One of the stranger headlines to emerge in the wake of Pope Francis’ death wondered about whether the next pope would reveal the Vatican’s UFO “secrets,” resurfacing the bombshell congressional hearing about UFOs last summer. Since Pope Leo’s election, it has been speculated that he will be the “disclosure pope” about the Vatican’s knowledge of UFOs. While even discussing such apparent clickbait runs some risk of carelessly playing into the hands of the conspiracy theorist, I believe it does raise questions worth considering.
What should faithful Catholics make of the whistleblower David Grusch’s claims under oath before Congress that the United States government has been engaged in an alien UFO crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program since the mid-20th century (allegedly, in collusion with the Vatican)? At root, this question raises a more basic question: How should the Christian think about the possibility of extraterrestrial life?
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There are three broad possible attitudes toward claims of intelligent extraterrestrial life one can find among Christians: first, the deniers; second, the believers; and third, the cautiously skeptical. Let’s consider them in turn.
The denier argues that Grusch’s claims and others like them are hogwash because there’s no evidence from faith or reason that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists. Christians have the advantage of revelation to guide our thinking about the universe. And the Bible can be interpreted to believe that God privileged Earth with a unique design and place in the universe to be the home of His image-bearers. On this view, the creation narratives in Genesis and Job don’t report any non-terrestrial intelligent organisms precisely because there aren’t any.
While all orthodox Christians would affirm that the Incarnation is a metaphysical marvel with cosmic implications, the denier would contend that it underscores the unique place of humanity in the universe. The Second Person of the Trinity assumed human nature at a specific point in space-time on the planet Earth, about two thousand years ago. The fact that God has not so interacted with the essential nature of any other material being on any other planet in the universe is telling.
Hence, through the lens of reason, the denier would suggest that Fermi’s Paradox—which asks: In such a vast universe that has existed for so long, “where is everybody?”—is solved by the answer: we are alone. The denier would chalk up so-called encounters with aliens and alien spacecraft as deriving from natural causation or perhaps demonic influence. For example, the famous Navy “tic tac” video might simply be a recording of a distant plane giving off an infrared glare. And, claimants to contact (i.e., “contactees”) are typically either hoaxers, delusional, or even victims of demonic deception perhaps through involvement in the occult (as Christian apologist Kenneth Samples argues).
The believer camp reads Sacred Scripture differently. While the Bible does not directly mention non-human bodily intelligences elsewhere in the galaxy, the believer emphasizes that the Bible does not deny their existence, either. The creation narratives are focused on man and Earth simply because revelation to man focuses on God’s dealings with man. Nothing more need be inferred. More than that, some believers find positive evidence in the Bible of alien visitation to earth, taking, for example, Ezekiel’s vision of wheels within wheels as a description of flying saucers (Ezekiel 1:15-16). And the believer contends that Jesus Himself can reasonably be read to signal that other life exists when He says, “I have other sheep that are not of this fold” (John 10:16).
Meanwhile, through the lens of reason, the believer tends to find at least some eyewitness testimony of UFO and/or alien encounters to be credible. In this view, the tic tac video and others must be nonhuman spacecraft because they show artificial objects moving in ways that are simply beyond human technology.
The believer leans on the sheer probability that, in the vastness of space, it is more likely than not that other intelligent life exists. A few hundred billion stars exist in the Milky Way Galaxy alone—and ours is just one of a couple trillion galaxies in the observable universe. The number of stars with orbiting planets is too great of a number for the human mind to comprehend: into the sextillions (1×1021). The heavens proclaim the glory of God—and is it really fitting that God would create all of that empty (Psalm 19:1)? The believer maintains that the Fermi Paradox can be solved if it turns out that advanced civilizations are relatively rare due to self-destruction, or cataclysm, or because interstellar travel is difficult, or because we aren’t capable of detecting their presence or communications.
The cautiously skeptical, in which I place myself, is somewhere between these camps.
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By the light of faith, the dogmatic denier goes too far. God certainly could have created nonhuman intelligent life in the universe. The wonderful planet we live on is teeming with countless organisms—each with its own distinct form or kind. Each natural form has its archetype in God’s mind, like the maker has in mind the idea of the artifact that he seeks to build. But, while we can mentally consider the exemplary forms in God’s mind in themselves, in reality they are simply identical with God’s nature, which is infinite. This entails that everything that is real in some sense is imitative of and manifests the divine nature—and that the ways in which creatures could imitate God’s nature is potentially infinite.
While God could have created just one creature, Aquinas contends, this could not adequately represent God’s infinite goodness. Hence, the great plurality and diversity of created things is fitting. All of this is compatible in principle with the existence of nonhuman and nonangelic intelligences. And, while demonic influence could explain alleged alien encounters, it simply begs the question to assume that any phenomena unexplained by natural causes must be demons.
In short, as the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, has put it, there is no contradiction with the Catholic Faith if it turned out we had “extraterrestrial brothers.”
On the other hand, there are good reasons to believe that by unaided reason many of the most frequently cited UFO encounters can be explained by natural or human causation. The United States Air Force’s Project Blue Book studied over 10,000 reported sightings and found no evidence of extraterrestrial origin or evidence of craft beyond the scientific technology of the day. Yet, it did find a lot of evidence of misidentification of natural phenomenon or other natural causes like hoaxing and delusion. To take one famous example, Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947, whence the term “flying saucers” derived, may have simply been misidentified manmade aircraft, or pelicans, or meteors, or an optical illusion.
