Do aliens walk among us? Has the government been covering up their existence for decades? In recent years the question of extraterrestrial life, and the fraught issue of government disclosure, has moved from science fiction to the news cycle. Aliens and UFOs — now called UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — aren’t just the subject of kooky podcasts and sci-fi films, but congressional hearings and White House document dumps.
And now Steven Spielberg, right on cue, is out with a big alien film, Disclosure Day, about these very questions. But unlike his other famous alien movies (ET, War of the Worlds, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) he’s talking about this one as if it were more documentary than sci-fi. In a recent interview, he said Disclosure Day will cause religious people to question their faith. Most alien films, including Spielberg’s past efforts, have focused on the question of whether aliens exist. This one, he says, will explore what the existence of aliens might mean for religious belief systems that have placed mankind at the center of God’s creation, and will “take the position of the Church.”
“What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?” he said.
Spielberg seems to think the existence of an advanced alien civilization would shatter, or at least re-order, the religious commitments of us earthlings, especially Christians who believe that God has fully revealed himself in His Son, Jesus Christ. The notion that an advanced alien species would shake or even break that faith has been the assumption of a lot of sci-fi over the years, much of which posits a fundamentally materialist view of the cosmos. If super-intelligent aliens really exist, then maybe all our notions about the supernatural and the spiritual have been wrong, and will become untenable in the light of higher alien civilizations.
Spencer Klavan argues in the Wall Street Journal that that’s not necessarily so. Aliens, he says, “might astound us … by finding our ideas about creation consonant with, even similar to, their own.” Rather than affirm the materialist assumptions of the modern era, or undermine the foundations of religious belief, an alien civilization might be “equally likely to strengthen them beyond measure.” It’s not an unprecedented view. Indeed, as Klavan notes, C.S. Lewis posits something similar in his space trilogy, imagining rational animals on Mars and an unfallen world on Venus, all beloved children of the Christian God.
But setting aside the theological and scriptural problems with both Klavan and Lewis’ speculations, there is another possibility that must be taken seriously with regard to UAPs and disclosure. That’s the view articulated recently by Vice President J.D. Vance, that UAP phenomena are not caused by creatures from outer space but creatures from beyond space and time — that they are demons, not aliens. “When I hear about extra-natural phenomenon, that’s where I go, to the Christian understanding that there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also evil out there,” he said. “I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”
Here Vance is referencing not only the idea that there is some kind of deception at work in the UAP discourse, but also something most Christians are familiar with, which is spelled out explicitly in the Nicene Creed, that God is “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” Christians of course believe God created the earth and all that is in it, but also created immaterial (invisible) beings, which scripture calls the angelic host of heaven. Some of these angels rebelled and turned to evil, and Christians understand them to be demons or devils, the enemies of mankind.
It would not be inaccurate to call these immaterial creatures “vast cosmic intelligences,” or even “multidimensional beings,” as some in the UAP world refer to aliens. At the very least, we can say that every culture in human history prior to World War II would have known such beings to be spirits, whether good or bad or something in between. Only since the late 1940s, after mainstream western society had adopted a strict materialist mindset (and after the 1947 Roswell incident launched a million UFO conspiracy theories), did we adopt the idea that UAP or “alien” encounters must involve physical creatures and craft from outer space.
In a materialist age, it would make sense that malign spirits, the demons of Christianity, would want to appear as something plausible to modern man, something he was prepared to believe was “real.” And for a materialist it is indeed easier to believe in little green men and flying saucers than the appearance, in whatever form, of a fallen angel. As the late Orthodox priest Seraphim Rose argued in a chapter on UFOs in his 1975 book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, UFO sightings first began in the 1940s because popular science fiction literature had groomed modern society to accept it: “What were men prepared to see in the sky?”
But for a properly catechized Christian, the evidence points to something else. For example, the images and videos related to UAPs that were declassified by the Trump administration last month, along with the leaked footage of UAPs first reported by The New York Times in 2017, seem to show objects defying the laws of physics. Egg-shaped craft flying hundreds of miles per hour with no heat signature, stopping on a dime, then plunging into the ocean with no change in velocity. What’s more, pilots involved in these sightings have said that while these UAPs were visible on everyone’s instruments, they were only physically visible out the cockpit window to some pilots and not others. Now what could do something like that?
In the absence of any credible physical evidence, all we have to go on for now are these apparitions picked up by military sensors and the accounts of purported eyewitnesses. There are now decades of such accounts, and an overwhelming majority of them have involved psychological or supernatural elements that are not neatly explained by a materialist narrative about an advanced extraterrestrial species visiting earth.
They are in fact much more consonant with accounts of demonic possession and oppression, which is one reason why prominent Catholic exorcists like Fr. Chad Ripperger have spoken out recently on this very question. In a March appearance on the popular Shawn Ryan podcast, Ripperger called the UAP phenomena a “ruse,” and “diabolic in nature,” saying that “if you strip the veneer of the ‘alien’ aspect of it off, that in point of fact what you’re dealing with are just demons.”
He points to the many accounts of alien abductees crying out to Jesus in their distress and instantly ending the experience. He points to what aliens purportedly do in abduction scenarios, which is identical to what demons do in possession scenarios. He points to the type of things the “aliens” in these encounters say they want, to be saviors of humanity, to usher in a new era of civilization — the very things the demons want, according to Ripperger. (Fr. Rose, the Orthodox priest, also wrote about this, referencing the prominent computer scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallée, who “notes the similarity between UFO encounters and occult initiation rituals which ‘open the mind’ to a ‘new set of symbols.’ All of this points to what he calls ‘the next form of religion.’”) As for sightings of what appear to be alien craft that can move in ways contrary to physical laws, that too, says Ripperger, is likely a “diabolic mirage,” which he says is something demons are able do, albeit rarely.
Ripperger is not alone in making these claims. In late May, Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, also a prominent Catholic exorcist, posted a video on YouTube expressing his personal belief that, “many, if not most, [UFO] sightings are, in fact, demons.” In the video, which has since been taken down, Rosetti took care to note that this is his own opinion, not official Catholic doctrine.
Like Ripperger, Rosetti thinks UAP sightings and “alien” encounters are a diabolic deception. “There’s a danger here,” he said. “As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide … They don’t want us to know what they’re doing because they’re more effective when we don’t realize it.”
What made news, however, wasn’t Rosetti’s comments on UAPs but what Washington Archbishop Cardinal Robert McElroy did in response to them. McElroy, one of the most powerful (and liberal) Catholic prelates in America, on June 3 abruptly removed Rossetti from his role as an archdiocesan exorcist and severed the archdiocese’s relationship with the Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal in Washington, D.C., which Rosetti runs.
In a statement, McElroy said that Rosetti’s comments “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.” He didn’t explain how the belief that UAPs are demons contradicts Catholic teaching, but merely asserted it.
This is strange. Rosetti, 74, is not some crank but a well-respected priest who has served in the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., since 1993. Before his removal by McElroy, he had been the archdiocesan exorcist in Washington for nearly two decades. He teaches at the Catholic University of America and has served as chaplain to the Washington Nationals baseball team. He’s also a licensed psychologist and an author with a large social media following.
Why did his comments about UAPs and demons provoke such a harsh reaction — and what appears to be a false statement about Catholic teaching — from McElroy? We cannot know for sure, but McElroy is precisely the kind of liberal, modern archbishop who would rather not associate the Catholic Church with cosmic supernatural phenomena — certainly not in the context of the UAP discourse.
Yet in a West that increasingly rejects the cold materialism of the last century and is now entering an era of re-enchantment, it is becoming difficult to posit purely rational, physical explanations for UAPs. Whatever one thinks of the possibility of sentient life on other planets, what we have been told for the past 80 years about aliens and UFOs makes less and less sense as time goes by. The most cutting-edge quantum physics now suggest that not everything that is real can be seen or measured or explained in purely materialistic terms. It is therefore not much of a stretch to think that the things our most advanced military technology can detect in the sky or under the sea, like UAPs defying the laws of physics, might not be what we have been conditioned to believe they are.
After all, if Christianity is true, in all its awesomeness and wonder, then what is the more likely explanation for UAPs? That they are the alien spacecraft of Spielberg’s science fiction, or that they are manifestations of spiritual beings created by God, who have rebelled against heaven? If the latter, then any such beings who come promising salvation, or a new era for humanity, or anything at all, should be understood for what they are: not benign creatures from an enlightened star, but the ancient enemies of mankind, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
