Seriously, I doubt it would even take that long. We get used to shit so quickly, and the news cycles have to keep feeding us new things, the only way we’d keep talking about the aliens if they kept doing new and interesting things. I’d be willing to bet a year later there would be some people who straight up forgot about it. “Oh yeah, aliens! Are they gonna, like, visit at some point or just keep exchanging calls with the Whitehouse?”
I’m not sure I even believe that. I mean look how much generative AI is dominating the conversation, despite being garbage. I think aliens would have a similar ability to dominate conversation, even for the general public.