Excitement is building for Steven Spielberg’s hotly anticipated new film, Disclosure Day, a return to the filmmaker’s lifelong fascination with all things extraterrestrial. All teasers so far have been as mysterious as possible by design, leaving audiences with more questions than answers about the story. At a panel discussion with some of the stars, an interviewer asked the director about Spielberg’s personal connection with the source material. How would the world react to a real Disclosure Day? How would Spielberg react? Is it something he just yearns for, or is he a true believer? “I was yearning for it when I made Close Encounters,” Spielberg replies, “but when I made Disclosure Day, I believed it.”
Spielberg goes on to foretell ominously that the consequences of “a real full disclosure” would include “social dislocation,” even “trauma,” including “theological questions.” He hints that this will be among the tensions explored in the film.
The Devil’s Work?
He’s far from the first to propose that UFOlogy and traditional theology might be at odds. In the documentary Age of Disclosure, whistleblower Luis Elizondo talks about the potential for “ontological shock” on levels “theological” and “philosophical.” Meanwhile, there is little patience with the alternative hypothesis that if the evidence is real, it points to demons rather than aliens. According to Elizondo and retired intelligence agent Jay Stratton, their investigations have been blocked by “religious fundamentalist extremists” in the Department of Defense, who have ordered them to stop meddling with the devil’s work. The dislike, it seems, is mutual.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Spielberg-produced Encounters docuseries introduces us to Eddy Weiss, a complicated character with his own idiosyncratic way of merging theology and UFOlogy. Gathered around the table for a Bible reading with his homeschooled children, he teaches them to read alien encounters back into cryptic prophetic texts like Ezekiel (a “wheel within a wheel,” you say?). He presents this as an enlightened alternative to the ignorant fears of the broader Christian populace, who do “not want to believe that any of this is real because if it does [sic], it changes all of their reality.” “Is the Bible just for us,” he asks rhetorically, or could it possibly be for aliens too? He believes the question is too mind-boggling for most people to handle.
Christian writers like Michael Heiser have attempted to put a more sophisticated spin on Weiss’s kind of speculation, exploring how UFOlogy might intersect with demonology. Some readers will find this enterprise more compelling than others. I myself favor a third way somewhere in between dubiously fantastical syncretism and the DoD officials’ allegedly obstructive “fundamentalism.”
Call It the Way of Lewis
C. S. Lewis was always game for a chat about God and aliens, as recalled by his protégé Sheldon Vanauken. The question of how to reconcile the possibility of extraterrestrial life with Christian theology was a hangup for Vanauken in his early explorations of the faith. Lewis helped him to think outside the box. We can see the sorts of ideas Lewis was playing with in his fictional Space Trilogy, or the Ransom Trilogy, as fans prefer to name it for the main character. Dr. Ransom is kidnapped into space by a mad scientist and has adventures on other planets containing intelligent life. In the middle book, Perelandra, he finds himself at the center of a parallel-planet Genesis narrative in which he must thwart the Satanic seduction of Venus’s Eve figure.
None of this is presented as if it’s in any tension with Earth’s Genesis narrative or salvation story. In the trilogy’s storyworld, God simply deals with sentient non-humans on their own plane of existence, writing their own parallel story.
Another character in the Encounters series, retired Texas constable Lee Roy Gaitan, lacks Lewis’s sophistication. But he gestures at this possibility when he says simply that if aliens are real, then God made them too. Presumably He must have something or other figured out for them.
A Substitute Religion
But die-hard UFOlogists might not welcome a peaceful Lewisian resolution, so invested are they in the idea of disclosure as a “disruption” of traditional theistic religion. Spielberg has teased a scene in the new film where a character tells us she was “raised to believe in a Supreme Being” and is now awed at the prospect of seeing “actual supreme beings.” “The world can’t handle both,” she asserts.
This makes sense if one understands UFO enthusiasm as a form of substitute religion. As researcher and hypnotist Budd Hopkins once admitted in so many words, “I often think of myself as a very religious person. Maybe I’m inventing my own.” Indeed, perhaps it is easier to invent one’s own religion than to submit to an ancient one — or to the Supreme Being behind it.
The mere prospect of aliens is in no danger of shattering our religious foundations, as Lewis’s thought experiment demonstrates. The ever-repeated mantra “We are not alone,” sold as an explosive revelation, is in fact the oldest of old news. Of course we’re not alone. We never were.