possible exception might be UFO cults, and even then, any kind of official or semi-official Disclosure would call into serious question the veracity of their respective theologies, because - like the WTS – most UFO cults are apocalyptic in nature, and Disclosure doesn't really seem to fit with that kind of eschatology. Authoritarianism - and authoritarian high-control groups - as a sociological phenomenon would arguably still continue; IMO, the trait is hard-wired into the human psyche (in varying degrees, depending on the individual) as an evolutionary adaptation, but I couldn't imagine it having much of a religious flavor to it.