Will Pope Leo XIV Reveal the Vatican’s Secret UFO Files?

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?

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. 

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.  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.Tweet This

Summarizing the several domestic and foreign governmental investigations that came after Project Blue Book, the Department of Defense’s AARO Historical Record Report concluded that none concluded UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin and the “vast majority of UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] reports could be resolved as any number of ordinary objects, natural phenomena, optical illusions or misidentifications.” While we obviously can’t simply trust whatever the U.S. military claims, the believer who claims that the government is engaged in a massive cover-up bears the burden of proof. 

There are also real theological challenges, at least for the dogmatic and exultant believer’s view. 

First, at least some UAPs may be demonic in origin—and this is the perspective not merely of some of the more thoughtful armchair theologians but of some military officials as well. Reportedly, one of the recent iterations of taxpayer-funded government investigations into UAPs, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which ran from 2007-2012, faced resistance from many officials within the Pentagon because they believed that phenomena unexplained by natural causes were caused by demons. This is certainly possible, for we know from the testimony of exorcists that demons are incredibly powerful beings and masters of deception (cf. 2 Corinthians 11:14-15). If indeed there are good reasons to believe the phenomena are demonic, these officials are right to think that they ought not to be trifled with.

Moreover, the attempt to shoehorn aliens into the Bible strains credulity. A better argument is that the Bible doesn’t mention lots of things that exist, like narwhals and staphylococcus, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It is the confident and gleeful attitude that some believers have that is troubling. If God created other bodily beings of reason and will, why would He direct or permit them to come to Earth? Either they would be fallen or unfallen. If fallen—that is, corrupted by sin—then they should be seen as a potential threat to humanity and in need of a Redeemer. While contact could be the catalyst for the fallen alien race to come to faith in Christ, the proper attitude is caution, not excitement, as if salvation had arrived. 

On the other hand, if the alien race is unfallen, then why would individuals of that race be visiting here? In the spirit of C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy, in which Earth is the “silent planet”—cut off, as it were, by sin as “lost sheep” from the rest of creation—I imagine it would be fitting that God would warn any unfallen races against visiting the world in which Satan has a kind of princedom (John 14:30). Indeed, if there is an unfallen alien race, some members of that race visiting Earth, for them, could be akin to eating the forbidden fruit in the Cosmic Garden. The visitors in that case would be rogue exiles defying God. 

Of course, this is all speculative—but the point is that the attitude of excited religious fervor among some believers is unjustified from a Christian perspective. Indeed, for some, belief in aliens takes on the trappings of a false religion, complete with its own rituals, sacred texts, communal gatherings, and cultus. A number of UFO cults have arisen in the 20th century—and they tend to believe that aliens are delivering some important salvific message. Some, like the Aetherius Society, go so far as to claim that Jesus Christ Himself is an alien (from Venus). For such believers, belief in aliens appears to be an outlet for the unsatisfied, deep religious longing of man for God, which places a false hope in aliens to deliver enlightenment, fulfillment, and salvation from “beyond” this world.

So, what of the claims that the United States has a secret alien spacecraft crash retrieval program, the original of which crashed in Italy in 1933 and our intelligence agencies acquired via back channels from Pope Pius XII? Such extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The story of an alleged UFO crash in Magenta, Italy, in 1933 and a cover-up by the Mussolini regime predates Mr. Grusch’s claims. It derives from the so-called “Fascist UFO Files,” which were anonymously sent by someone calling himself “Mr. X” to various Italian news outlets in 1996, which refused to publish the story. 

Subsequently, UFOlogists Roberto Pinotti and Alfredo Lissoni came into possession of the documents and spread the story in UFO publications and a book, arguing the documents were authentic. Yet, as archivists critical of the story have pointed out, the documents produced are largely photocopies deriving from an unknown source, and the supposed originals have not been made available to scholars for independent examination. 

Simply put, extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim has not been provided. Catholics, therefore, have good reasons to doubt whether Pope Leo XIV has anything to reveal corroborating the story.

None of this necessarily means that Mr. Grusch is consciously lying; he seems to have the marks of a man who believes what he is saying. But without the extraordinary evidence—such as showing us the receipts (e.g., evidence of the spacecraft that he admittedly has not seen himself)—it is at least as likely as not that Mr. Grusch is, perhaps unwittingly, an agent of disinformation (a point that some Catholic commentators have made). 

There is evidence that the U.S. government may have engaged in psyops in this vein in the past. The Majestic-12 or MJ-12 documents that started to come out in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War—which purported to show internal governmental memos verifying that the U.S. had recovered crashed alien spacecraft and bodies—turned out to be an elaborate hoax that agents within the government itself may have sown or at the very least tolerated (the FBI did not pursue prosecution of the hoaxers). If your enemies believed you might have alien tech, would they not hesitate before initiating war? If U.S. government agents believed such tactics to be effective psyops against the Russians in the ’80s, why not again today?

Still, reasonable persons with Christian faith should be open to wherever the evidence might lead. In the meantime, we have a firm rock to stand on and a clear duty to perform, regardless of what hot air or interstellar winds might bring: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away with all sorts of strange teachings” (Hebrews 13:8-9).