Sorry everyone. One of those ships of theirs would probably be able to take over the planet on its own. Supposedly these ships have been observed disabling nuclear missile silos. If they were communists, they would probably want to liberate us. They would likewise be able to do so right this moment. But they don't. Therefore, they aren't communists. Facts and logic :expert-shapiro:
How could a non-communist society send ships to other solar systems? It's possible. Something like Breakthrough Starshot could conceivably happen before a communist revolution on Earth. The USA, a fascist dictatorship, sent people to the moon.
If the UFOs are real, I think that they're some kind of automated probe(s) which were actually sent here hundreds if not thousands of years ago. (The earliest recorded UFO sighting was in 1440 BC.) As mentioned on the most recent episode of Guerilla History, UFOs might have been triggered or made more active somehow by the first detonation of an atomic bomb.
The civilization which built them might not even exist anymore, but their technology is evidently still way ahead of ours, which means it could be quite some time before we ever figure out what these UFOs actually are.
Something is definitely going on, though, whatever the fuck it is. The podcast mentions a guy I had never heard of named Ron Westrum. He gave a talk here mentioning how alien abductions probably aren't all in people's heads, since they sometimes happen to multiple people at the same time or are observed by others who are not abducted.
All of this generally shows that in spite of what people tell you, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on.
I fucking swear every single time this damn thing comes up, we have to keep going over this. The prime directive has it's origins in mainly two things, liberals finding out about the horrors of colonialism, and the unpopularity of the korean and vietnam wars. So we have this thing that's created in TOS so we don't have our protags looking like genocidal monsters, which ironically also happens to be broken a lot of the time because our protags are in a situation that would make them look like holier than thou jerkbags if they didn't break it.
And this isn't talking about how stupid VOY and ENT got with it. Especially the latter, where the title ship's doctor decided to just not help a race after actually making a cure for their disease that will make their race extinct in a couple hundred years, all for the horrible crime of he decided at the end that nature should take it's natural course (ENT episode: Dear Doctor).
Honestly, I see the PD more and more used as an excuse to do nothing because you're too afraid of fucking it up badly.