What if UAP sightings and alien abduction accounts aren’t evidence of extraterrestrial life, but of supernatural life?
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.”