UFOs and Aliens in the Bible
The case against Extraterrestrials in the Bible

Adapted from Daniel O'Connor's book "Only Man Bears his Image" with permission

There are two ways to demonstrate that the Bible provides no room for aliens:

1. The evidence of the Biblical text and the Church Fathers' interpretations of it
2. The nuttiness of ET promoters' attempts to shoehorn aliens into a biblical narrative

We'll look a both of these in this article.

The Bible: A marriage between God and his Church

The Bible is a love story about marriage. It opens with Adam's marriage to Eve (Gen 3:6) and closes with the marriage between Jesus Christ (the New Adam) and the Church "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband". (Rev 21:1-2) In the middle, we have the Song of Solomon's allegory of the intimacy between God and his Church. Inseparably woven throughout the fabric of Scripture is this monogomous marriage.

If God had many other brides in the cosmos, this entire narrative of the Bible would collapse. God would not call humans to monogamy (Mt. 19, Lk 16:18), and use a monogomous marriage analogy for his relationship to us, only to be found to be an adulterer or polygamist on the "day of disclosure".

“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’” (Revelation 22:17)

“Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the lamb.” (Revelation 21:9)

Bible compares idol worship to adultery (Ez.16, Hos. 1)

On the Church's side of this marriage, there is an "affair" looming. ET Promoters say that aliens will (or have already) come to save us from self distruction with their intelligence, technology and spirtual advancements. On the diabolical "day of disclosure", Christians will be invited to submit to these "teachers." It will be a "Great Deception":

a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false (2 Thes. 2:11)

The Israelites committed "adultery" with the golden calf because they felt "alone" when Moses ascended the mountain and didn't return quickly. Modern day therapists report that wives who commit adultery “feel alone” in their marriage. ET promoters seduce Christians with the pick up line “do you really think we are alone in the universe?”, as we wait for Jesus' return after his ascension.

Christians should not be seduced by this falacious use of "alone". We are not alone. We have 6 billion brothers and sisters, 9 million other forms of life and legions of angels and saints and of course Jesus Christ is even closer to us than than our own hearts.

Everything in the universe is created for man - Genesis

Genesis 1:14-15 makes it clear that the Heavenly bodies exist for us, for man.

... let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

“God created everything for man...” §358

ET Promoters recognize that the Bible puts man above all of physical creation. Instead of submitting to it, they say this is because of its anthropocentriphobic authors. This is the idea that humans are “bad” and the created world and animals are “good”. It is fostered by Hollywood, environmentalists and PETA celebrities and is another diabolical deception.

ET Promoters turn the Bible into a simple work of antiquity written by human authors who were prejudiced by their perspective and environment.

All Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, asserts that:

Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit. - Catechism 81

This is another clue that ET Promoters are trafficking false goods.

The End of Time: universe-wide centered on Man and Earth

“Man is woven into the fabric of the universe. Time is first of all a cosmic phenomenon. Man lives with the stars.”

Joseph Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence

It is Catholic Dogma that Christ will come at the end of time, not just the end of time for humanity, or for planet earth, but the end of time for the material universe.

After the end of the entire material universe there will exist only “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). The absolute end of time is both “soon” and is entirely centralized upon, flowing from, and concerned with, events transpiring with human beings here on earth.

29 ‘Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened,and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. (Mat 24:29)

The Bible, the Magisterium and Sacred Tradition are filled with declarations that the Second Coming of Christ to earth in the flesh corresponds to the unqualified end of time. It is heretical to deny it.

ET promoters depart from the Bible with "solutions"

The more ET promoters try to reconcile aliens with the Bible, the further their theology spins out of orbit.

ET promoters bounce from weak theory to weak theory, hoping that the shear number of explanations they propose, and the lack of commitment they have to any of them, will satisfy their non-rigorous pop-culture audience

ET promoter Catholic theologian Dr. Paul Thigpen

Dr. Thigpen argues that each of the supposedly inhabited planets will “likely” have its own Judgment Day, asserting it is merely the case that “Christ comes to Earth to draw our history to a close [emphasis in original].”[17] He concedes that the Faith teaches the whole material universe will come to a close, and that it “seems” this end will “follow Earth’s Judgment Day,” only to then imply there could actually be untold billions of years left after “our” Judgment Day, before the end of time.

ET promoter Anglican clergyman and theologian, Andrew Davison

Davidson dedicated an entire chapter in his 2023 book (published by Cambridge University), promoting ET belief. He says:

“ ... it becomes arbitrary to place human beings at the centre of the timing of the eschaton”[18]

[ET] belief “might call for serious revision, rather than simply expansion” of Christian teaching.

The perennial Church teaching can never be “seriously revised”. Doctrine may organically grow from its roots, but Davidson is trying to uproot the Bible. Davison proceeds to attempt to work out a solution that is:

“involving the return of all the [other] ways in which God has been Incarnate,” (page 354)

... a “string of local ends, worked out on many worlds,” (Page 355)

or (he quotes another author) simply dismissing Bible eschatology as "myth":

“Nowadays ... [we] no longer look for a supernatural cataclysmic end to the world ... it is the existential significance of the myth that remains—as the element of permanent value in it” (Page 356)

He also proposes that we can simply ignore what the Bible and the Church has always held about the meaning of time itself. (cf. Page 356-357) He then says:

... a post-human story for the Earth, and for the universe more widely. ... Indeed, there is reason to suppose that humanity would eventually pass away ... either in outright extinction, or by continuing evolution ... leading to a species other than human. (Page 359)

At this point the Bible and Christianity have been abandoned to accommodate Davidson's belief in aliens. This will foster the rise of the Antichrist, especially when combined with similarly delusional anticipations of “leaps in human evolution.”

ET Promoter Richard Rohr piles on

Richard Rohr says:

... ‘who is God?!’ Well, he certainly isn’t upset because someone bit into an apple...our theory of salvation is so tiny, so planet-bound... when we discover life on another planet, which might be tomorrow, our little story line is shot to hell...[13]

Top theologian Fr. Thomas Weinandy, provides clarity

... while it may be fun to fantasize ... about the existence of aliens, such daydreaming, if it is deemed to be real, can wreak havoc on the Gospel, particularly to the primacy of Jesus as the cosmic incarnate Lord of all.

—Fr. Thomas Weinandy

ET Promoters say dinosaurs and microbes aren't in the Bible, why should aliens be there?

Dinosaurs and microbes were not rational beings, so there truly is no impact on salvation to leave them out of the Bible. This is not the case with ET promoter's proposals about rational aliens.

Were the Nephilim aliens?

Some ET promoters point to the Nephilim as aliens depicted in the BIble.

There were giants [nephilim] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown (Genesis 6:4)

There are 3 credible theories of who the Nephilim are (source):

1. Offspring of Seth
2. Demons (fallen angels)
3. Humans who are possesed by demons

There is no credible evidence that they are aliens. This is New Age fiction, not biblical scholarship. Nephilim existed before (Gn 6:4) and after the flood (Num 13:32–33), so the theory that the great flood was to purge them is weak.

Bible leaves no room for life elsewhere, unlike foundational texts from other religions

Christianity is unique among the world religions. There are dozens of references to the "heavens" in the Old Testament. None of them speculate that they are populated with our brothers. Whenever the Bible speaks about men, it is in a purely singular way. The Wisdom of God is a preparation for the Holy Spirit. In the book of proverbs, Wisdom asserts:

... my delights are with the children of men. (Prov 8:31)

If rational beings other than men existed, Wisdom would include them in the objects of God’s delight, besides men.

Christianity is different from every other religion. All other religious foundational texts (Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, etc) either speak of aliens or have open ended verses that allow for them.

ET promoters know the Bible doesn't support alien life. They counter this with something like this:

...because there was no need for Him to [tell us about other species on other planets] — since we are not in contact with those extraterrestrial beings, there is no risk we would fail to render them their rights on account of being uninformed regarding their personhood.

This response fails in three ways:

1. The Holy Spirit had no problem putting Angels in the Bible

   Angels are extraterrestrials and they are more out of our reach than any alien civilization would be, yet God left out little green men aliens.
   
   

2. ET promoters claim intelligent incarnate extraterrestrials have visited earth

   This includes “orthodox Catholic” ET promoters who point to:
   • ”UFO” encounters in the headlines
   • Testimonies of “alien abductions” or other communications
   • History Channel “documentaries” of ancient alien participation in pyramids, etc,
   • Claims of Biblical or medieval miracles via extraterrestrials.

   Many of the same ET promoters argue that the absence of aliens from Scripture is unproblematic on account of the great distance between our civilization and theirs

   This is another clue that ET promoters are trafficking false goods. They adapt their message to their audience.

3. God hasn't asked us to pray for aliens or evangelize them

   “Thy Will be done on earth as It is in Heaven.” (Matthew 6:10).

   The most important prayer of Christendom is Our Father. It places Earth in the centre of the text physically and conceptually. If there were aliens, Jesus would not have “summarized the whole Gospel” (cf. Tertullian) with these words, but instead would have said “Thy Will be done throughout the cosmos (galaxies, dimensions, universe etc.) ...” ET promoters assert that aliens are "our brothers". Yet God has not instructed us to pray for beings who would deserve our supplications, in this greatest prayer of history, nor anywhere in the Bible.

   ET promoters want to change the Lord's Prayer. They push “private revelations” that announce imminent alien contact and propose “the galaxies" instead of "earth”. Another example of them rewriting and reframing the Bible. This time they want to change Jesus' words.

   "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." There cannot be a greater prayer than to desire that earthly things should deserve to equal heavenly ones. (St. John Cassian, Father of the Church)

   The explorers and missionaries in centuries understood Jesus words:

   “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation.” (Mark 16:15)

   If beings in need of receiving the Gospel existed outside of “the world” (earth), then Jesus would have instead instructed us to “reach into all the cosmos,” or to “proclaim to all the heavenly bodies,” or something similar.

Jesus is God

This is an inconvenient Truth for "Catholic" and "Protestant" ET promoters.

[Christ Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. .. in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell... (Colossians 1:3-4,15-19)

ET Promoters try to counter this they use 3 theories:

1. Christ’s Passion also redeemed alien races from their own sins
2. Alien races each had their own incarnations and, correspondingly, their own Passions of (their) Christs
3. Unfallen aliens in no need of Redemption

Let's look at these proposals one by one.

1. Christ’s Passion also redeemed alien races from their own sins?

    Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures (1 cor 3:15)

   Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world! (John 1:29)

   [Jesus Christ] is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:2)

   The weird position that Jesus, the human/God, saved aliens, raises questions:

   • Don't ET promoters tell us aliens predate us (and Jesus' Passion) by millions/billions of years?
   • How would aliens have heard about Jesus? If the answer is that they visited us, then their society advanced to a point of traversing the cosmos without Jesus, whereas we couldn't even build a tower of Babel without God.
   • Don't ET promoters tell us that aliens are superior to humans?
   • A core purpose of Christ's incarnation was solidarity with humans. How could aliens relate to him?
   • Would God require aliens to surrender to a human/God or go to hell?
   • Can you imagine God asking humans to surrender to an alien saviour - or go to hell?
   • Finally, a rhetorical question. Why would aliens surrender to Jesus, when the ET promoters of this theory can't even seem to surrender to Jesus?
     
     

2. Were there multiple incarnations of Christ for the many planets?

   “If anyone shall say that Christ ...passed through various classes, had different bodies and different names ... let him be anathema.” —Second Council of Constantinople, 533 A.D. The Anathemas Against Origen. §7

   The absolute primacy and uniqueness of Jesus Christ is among the most fundamental truths of the Christian Faith.

   For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

   The Pauline Prologue (Jn 1:1-14) presents the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union:

   And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father (John 1:14)

   The Hypostatic Union says Christ’s two natures are united in one and only one indivisible subsistence (one Person) which will persevere eternally. The Second General Council of Constantinople, in 381 A.D., dogmatically condemned the notion that the Hypostatic Union only endures until the end of the world.

   It is not a mere moral union, nor an “accidental” (non-essential) union, nor “commingling” (i.e., mixing).

   Some ET promoters try to interpret the Johannine Prologue to say that:

   Christ is the only Son of the Father, but this has nothing to do with the man, Jesus. It is merely an assertion that the Divine Nature of Christ is unique; that same Divine Nature of Christ could be Incarnate elsewhere, having nothing to do with the man we know as Jesus.

   It is the opposite of Hypostatic Union. This usually manifests in the theory of "Universal Christ Consciousness".

   Universal Christ Consciousness

   This concept was originally channelled by "ascended masters" to New Age founder Helen Blavasky in the 1890's. It is espoused by Richard Rohr who asserts that salvation is not about sin and redemption but rather of ignorance and enlightenment. Therefore, we don't need a sacrificial lamb to atone for our sin. We just need to learn that we are God by tapping into this Christ Consciousness, known in eastern religions as Brahman, Ommm , Chi, Prana, etc., which has flowed through the universe, since its inception.

   Proponents of this theory claim Jesus tapped into it like a guru, and that we can use his example but need not surrender to Jesus as God. They say aliens could do this also.

   

   This is what some ET promoters mean when they say "we'll have to revise our theology to accommodate for aliens." Obviously, this is not compatible with Christianity or the Bible and is condemned by the Vatican.

   Every rational creature has to go through the one and only Jesus

   For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

   Jesus is eternal (Jn: 1-2), everything was created through Him (Jn: 3), our Faith in Him is essential and transforming (Jn: 9-13),

   Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

   The Book of Hebrews is filled with repeated references to “the”—singular—Son, Who is Jesus Christ. In Matthe 11:27 Jesus says:

   All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

   Immediately after the Blessed Virgin Mary said, “behold the handmaid of the Lord,” (Luke 1:38) any reference to the Second Person of the Trinity is also a reference to the man, Jesus, since this very Divine Nature is forever hypostatically united to Jesus’ human nature. Hugh Owens says:

   Since Christ’s death on the cross happened only once (cf. Romans 6:10 & 1 Peter 3:18) on this earth, which was to redeem men from the fall of Adam (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22), Christ cannot have died anywhere else at any other time. It is therefore nonsensical to think that there are other men in need of redemption on an alien planet.[15] ... it is also settled in Scripture that Christ’s Passion occurred once and only once.

   Rotten Fruit of ignoring article words like "One", "Only" and "the" in Scripture

   In Quebec, a renegade sect claimed the Trinity was five persons. They added Mother Mary and their founder. Nowhere does the Deposit of Faith explicitly say, “God is not Five Divine Persons; let anyone who says this be anathema.” Instead, it teaches that God is Three Divine Persons, and we are trusted to use our intellects to recognize that “three” and “five” are mutually exclusive when said of the same thing.

   Likewise, ET promoters gloss over the plethora of Scriptural teaching ruling out aliens, when they claim the word “extraterrestrials” is not used. They hope we don't notice incessantly repeated qualifiers like “only,” or “one,” or very deliberate uses of the definite article “the,” (instead of “a”). The Book of Hebrews, and all of Scripture, is filled with repeated references to “the”—singular—Son, Who is Jesus Christ. ET promoters ignore categorical and clear declarations of absolute supremacy or uniqueness; they ignore the deliberately complete nature of the presentations of certain theological and philosophical dynamics discussed in Scripture.

3. Aliens never fell

   This is the belief that aliens are incarnate evolutionary rational beings with self will who never fell. In a Judeo-Christian model, this would mean they never broke any commandments in their multi million year existence. They never sinned. Hugh Owen says:

   We must make no mistake about it: aliens, too—had any single one of them in the entire universe committed so much as a single sin—would need Redemption, and this Redemption would not happen except through blood, since “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Hebrews 9:22)

   This problem has caused some "Christian" ET promoters to deny salvation history as its presented in the Bible. They turninstead to the concept of "Christ Consciousness" as a solution which we discuss above.

Bible verses used to justify aliens

Bible verses that ET promoters try to use to justify belief in aliens are below:

And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd. (John 10:16)

This has always been understood as the total of humanity who will believe. Church Father, Bishop Theodore of Mopseuestia (†428) wrote, “This sentence [John 10:16] alludes to those among the Gentiles who will believe, because many among the Gentiles as well as many among the Jews are destined to gather together into a single church.” There is examples of any theologian or biblical scholar interpreting this verse to refer to aliens. If it was referring to aliens, there would be references to aliens in the Bible elsewhere to provide context.

Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. (Revelation 12:3-4)

The Bible itself explains what this is in a later verse

The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it. (Revelation 12:7-9)

Pope St. John Paul II used this passage in his homily at the beatification of Sts. Francisco and Jacinta, saying:

“Another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon” (Rv 12:3). These words... make us think of the great struggle between good and evil, showing how, when man puts God aside, he cannot achieve happiness, but ends up destroying himself. ... The message of Fátima is a call to conversion, alerting humanity to have nothing to do with the “dragon” whose “tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth” (Rv 12:4).

Conclusion

There is no way to reconcile the Bible with belief in aliens. However, it is easy to reconcile the "unexplainable" abduction experiences and UFO sightings with demonic intervention and deception, which is discussed and prophesized in Scritpture. It is a much more reasonable explanation for the ET phenomenon. 2 Cor: 11:3 says:

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure[a] devotion to Christ.  4 For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough.

When we think about the incredibly rotten fruit that always results from belief in UFOs, we should take heed to Paul's words in Col. 2:8:

See to it that no one captivate you with an empty, seductive philosophy according to the tradition of men, according to the elemental powers of the world and not according to Christ.