If the alien mothership in Independence Day did a slingshot around the Earth, could the aliens have fucked us up with tidal effects?

Or maybe they don't need a slingshot

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Star-Trek-Alien-Invasions/dp/product-description/0060977574

A Mother Ship full of aliens bent on ending life on Earth may not need to send out a squadron of huge flying saucers in order to destroy our major cities. Long before the first shadow fell on the Empire State Building or the Hollywood sign, New York might be underwater and Los Angeles could be leveled by earthquakes. Early in Independence Day, the telemetry tracking the approach of the Mother Ship reveals that it is almost 1/4 the mass of the Moon. Before it releases its squad of death saucers, the mammoth ship pulls into a geostationary orbit above the Earth--the same sort of orbit the U.S.S. Enterprise uses to visit a new planet. In such an orbit, a spacecraft or a satellite moves at the same rate as the planet rotates, so that it always stays directly above the same spot on the planetary surface. The large communication satellites that transmit our international messages, as well as the network of Global Positioning navigational satellites that guide our airplanes and well-equipped trekkers (the terrestrial wilderness type), sit in such orbits.

Newton's law of gravity determines how high such an orbit must be, regardless of the object's mass. It is one of the many miracles of the law of gravity that any object, no matter how heavy, must orbit at exactly the same speed as any other object at the same distance from Earth. (If that weren't the case, NASA would have to design a different trajectory for every space shuttle, depending upon the weight of the astronauts inside.) The distance from Earth for an object in geostationary orbit is about 22,500 miles, or almost 1/10 the distance from Earth to the Moon. At 22,500 miles up, the gravitational attraction on the Earth of an object the mass of the Moon would be 100 times stronger than the Moon's gravitational pull; since the Mother Ship is 1/4 the mass of the Moon, its gravitational pull on the Earth would be 25 times that of the Moon! What would this do? Well, one effect might well be to close down Wall Street, because much of New York City would probably be awash. The tidal forces provoked by an object as massive as the Mother Ship would cause a catastrophic rise in sea level in various places on the Earth. At the same time, the unaccustomed tidal stresses on the Earth's crust would undoubtedly induce earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in sensitive areas around the globe. Moreover, the very motion of the Earth through space would be affected, producing unpredictable effects, including possible climatic variation. When an object as heavy as 1/4 the mass of the Moon is in close orbit above the Earth, it causes the Earth to move back and forth in response--once again, because of gravity. Adding a third massive body, with its additional gravity, to the Earth-Moon system would change the system's dynamics in possibly chaotic ways.

Krause also pointed out that wouldn't all those saucers crashing do a lot of damage if you assume a plausible density for them

Not to mention that even after the motherships are destroyed the aliens in the fighters are going to survive

http://www.cracked.com/article_18733_6-movies-that-didnt-realize-they-let-villain-win.html

We're not sure how many troops and crew were on board each, but we know each one housed an entire air force worth of those little fighter craft.

Speaking of which, any aliens who happen to be sitting in one of those crafts is probably going to make it. We saw earlier that an alien shot out of the sky was able to survive. And by survive we mean it hot wired a human brain and had a conversation with the fucking President after going through a crash-landing, a cold cock delivered by none other than Will Smith, and being cut in half on an operating table.

Actually at the end there are "fireworks" caused by the alien mothership breaking up in the atmosphere. That's not necessarily going to do us any good.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/holocaust.html

What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won't remain habitable for long.

...

Fate of the Ewoks

No animal larger than a few kilograms and incapable of long sheltered hibernation could survive the Endorian calamity. The air might even have been poisoned and deoxygenated for a few years until simple plant life could return to growth. If so then it is possible that all animal life perished. In any case any ewok on the surface who was not equipped with impressive high-technology survival gear and a nuclear shelter must have died.

For those unfortunate beings not painlessly obliterated by the impact concussions, the initial night of celebration would linger on and on with days of darkness. A chill would fall, the waters would turn to ice and the vegetation would wilt into death or dormancy, depending on species. Provided that radioactivity was insignificant and the air remained modestly breathable (a very generous assumption) the doomed ewoks might survive for days or weeks huddling around bonfires, until they starved.

And quite frankly, don't the humans in Independence Day sort of deserve to go out like this?