The U.S. government “disclosure” of files related to UFOs commenced on Friday. I had predicted the day before that the results would be a letdown, and so far, that has proven to be the case. If you’re impressed by more of the familiar grainy, black-and-white images of dancing specks in the sky, then you will be impressed by what we saw Friday.
Adding to my own feeling of being underwhelmed is the fact that little that’s “known” about UFOs has changed much in 70+ years. A 1958 work by psychologist Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, describes behavior by the apparent crafts that echoes exactly what we hear in 2026.
A “Psyop” Against Faith?
A theme in social media chatter has been that the disclosure will challenge traditional religious beliefs, and that it may even be a “psyop” directed against Christian faith. It’s hard to imagine anyone’s faith being rocked by what seems to be a blurry closeup of a kidney bean.
Nevertheless, the idea is out there, and who knows? We haven’t seen the end of the disclosure yet. The Steven Spielberg UFO blockbuster Disclosure Day, due in theaters next month, promises to address religious questions — “an important part” of the film, as the self-described agnostic screenwriter said last week. If anything really interesting does come out from the government, no doubt some will seek to turn it into a narrative corrosive of religious tradition.
So it’s good that our colleague Casey Luskin addresses the subject head-on in an article today at Townhall. He allows that the new images and information could turn out to be a “highly redacted nothingburger.” (Does it come with fries?) Dr. Luskin asks,
But let’s try a thought experiment: If the government were to disclose information showing the existence of alien life, what would that change for us?
Overnight, on the subject of UFOs, cynical smirks on countless faces would be wiped clean. Many would look to spiritual and scientific authorities for answers.
But Here’s the Thing
People would indeed look to pastors and other clergy. Yet consider that if aliens have been visiting our planet, they would need to have been intelligently designed.
From, “Alien Life Would Not Refute Religion — but It Would Challenge Materialistic Evolution”:
Everything we know about life tells us that it doesn’t arise naturally, but needs an intelligent designer.
At the heart of life is an information-rich molecule, DNA, bearing a language-based code that specifies the construction of highly complex molecular machines that process information in the cell. These machines read information in DNA and process it much as a computer interprets and executes programming code.
For these reasons, even atheist biologist Richard Dawkins wrote that “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like,” while Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project, notes that “DNA is something like the hard drive on your computer,” containing “programming.”
DNA or No DNA?
It doesn’t matter whether hypothetical aliens have DNA just like ours. (The question of whether they would was asked by atheist Neil deGrasse Tyson last week in the New York Times.) The problem posed by life itself, given any reasonable presuppositions about it, would remain. Luskin:
Where do language-based code, computer-like information processing, or machines come from? In our experience, they have only one known cause: intelligence. The existence of ET life wouldn’t prove unguided, purposeless naturalistic evolution — it would provide another example to doubt it.
Aliens would owe their existence to a designer outside the physical universe, just as we do.
Alien life, if it exists, wouldn’t overturn anything about God. He made the universe, and could have made other intelligences than ours — be they “extraterrestrials,” spiritual beings, or anything else.
Following a credible government disclosure, figuring out where ETs fit into that spectrum would be our next task. Whatever the answer, the science of alien life would only increase our wonder at God’s creation.
That last sentence — along with biologist Michael Denton’s prediction that technological aliens, if they exist, would need to look like us and come from a planet like ours — is the key point to bear in mind in coming weeks. Read the rest at Townhall.