Be Prepared

I have pondered on this before but with the US Government announcing there were hundreds of Unidentified Flying Objects in 2022 which they can't explain away as aircraft, drones, weather balloons or natural phenomenon, then we must assume that the Unidentified bit is coming from something outside of our planet and if that is the case, what would we do about if it is a message from an advanced civilisation?
The University of Saint Andrews are certainly open to the possibility and they are concerned that we are woefully unprepared for an event that could happen at any time and are setting up a team of researchers and strategists to work out every aspect of what we need to do and how to do it.
Seti researchers already have some guidelines on how to behave if they detect an interstellar message from an advanced civilisation. A 2010 declaration from the International Academy of Astronautics urges those who detect mysterious signals to rule out non-alien sources first – such as a microwave oven down the corridor (looking at you Australia) and if there is consensus that the signal is legitimate, then the secretary general of the United Nations is the first to be told.
What they do with it is then is up for debate as should an announcement be made to the World or just the heads of the World's nations informed and importantly should we respond and alert any sender that we are here, assuming that the civilisation has not gone extinct in the time it has taken the message to reach us.
Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, warned in 2016 that humanity’s first contact with an advanced civilisation could mirror what happened when Native Americans encountered Christopher Columbus, which as he said: 'didn’t turn out so well so for them', a thought echoed by other scientists although others argue that it is a too good opportunity to miss linking up with another intelligence out there.
As any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, communication time would be on the scale of many centuries so if we were to receive a signal today, we would have plenty of time to work out some form of international agreement before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say.
My first question to aliens would be why do you travel across billions of miles of interstellar time and space just to draw pictures in our crops and anally probe drunk American rednecks?