The Latest Space Alien And UFO News

As someone who converted to Catholicism late in life, I'm only slowly coming to recognize that it's always a good idea to listen to the bishop, even if the bishop is someone you'd rather not listen to. Thus, in Washington recently,

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy has removed a priest from his exorcism ministry in the Archdiocese of Washington, citing concerns over the cleric’s recent social media statements “linking UFOs to demonic presence.”

In a brief statement issued June 3, the cardinal said that Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, New York, can no longer exercise his ministry as an exorcist of the archdiocese.

In addition, Cardinal McElroy said he had “ended all affiliation between the archdiocese and the Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal located in Washington, D.C.”

The cardinal said that the connection Msgr. Rossetti drew between UFOs and demons, and the St. Michael Center’s “recent use of social media,” both “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”

Msgr Rossetti remains a priest in good standing. Accounts note that Cdl McElroy didn't give any explanation of how Rossetti's statements undermined Catholic teaching, but some reports indicate that Rossetti has said that UFOs don't necessarily carry space aliens, but they themselves are demons. According to People,

In a video published on Facebook on Friday, May 29, Rossetti said “there is a danger here” as he addressed UFO sightings and aliens, according to the Associated Press.

“As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide,” Rossetti said in the video. He later added, “They don't want us to know what they're doing because they're more effective when we don't realize it.”

Rossetti also said, “It's my personal belief that probably many if not most of these UFO sightings are in fact demons.”

That video has since been taken down. Can a UFO be a demon, according to Catholic teaching? CCC 392 says that demons are fallen angels:

This "fall" consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign.

Catholic teaching is that, as Catholic Answers puts it, both angels and demons are spiritual beings:

When I was very new as a street-corner preacher for the Catholic Evidence Guild, a questioner asked me what I meant by spirit. I answered, “A spirit has no shape, has no size, has no color, has no weight, does not occupy space.” He said, “That’s the best definition of nothing I ever heard,” which was very reasonable of him. I had given him a list of things spirit is not, without a hint of what it is.

Spirits are normally invisible, but both demons and angels can be temporarily visible. Nevertheless, the problem with UFOs is that they're primarily understood as artifacts made by beings who can manipulate the physical world, which spirits can do only indirectly. It's a couple of steps too far, as I understand this, to imagine a UFO as a spirit trying to deceive people by manifesting as an artifact. It would also be contradictory, in the sense that if it were a spirit, its ability to manifest physically would be only temporary, which would make the question of whether UFOs are real moot -- they aren't, if they're just temporary manifestations.

But so far, I haven't seen any serious, systematic attempt to show that Cdl McElroy is mistaken in his view that Msgr Rossetti's statements undermine Catholic teaching. If someone does this, I'll be very attentive. On the other hand, I see references to an estalished view among some ufologists, many of whom are Catholic like Vice President Vance, that UFOs are demons. In my opinion, this view isn't consistent with Catholic teaching.

Another recent news item is the imminent release of the new Spielberg blockbuster Disclosure Day.

Half a century after Steven Spielberg challenged audiences to think about what lies beyond the starry canopy that defines our universe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the director is again challenging accepted precepts of faith and singular belief in a supreme being.

. . . “‘Disclosure Day’ is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what’s been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once?” Spielberg said, adding it is as much a “chase” movie as it is a reflection on our very being.

“And the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening, that is basically the core of this chase movie.”

. . . Spielberg – who directed and co-produced the movie – feels Christians will find themselves asking of their faith and their beliefs as the movie takes the absolute position of the Church.

. . . As Breitbart News previously noted, the movie stars Josh O’Connor as a cybersecurity whistle-blower with government evidence, long suppressed, chronicling a history of alien encounters.

I see two problems here. One is that Spielberg seems to think the idea of space aliens is troubling only to Christians, but of course, the Christian view of a world created by God in six days is based entirely on the account in the Hebrew Bible. Jews woukld be asking just as many questions about their faith as Christians.

But now we get to two sub-issues that are raised by Fermi's paradox, which is the apparent contradiction between the high statistical probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of verifiable evidence for it. The first is the UFOs, or whatever we want to call the vehicles that bring the aliens to Earth from the planet Zohran.

Fermi's paradox inevitably implies that these aliens are "intelligent", which means that they have reason equivalent to, or surpassing, humans and can build space ships with warp drives and so forth. But where does reason come from? Let's return to the Catholic Answers link above:

Mind, we say, splits the atom and calculates the light years. It is true that in both these operations it uses the body. But observe that there is no question which is the user and which is the used. The mind uses the body, not asking the body’s consent. The mind is the principal, the body the instrument. . . . We have evidence in our own experience of mind affecting matter directly. We will to raise our arm, for example, and we raise it.

. . . Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space-and neither has spirit, whose offspring they are. But no one can call spirit nothing, for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world-apart from love, which spirit also produces.

Reason, or intellect, is spirit, and it comes from God. God created humans with a unique ability to reason and manipulate the physical world. On one hand, we can conceive of creatures that have spirit and reason through which they can manipulate creation, but their ability to do so is going to have to be very similar to the way humans do it, and this is something we don't understand at all. Back at the link,

Occasionally a materialist will argue that there are changes in the brain when we think, grooves or electrical discharges or whatnot. But these only accompany the thought; they are not the thought. When we think of justice, for instance, we are not thinking of the grooves in the brain; most of us are not even aware of them. Justice has a meaning, and it does not mean grooves. When I say that mercy is kinder than justice, I am not comparing mercy’s grooves with the stricter grooves of justice.

The second sub-problem under Fermi's paradox is that we have no idea how intellect inserts itself into the material evolutinary process. We have no better explanation for what specifically takes place when I decide to raise my arm than what specifically took place when the physicist Ernest Rutherford figured out how to split an atom and built a machine to do it. Fermi's paradox is only the simplest expression of a bigger problem which is outside the evolutionary model: on one hand, we've never seen an actual, confirmed flying saucer type device with a space alien in it, but we have no understanding at all of the spiritual process by which a being on another planet could undertake such a thing.

In other words, we can construct a Darwinian model for cells evolving into complex beings in the right sort of pond slime, but we can't even build any model at all for how intellect somehow inserts itself into whatever complex being develops, that's an entirely different question, of which Fermi's paradox is just a simple illustration.

And this brings us to Spielberg and Disclosure Day. In it, a hero-whistleblower is somehow able to assimilate all the known evidence of extraterrestrials and put it out before the public in a new, completely irrefutable form, or at least that's what the teasers say. But we're back to Fermi's paradox. Why hasn't this already been made manifest? Can someone seriously claim the Vatican or the National Council of Churches could possibly cover this up?

In fact, the Trump administration has had a project to release just that aggregation of UFO data that's apparently what the hero-whistleblower in Disclosure Day aims to disclose -- but with each new tranche, the complaint continues that all we see are unconvincing fuzzy blurs -- you'd think even an enterprising demon could do better. This is one factor that knocks down the UFOs-are-demons theory in my mind.

But this also turns up another problem with the Disclosure Day model of hidden evidence: as i've pointed out here before, since the advent of systematic empirical observation in tbe early modern period, nobody, not Copernicus, not Newton, not Galileo, not any of their thousands of genius suceessors, has found any evidence of flying saucer-type artifacts, much less sentient space aliens. This is why the ancient astronauts theory has had currency; if we haven't been able to find it since the invention of the printing press, we're forced to try to discern it in ancient hieroglyphics.

Fermi had a poweful point. Even Spielberg will have trouble disproving it.