Prominent UFO promoters in the Catholic Church
Is this playing into the Great Deception (2 Thes 2:11)
Adapted from Daniel O'Connor's book "Only Man Bears his Image" with permission
Diabolical Deception in the Church “We have matured ‘spiritually’ so much during the last forty years that it would be beneath our adult dignity to waste a moment on original sin, let alone on the devil. This in part is due to the fact that neither sin nor the devil figure prominently in the documents of Vatican II...this pleases the devil more than anything else, for the devil’s chief stratagem is not to show himself...”—Fr. Stanley Jaki
We have seen how deeply diabolical deceptions based on extraterrestrial belief have penetrated into the world. Has the Church, at least, been spared such infiltration? The answer, unfortunately, is a resolute no.
Now, naturally, the Church has not fallen anywhere near as low as the world has. In accordance with Christ’s promise to Peter that the “gates of hell shall not prevail against” the Church (Matthew 16:18), ET-belief never has been—and never will be—taught in the official Magisterium. But this assurance is the only one we can ultimately count on in limiting the reach of diabolical alien doctrines.
Individual men in the Vatican, regardless of the color of the hat they wear, are not protected by any Divine guarantee that they will evade being seduced by the Devil’s deceptions. In the following sections, we will consider—and refute—various ET-related deceptions that have raged within Catholicism.
St. Paul VI’s Real “Smoke of Satan”—”Pagan Prophets” of “Science”
“Through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God...We trust the first pagan prophet we see who speaks to us in some newspaper, and we run behind him and ask him if he has the formula for true life... [doubt has] entered through the windows that should have been open to the light: science.” —Pope St. Paul VI. June 29, 1972
Especially during the 20th century (although the 19th saw its fair share of this), many Catholic clerics and other prominent voices became infatuated with the prospect not of saving souls, but of being taken seriously by the worldly and being invited into the prevailing movements of the world.
Prudence was thrown to the wind, and a corresponding attitude was adopted insisting the world could simply be accommodated—that almost any compromise was acceptable or even obligatory—”so long as we are sure to hold on to certain explicitly defined dogmas.” (Though the modernists soon emptied even those of any meaning.)
With the growth of Ufology from 1947 onward came the emergence of Catholic leaders all too eager to jump on that bandwagon. If only such leaders had listened to Cardinal Ratzinger, who warned:
He is totally ignorant of the nature of the Church and of the nature of the world who believes that these two can meet without conflict or that they may be somehow mixed.
Pope St. Paul VI noticed what was happening in the Church. His famous observation, that the “smoke of Satan has entered the Church,” is often quoted today. Sadly, the rest of the quote (shown above), where he explained precisely how this happened, is often ignored. The way the proverbial “smoke” entered was through “pagan prophets” who propose to have the “formula for true life,” and whom those in the Church, diabolically deceived, are so foolish as to “trust” with such credulousness that they “run to” them, and that this deception takes place through what is presented as “science.”
A more precise description of how the ET and UFO Deception infiltrated the Church cannot be constructed. In the years leading up to the Pope’s declaration about Satan’s infiltration of the Church, the man who was—tragically (in light of his famous dissent on many other Church teachings)—considered the leading Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, was arguing for the compatibility of Christian Faith with Extraterrestrials, even signaling his openness to the particularly diabolical doctrine of multiple incarnations of God; robbing Jesus Christ of His singularity and supremacy.
In the decades that would follow, this smoke would billow through the Church more thickly still. The Vatican would begin sponsoring conferences dedicated to exploring questions related to extraterrestrial life.
In 2008, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, Jesuit Fr. Jose Funes, made international headlines by advocating for aliens—presenting as his justification the usual fallacies we have already refuted (particularly by insisting that we “cannot limit God,” as if believing what God has revealed somehow constitutes “limiting” Him).
Secular outlets often reported on this with the headline, “Vatican Says it’s Okay to Believe in Aliens,” and many of the faithful were thereby beguiled into supposing that Catholicism had formally endorsed alien belief. (In fact, Fr. Funes’ position in the Vatican does not lend one ounce of Magisterial weight to his opinions.) What is certain is that—in the years leading up to Paul VI’s “Smoke of Satan” declaration—claims of compatibility between belief in ETs and Catholicism suddenly erupted in the Vatican.
One chronicler of ET debates noted:
...very little public, Roman Catholic intellectual debate occurred regarding the compatibility, or lack thereof, of extraterrestrial life and the Roman Catholic faith for most of the first half of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s that situation changed...[255]
Among the most prominent of the “pagan prophets” celebrated in secular news media, to whom the masses (and certainly too many in the Church) were running for existential answers, was a man named Frank Drake (as discussed earlier, he was “the father of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” or SETI). As the great Benedictine priest, theologian, and scientist, Fr. Stanley Jaki, noted:
Shortly after Frank Drake started his project in the 1960s various prominent people were interviewed as to what we can expect after we have detected radio signals from outer space. Some thought that this will mean the coming of Paradise on earth. What God failed to achieve, the science brought by extraterrestrials would make possible as they would bring with themselves the wisdom of their own evolution.[256]
Here, we see the real deception of the smoke of Satan entering the Church: God’s Providence replaced with scientific hope in extraterrestrials. Many Catholics who today comment on these remarks from Paul VI focus almost exclusively on Liturgical matters (and indeed, there is much valid concern there).
The Devil, however, was executing a much darker, much deeper, much more nefarious, and much more apocalyptic plan, which the Pope prophetically described as smoke billowing into the Church.
“Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers... [it] will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.” —Catechism of the Catholic Church, §675
Here, the prophetic admonition of Bishop Marian Eleganti comes to mind, when he warned, in 2023:
...the faith Tradition of the Church is always superior to any era ... new human science theories, which are always valid until they are falsified, do not force the Church in this respect to a revision of revealed truths of the faith. A departure from them is doomed to failure, and coming generations will state as much ... What shocks and amazes me is the perfidy, cunning, and intelligence of how the new postulates are implemented and linguistically disguised. I have always considered theologians to be the greatest and most gifted of the sophists. The phenomenon always makes me think of the Antichrist, who in Soloviev appears very friendly and inclusive; does not hurt anyone’s feelings; lets everyone have his opinion; does not condemn anyone; fraternizes everyone; only guts the faith from the claim of absoluteness and exclusiveness of Jesus Christ and therefore is radically inclusive, a friend of diversity and equality, a fraternization of all. ...Christ, however, [the modern Church] no longer proclaims as the only valid and definitive revelation of God, as the door past which no one comes to the Father.[257] ***
Here we list influencial Catholics who promote UFO's, extraterestrials and other deceptions that we believe is preparing for the rise of the antichrist. We also list a few others outside the Church, who are influencing Catholics.
A common thread that we find through many of these individuals is a past history of New Age or occult involvement before "becoming Catholic", another thread we find through these individuals is either advocacy of moral issues that are contrary to Church doctrine, or confusing contradictory positions which lead Catholics into a noman's land of ambiguity. Here are some of their charateristics.
- Fr. Teilhard Pierre de Chardin Grandfather of the entire mess
- Brother Guy Consolmagno: Vatican astronomer
- Fr. Corrado Balducci: High ranking priest featured in UFO documentaries
- Fr. Richard Rhor: One of the most influencial Catholic writers ever
- Jimmy Akin on Pints with Aquinas: Apologist with Catholic Answers
- Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World
- Dr. Paul Thigpen
- Fr. James Martin: Student of Richard Rohr, LGBT advocate
- Hans Urs von Balthasar: Architect of a moverment towards Universalism
- Elizabeth Kubler Ross: Psychologist promoting universalism.
- Joel Parkyn is a theology professor at a Catholic seminary who also published a 2021 book arguing for belief in aliens, therein praising Fr. Teilhard’s teachings for lacking “rigidity” and moving beyond a “pre-scientific” outlook, before expounding upon the latter’s insistence upon multiple incarnations in support of ETs
- Fr. Paul Mueller
- Dr. David Wilkinson, Theologian and ET belief promoter,, also draws from de Chardin in his 2013 book, Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
- Dr. Robert John Russell—a prominent Christian theologian and physicist who promotes belief in extraterrestrials
Non-Catholic ufo influencers
- Joe Dispenza and self actualization
- Is Gene Decode a safe teacher?
- Lutheran theologian Ted Peters, who wrote a popular 2018 book arguing for extraterrestrials, also invoked Fr. Teilhard. The director of the Vatican Observatory,
- The astrophysicist, Professor David Weintraub
More to come ... this list and links to profiles of each promoter is a work in progress.