The disclosure began in May, with the Pentagon’s release of murky “new, never-before-seen” images whose significance is so far unclear.

But for some conservative Christians, who are among Trump’s most loyal supporters, the prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has some unsettling theological implications. Some worry that it undercuts the Bible’s account of the Earth and humanity as the centrepiece of God’s plan for the universe, for example.

Christians in the United States are significantly less likely than the general public to say intelligent life exists on other planets, according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center. Among atheists and agnostics, 85% say their best guess is that intelligent life exists outside Earth. Among white evangelicals, only 40% say the same.

“The UFO topic in particular is a big challenge to any religious worldview,” said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has compiled an archive on paranormal subjects, including accounts from UFO “experiencers”.

In Kripal’s view, the origin stories of many Earth-based religions can be read as descriptions of encounters with unexplained entities of unknown provenance.

“The gods have always come from the sky, and we call that religion,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of words in the Western canon for these entities of the middle realm, so my own feeling is that when religious people look out and they see entities that don’t fit into their religious world, they call them demons.”

The possibility that extraterrestrial beings might be better understood as demonic entities is not a new theory among some conservative Christians. But it has lately burst from the fringes of speculative religious cosmology into more prominent view, including from elected officials at the highest levels of government.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said on a conservative podcast this spring.

The Catholic Church has no formal teaching on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, though it has intrigued some Catholic theologians. A Vatican scientist made headlines in 2010 when he suggested aliens might have souls, and said he would baptise an alien “if they asked”.

“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,” Vance added.

Republican Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado made a similar point recently on another podcast, this one hosted by conservative Christian musician and activist Sean Feucht.

“This is more spiritual and, if you really want to go there, demonic,” she said. “I don’t think that they are aliens as we have thought for most of our lives.”

Spiritual conjecture about aliens and demons is not a topic in the vast majority of Christian pulpits, said Russell Moore, an editor-at-large and columnist at Christianity Today magazine.

Moore touched on the topic this spring in an adult Sunday school class at his evangelical church in Nashville. Teaching from the New Testament book of Hebrews, he discussed a passage in which the writer ponders humanity’s relationship to angels, and our lack of control over the universe around us. Moore opened the class by asking what it would mean to have some kind of direct contact with non-human creatures like angels – or extraterrestrials, lately in the news.

Afterwards, “the conversations were less about aliens than they were about ‘What does it mean to be human?’”, he recalled, adding that unidentified anomalous phenomena, colloquially known as unidentified flying objects, “weren’t the point for them, they wanted to talk about AI”.

Moore said proof of extraterrestrial life should pose no threat to Christianity and need not be received with hostility. “If we assume the possibility that there’s something outside of Earth, our basic default should be the way we treat strangers generally,” he said.

Speculation about alien life fits more comfortably into other theological and cultural streams. For charismatic Christians, who emphasise the active movement of the Holy Spirit in contemporary events, “there’s a thinner line between the natural and supernatural worlds”, said Paul Gutjahr, an English professor at Indiana University and the author of the coming book Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life.

DiDio, like most of the dozen or so charismatic Christian leaders in attendance at the meeting in February, has an established interest in the borders between the spiritual and the paranormal. So he was primed to appreciate the presentation by the men, who told attendees that they couldn’t share their names or exact professional backgrounds.

Tony Merkel, a podcaster who invited many of the attendees, declined to share the organisers’ names but said they were “intelligence operators” unaffiliated with the US government. They assembled the meeting, he said, because thousands of conservative Christian leaders and media figures were already in Nashville for the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention, a major gathering where Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered the keynote address this year.

“The purpose was to be able to say, ‘This is what is coming, it seems like the government is gearing up for a disclosure and you need to be able to prepare and warn your people not to be deceived,’” said Ben Hughes, a pastor in Texas who attended the meeting.

At a similar meeting of Christian leaders, Republican Representative Eric Burlison called in to share his views about the ways that proof of extraterrestrial life might be misunderstood.

Some of the attendees have since shared their accounts of the meeting – and their guidance about how to interpret any future revelations – with their congregations and podcast audiences, striking a tone that balances warning, conjecture and reassurance.

But many of them also see a certain validation in increasingly mainstream speculation around extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings.

“The fence will disappear,” Hughes said. “This is going to force people to decide, either God is real and Christianity is real and the supernatural is real, or this alien thing is real.”

He recently launched a podcast whose topics include “salvation testimonies” and “supernatural encounters”.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Ruth Graham

Photographs by: Shawn Poynter, AFP and Nasa

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