” Today, when the DeepStaters start hawking this rubbish, it’s designed to control the public, not entertain them.”
Where we disagree is that I think the stuff is real and you do not—but to the Deep State everything is a weapon and a propaganda tool—regardless of where the truth lies.
One of the references I have used in previous discussions about the (lack of) extraterrestrial intelligent life is The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, particularly their Chapter 8, "The Anthropic Principle and Biochemistry," and Chapter 9, "The Space-Travel Argument Against the Existence of Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life" (a more detail explanation of Enrico Fermi's quip, "If they existed they would be here.").
There are other papers and books that deal with the critical (planetary, solar system, and galactic) factors needed for intelligent life to exist. More of these factors are likely to be uncovered, but those known so far reduce Drake's probability equation for a planet in the galaxy containing intelligent life very close to the experimentally measured value of one.