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 no
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
