Even as a very young guy, I'd realized that full-on First Contact (hostile or friendly) would be a crippling blow to the WTS... I didn't really know why, I'd just grasped it intuitively.
As I got older, I realized that the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial biological life simply isn't compatible with a fundamentalist/evangelical worldview... including the JW version (and this was confirmed for me decades later*).
It's one of the main reasons the gradual rising tide of UFO sightings in recent decades (that respected public officials are acknowledging, I might add) interests me.
*A few years back, there was a university research paper published (please note: I have never been able to find it since, but I swear I read it) regarding Americans' overall potential belief in the supernatural... and had included ghosts, hauntings, angels, demons... and aliens (there was more, but for all intents and purposes, those were the big five).
The researchers discovered a funny trend in the data; namely, that many of the individuals surveyed accepted the first four, but not the fifth... which they thought was weird, and scratched their heads. After all, paranormal phenomena was paranormal phenomena, right?
The trend was significant enough to throw off their projections, so they did some further digging... and found that virtually every single one who'd accepted ghosts, hauntings, angels, and demons - but specifically rejected the possibility of ETs - were Evangelical Christians.
So they dug into the fundamentalist/evangelical belief system to figure out why, and quickly realized that - short version - quite a numbers of particulars inherent in a literalist Biblical worldview just didn't really allow for the possibility of extraterrestrials.
This was effectively confirmed for me recently as I was reading a book containing UFO-related testimonials, and came across a blink-and-you'd-miss-it moment wherein an Air Force flight controller had tremendous difficulty reporting his own UFO sighting specifically because, as he said, his religion didn't allow him to believe in aliens.
Seriously.
EDIT: It makes me really wonder just how many of the government officials who'd specifically derided Project Blue Book back in the day were devout Evangelicals.