I suppose that messing with nuclear weapons is a slightly more plausible activity for aliens than anally probing inhabitants of the American Mid-West.

But, to change, the drift of this posting a bit. All speculation on aliens seems to assume that there is just one species of alien 'out there'. Given the sheer scale of the galaxy (not to mention the wider universe) there could be millions of different species - all with different dispositions and motivations (which, I suppose, could include a desire to mess with nuclear weapons or even to anally probe inhabitants of the American Mid-West). Some might be benign and some might be extremely aggressive and war-like. I would guess, though, that most would find interstellar travel extremely difficult (it might actually turn out to be impossible). There might not be many nearby species with interstellar travel capabilities at this particular stage of galactic evolution. We had better hope that, if they exist, our local spacefarers are of the benign variety.

One recent hypothesis is that once a species discovers radio it is on the road to creating artificial intelligence - and once it does so the artificial 'species' replaces the biological one. These super-intelligent, self-reproducing, immortal 'robots' then head off for an energy rich area of the universe like the centre of a galaxy and pass beyond the ken of mere biological intelligence.