Response to Jimmy Akin's UFO comments
To Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas regarding Daniel O'Connor

NOTE: This article includes some exerpts and/or summaries from Daniel O'Connor's book " Only Man Bears his Image".We have deep respect for Jimmy Akin, who has been a "go to" source for us for over 20 years. The Pints with Aquinas interview (March 2024) demonstrates what happens, even when good Catholics start down the rabbit hole of UFO belief. The show devolved to Jimmy's theory that there may be multiple "mothers of God" on other planets, stigmatas on multiple limbs of aliens, and a UFO abductee who was used as a "stud" to breed with a female alien, followed by a straight faced discussion about the morality of having intercourse with an alien and/or marrying an alien. I couldn't help but think:

Listening to Jimmy Akin talk about UFOs is like listening to
Fr. James Martin talk about transgenderism

Jimmy Akin was asked on the Matt Fradd podcast:

Matt fradd: We're seeing a lot of people now pushing back in the Catholic space, maybe not a lot of people, but more and more vocally it seems against UFOs saying that

• UFOs are demons
• UFOs don't exist
• The Catholic church does not allow for the possibility of UFOs and specifically aliens

Jimmy Akin: ...Saying there are no UFOs, properly speaking, is just factually inaccurate ... there are unidentified things that we don't know any kind of conventional technology that it represents.

Does it have to be demons? ... Daniel ' O'Connor claimed that the catechism contains a passage that basically restricts the image of God to man and therefore, in his view, there could not be creatures other than man that have the Divine image and thus are intelligent.

There are several problems with that argument ...if you don't have intelligent rational aliens as a possible explanation for these unidentified things, then since they seem to display intelligent behavior you would be left with the only other intelligent thing we know about other than humans which would be Angelic beings and so UFOs would need to be either be good Angels or bad angels and given that they are sometimes reported to do traumatic things like abduct people and traumatize them, that would suggest demons so you end up with demons as a kind of due to the availability bias you've said other intelligent life forms like us aren't possible and that would point you in this direction because that is the option that's available as an explanation.

The problem is the initial reasoning that says the church does not permit belief in extraterrestrial intelligence. That's just completely false if you talk to Catholic theologians and if you even read the writings of recent popes they are open to the idea that God may have other children out among the stars they have not said that only mankind is is capable of being rational according to the teaching of the church. They have they it's the reverse when you read including things popes have said. .. .I

I consider Daniel oconor to be something of a friend. I've had positive interactions with him in the past but I think he's taken a passage from the catechism and read it contrary to the intention of the Pope who promulgated it and so he's reading a text against the interpretation that the pope would give it in fact the same Pope who released the catechism and I find that a a mistaken hermeneutical Strat y I don't think you can say ah well the pope may be open to extraterrestrials but here he wrote something and if you read it just the way I want you to read it it actually contradicts what he said and therefore the church doesn't allow this when the pope plainly allowed it that's just a mistaken course of hermeneutics um okay so and and what the passage in the catechism was talking about is creatures on Earth one of the things you've always got to do when you uh look at a passage is say what's the universe of discourse that this text is talking about if it's not trying to answer the question of what exists elsewhere in the cosmos then it's not addressing the issue of what exists elsewhere in the cosmos if it's talking about well here on Earth yeah man's the only rational thing well yeah okay but that only talks about Earth it doesn't tell us anything about elsewhere in in addition to as you said recent popes being open to the possibility oft elsewhere a condemnation of the possibility of extraterrestrial life from popes or certainly not from an ecumenical council um and certainly nothing definitive okay um and there has been a discussion of in fact I've got a huge big thick book on this on the history of the Extraterrestrial question down through history um there have been rejections of individual thinkers like um is it savan Rola who uh who proposed many worlds with other inhabitants on them and he got condemned but he also got condemned for other stuff um he was he was he had a bunch of problematic theological ideas but just because even if you have a condemnation in the past that doesn't mean that condemnation applies today look at Galileo and so if you even if you had an opinion that was expressed in the past and got condemned that was of that had a scientific bearing and this all happened before the Scientific Revolution the church isn't hanging on to opinions that it hasn't articulated in hundreds and hundreds of years so there is a form of doctrinal development that occurs where ideas that used to be common like pic cosmology where the Earth is at the center of the universe and it's surrounded by these Crystal shells that the planets orbit on and the sphere of the fixed stars is just beyond the orbit of Saturn um well that used to be a common opinion and some people like Galileo even got condemned for uh for calling that into question in ways that were deemed problematic but that doesn't mean the church is stuck with all that yeah and in the same way there's been a revolution in cosmology to where we don't view the universe as a series of concentric Crystal spheres ending just beyond Saturn we don't today there's been so much revolution in our knowledge of cosmology that now there are options that Catholics can think about and endorse today that they didn't have a basis for in the past okay uh also I have an episode of mysterious World on is it always alien demons and in that one I go through a bunch of evidence proposed by the Evangelical scholar or astronomer Hugh Ross who supports the demon alien hypothesis uh Catholics often refer to Mary as the greatest creature in heaven mhm okay uh higher above the angels in Grace this sort of thing if it were the case in Grace sure by that yeah if there were AA civilization elsewhere in the stars and uh they fell and there was a redeemer aquinus says that God could become incarnate God the Father could become incarnate um or if the franciscans are right and Christ would have come regardless maybe he has already uh come to a planet among amidst unfallen beings then presumably or at least hypothetically theoretically you've got a mother of God on another planet right that's a possibility it's possibility they might not have Sexes though well or they might have more than two right so all that's possible I'm just going this if this is possible then it's possible that there are now two mothers of God yeah and then uh what does that mean like could mean that some alien Mother of God is above our mother of God in Grace I mean that that's where it starts to get weird for me well it but it should be weird because we're talking about aliens so I suppose it's appropriate yeah and the answer is we don't we don't we don't have any data here because God hasn't told us um at least I don't think God has told us now someone might say that the deposit of Revelation he's given us establishes that our Virgin Mary is the highest anywhere in any timeline in any con mos in which case okay well that would be true oh I see and so if there are other mothers of Jesus out there then well then they wouldn't be as high as our Mary on the other hand I think it's more plausible to again consider the universe of discourse what are these statements about Mary what are they talking about are they envisioning the possibility of Marys on other planets and I don't think they are I don't think that was on the Mind map of the people who formulated these and so if you want to say that our Virgin Mary is the highest creature in the order of Grace because she has been more graced than any of the Angels or any other human beings that's fine but I don't think that tells you anything about hypothetical creatures out in the cosmos because the people who formulated these statements about Mary we're not even contemplating that do you think uh aliens exist well I think I'm I have a I have a spectrum of confidences yeah I think that life in some form at least primitive unintelligent life probably exists off of Earth in fact I did a two-parter about life on Mars we've actually got good evidence for life may very well exist on Mars in A Primitive form um things that are equivalents of plants and fungi um there are structures on Mars that appear cyclically with the passing of the Martian Seasons that look like fungus and look like trees from orbit um so and and the Viking uh life test that was done in the 1970s passed it it verified the existence of life and then they changed the criteria after they saw the results which is bad science you don't change your validation criteria after you've seen the data um so I think that there is a very I think if I have to bet life of some form exists elsewhere and I think that's consistent with god making such an enormously Big Universe you know which way beyond what you would expect to need to just have us in it um also the uh um does intelligent life exist I would guess that the answer is yes but that's more of a guess is that guess excuse me is that guess based on the sort of things you've looked into as far as UFO sightings is that no it's not um is that's a third question um but the second question do I think intelligent life do I think we would have reason to believe intelligent life exists elsewhere I would guess the answer is yes but I'm not as firm on that there are arguments that even though life may be very common intelligent life may be very rare and so I I I don't presently have an opinion about are those arguments conclusive or not um and even if it would be exceptionally rare on naturalistic grounds well that doesn't tell us what God did you know there's some like this is one of Hugh Ross's arguments that oh uh the odds of intelligent life are so low it shouldn't exist anywhere in the universe at all and therefore we have evidence that God designed our solar system to have intelligent life in it mhm okay suppose that's right suppose he's right it's so rare it should not exist in the universe yeah but God did it here well if God did it here God can do it elsewhere so just because you've got an argument that this is naturalistically so uncommon it shouldn't exist doesn't mean you've disproved that it exists any number of times if God chose to go against Natural odds and make life intelligent life here on Earth he could have done it the next solar system over it's entirely up to God at that point and you'd have intelligent design Arguments for aliens just like you would earth based on a Creator who's in control of everything so I don't think you could even if the naturalistic arguments for the Rarity of intelligent life work the fact that it's here means god did it at least once yeah so he could do it elsewhere and those naturalistic arguments th are not conclusive um then we get to the third question uh are we being visited maybe I don't know um I recognize there are things that are flying around out there that are hard to ex that are unidentified and that are hard to explain in terms of conventional technology they therefore could have an exotic Source an exotic Source meaning extraterrestrial interdimensional cryp terrestrial or time travel all of those four I would consider exotic sources um so there the U the uaps that are flying around they they may have an exotic Source I don't know I have studied and covered on Mysterious World a number of UFO encounters that I some of which I think have natural explanations like Betty and Barney Hill I don't think that abduction was a real abduction I think that um that it was a misunderstanding of what their experiences were by Betty and Barney Hill um I the evidence I have supports the idea that the Roswell UFO crash was not extraterrestrial there was something that crashed but it wasn't an extraterrestrial craft it appears to have been a uh product project Mogul balloon chain um that was designed that was a classified project at the time and was designed to uh sense nuclear weapon testing in the Soviet Union which is why it was classified because we didn't know we didn't want them knowing we were spying on them um there have been others that are harder to explain in conventional terms but I have yet to encounter one that absolutely convinces me that it has an exotic explanation so I'm open I but I don't have a firm opinion so so I think life in some form probably exists elsewhere yeah extraterrestrial intelligence May well Exist Elsewhere but I'm not as convinced I'm open to are we being visited but I'm not convinced we're being visited are there stories of alien abductions in other countries yesh in fact the very first alien abduction story in the modern era was from uh was from Brazil it's uh there was a guy named named Antonius vas boas who was is basically working as a farmer at the time and he reported being abducted by a group of uh extraterrestrials and then being required to engage in conjugal activity with a female of their party he's uh Compares himself to have been used as a stud you know you know in the sense of an animal like a stud horse um and that was actually the first one that was in the late 1950s but it didn't become well known here in the US for some time afterwards is it moral to have sex with an alien if it's rational that is a question that has not yet been settled by Catholic moral theology um the argument that it would not be acceptable it so sex is only supposed to be done inside a marriage the question is can you marry an alien also sex must be able to be possible inside marriage because if you're not able to have sex you can't get married per antecedent perpetual and incurable incontinent in uh not incontinence um impotence is an impediment to marriage that blocks it from coming into existence so you've got to be able to have have uh conjugal relations in order to be married and you've got to be married to have conjugal relations so could you um and um oh procreative yeah so Thursday is suggesting procreative capacity is also needed actually that's not true um you can have couples who are so old that their past childbearing years they can still get married right you don't have to have procreative capacity you just have to be able to perform the sexual act yes so um would it be possible for a human to marry a rational non-alien a non-human with suitable biological apparatus yeah well maybe but it's not established it partly depends on the analysis that you're using on what is a human if you define human in the classic way of man is a rational animal then a rational alien is an animal and it's rational so it's going to count as a human even if it's very different from us biologically yeah so you could marry a Vulcan or a Klingon or whatever if it's a rational animal it's going to count as a human under the classic philosophic definition of what a human is on the other hand if you mean it needs to have a gen a a gen a genome that is sufficiently close to be able to breed with us so that it's of the same species if that's what you mean by human then no you wouldn't be able to marry them because you're lacking even the possibility of procreation um so it's going to if you take a species reproductive based definition of what a human is so it's going to depend on how you define human whether you define it in a classical way or if you define it in a more modern biological way fantastic all right

however as we discussed in episode 105 and again in episode 106 on St Thomas aquinus the oone of the examples that aquinus sites is magnets at the time nobody had any idea how magnets worked so magnetic fields were a hidden or ult operation of nature we didn't figure out how magnets really worked until the development of quantum mechanics in the 20th century but just because the knowledge was occult or hidden from man didn't make magnet Sinister or satanic it was just something that God hadn't let man learn yet however the way samples and Ross use the term ult is basically a synonym for demonic or satanic anyone who is doing anything they consider a cult is doing something demonic or satanic in their eyes if samples has studied the modern UFO movement does he or Ross display comparable knowledge of parasoy no from reading the book I got the very clear impression that they know much less about parasym all of parapsychology and psychic functioning as a cult and thus functionally demonic which is very different than the Catholic attitude as we've mentioned in our episodes on St Thomas aquinus in the occult great theologians and doctors of the church like St Augustine and St Thomas aquinus believed in what we would Now call psychic powers they both believed in what's now called precognition which St Thomas aquinus called natural prophecy to distinguish it from the supernatural prophecy that God gives aquinus also believed in a form of psychokinesis or mind over matter as a natural human ability and as we saw in episodes 246 and again in episode 247 the church has basically no problem with the psychic ability known as dowsing it even allows priests to serve as Dowsers in scientific parapsychological experiments but samples in Ross would dismiss all of this as demonic and or as a cult and thus functionally demonic well at least they had devoted significant study and thought to the question of UFOs and aliens though so let's talk about their

supports now Rene is your wife's name yes yes uh was she uh how how open was she to you looking into these different things in Catholicism she was fine I mean she had been she she had been baptized a Catholic but her mom um had joined a UFO religion oh and so Renee had been raised in this UFO religion what's sometimes called a saucer cult but I don't use the word cult because it adds heat rather than light yeah um so Renee had had this kind of new age UFO religion background but she dropped that shortly after she met me and and went there was a period where she was identifying as Catholic but then I wasn't going to marry a Catholic