Angels, Demons And Lots Of Theological Questions About UFOs
(ANALYSIS) For centuries, stargazers of many kinds have debated the meaning of unidentified objects in the heavens and encounters with mysterious beings on earth.
“Each new discovery, even every new theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching theological and philosophical consequences. It is seized by unbelievers as the basis for a new attack on Christianity,” noted Oxford don C.S. Lewis, in a 1958 essay “Will We Lose God in Outer Space?”
This was years after the Christian apologist finished his science-fiction trilogy that imagined contact between humanity and extraterrestrials.
READ: Would The Existence of Space Aliens Threaten Christianity?
After the “novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before,” Lewis added.
The big question remains: Are there other beings with “what we call ‘rational souls’?”
In 2014, the Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno wrote a book with this title: “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” He stated, with “whatever authority I have as a scientist and as one of the ‘Official Astronomers’ at the Vatican Observatory: Neither I, nor anyone I know, has any evidence that extraterrestrials exist.”
The latest media storm was triggered by this Truth Social post by President Donald Trump: “Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
The first release included 170-plus files, beginning in the 1940s, ranging from encounters reported by farmers to videos filmed by U.S. military pilots.
Vice President J.D. Vance stirred debate with remarks during a Benny Johnson podcast: “I don'‘t think they’re aliens, I think they're demons anyway, but that's a longer discussion. ... Every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain.”
In the end, Christians believe that “there’s a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there.”
A decade ago, while exploring descriptions of beliefs about Purgatory, religious studies scholar Diana Pasulka found images and stories that sounded familiar — in documents from 1300 to 1880.
“I found ... what I would call extra information. I saw a lot of records of reported aerial sightings. People saw orbs, discs, and basically things that surprised them, flying around in the skies,” said Pasulka, in an interview with Rod Dreher for The European Conservative.
When discussing her work with others, she encountered the same images and experiences in UFO reports. This led to her book “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology” in 2019.
“It is rational to approach the topic like this: in the 1400s people were using religious frameworks to describe what they saw in the sky,” said Pasulka. "Today, people do the same thing, but now we live in an ostensibly ‘secular’ society and have achieved flight, so when people see unidentified aerial phenomena, they think of drones or something like stealth aircraft, and maybe UFOs.”
Truth is, she said, this “is a phenomenon that has been with us humans for a long time. As horrifying as this is for scholars to admit, it appears to be transhistorical. We might use different cultural frameworks to describe it, but there it is.”
Meanwhile, debates continue about what forms of scientific evidence would be necessary to answer the never-ending stream of questions about extraterrestrial life, noted James Renn, coordinator for the Vatican Observatory's Ambassador Program. Scientific evidence is essential, but only part of the ultimate mystery.
“Ultimately, as we search for our place in Creation, we need to ask — What are we looking for? What are we hoping to find?”, wrote Renn in a 2023 online essay for the Observatory. “Are we hoping that an advanced civilization can provide answers to the struggles of our existence or to the secrets of Creation? Can they teach us the path to attaining salvation? Do we hope that an advanced life form will provide (the) solution to our problems, or do we fear they will come to destroy us?”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.