The sun had begun to think about setting when Michael Krick walked into New Lutheran Creation Church on July 21.
He took a seat by his fellow congregants. Four plastic tables huddled around a miniature wooden cross encircled by a wreath. Above hung a framed portrait of The Last Supper; below sat a basket of popcorn, cookies, and cranberry mix. Adjacent to both was the church's library, stocked with canonical literature. Mr. Krick and several others laid their bibles before them, ready to study.
The monthly meeting of the Lima Area UFO Research Associates had begun. The bibles were UFO photo albums, the library an archive of 20th century ufological texts. As for the church setting — one of LAURA's founding members, Tom Bowman, had been a congregant before passing in 2020.
“It's quite a diverse group,” said Mr. Krick, the club's current president. “Some of us are interested in religion, others have no interest, and some go when they think they need it.”
That a place of worship should double as a site of ufological speculation captures the ambiguous intermingling of religious belief and the UFO phenomenon, further complicated by the latter’s associated alien mythologies. As the Pentagon’s formal acknowledgement of flying saucers fans the flames of an ongoing UFO revival, the question of what, exactly, religion thinks of aliens may soon take center stage.
MESSY RELIGIOSITY
"It's reasonable to suggest that we're not alone."
So declares Rudi Lindner, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Michigan. Astrobiologists have already discovered hundreds of planets orbiting stars, and are set to discover thousands more. Considering the size of the universe, why shouldn't there be life somewhere?
A Pew Research Survey in June found that 65 percent of Americans agree. Yet it also identified a rough correlation between religious belief and extraterrestrial disbelief. While about 85 percent of atheists believe in ET, only 51 percent of Protestants and 67 percent of Catholics concur, with white evangelicals most skeptical at 40 percent.
The findings seem to confirm a belief popular among astrobiologists: First contact with an alien civilization will cause Earth’s religions to “confront a crisis of belief and perhaps even collapse,” as put by Ted Peters, a professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in California. But his 2011 survey of seven major faith communities found the opposite: Most respondents said extraterrestrial life would not undermine their convictions.
“Religion is complicated, religion is messy," said Christopher Bader, who studied UFOs and religion while completing his master's degree in sociology at Bowling Green State University. "Whenever I hear somebody say, here is the one thing that's going to happen to religion, I immediately say, well, you're wrong."
Extraterrestrial life would ostensibly challenge terrestrial religion by undermining humanity’s privileged relationship with the divine and suggesting alternative ways of being. But while encountering aliens would be unprecedented, encountering intelligent beings that don’t share our religious worldview is not. It’s akin to the shock that Christian Europeans received when they first arrived in the Americas.
Jeanine Diller, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at the University of Toledo, outlined three historical responses to the problem of the religious other: exclusivism, pluralism, and inclusivism.
The exclusivist says only one religion leads to truth — there is but one way to summit the mountain. The pluralist suggests more than one valid path to the peak. The inclusivist insists on one way up, but accepts that other ways can help. In some cases, what looks like another way is actually part of the one true path.
“These three forms could very easily be parlayed into looking at extraterrestrial forms of religiosity,” said Ms. Diller.
Eastern faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism tend to fall into the pluralist camp. Jay Risen Weik, a Zen Buddhist priest in Toledo, said that much like Isaac Newton discovered gravity, the Buddha discovered the dharma: the universal root of a vast reality containing "more universes than there are grains of sand in the earth,” and the key to alleviating suffering. This path to enlightenment is non-theistic — about practice, not belief.
"You don't believe in working out,” Reverend Weik said. “You just work out.” The treadmill works irrespective of your atheism or Catholicism. The paths to awakening are many and open to all — including Martians, who would “encounter dharma the same way they encounter physics."
‘GOD’S BUSINESS’
By not claiming divine revelation, Buddhism avoids the anthropocentrism of the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As noted by science fiction writer Samuel Ruhmkorff, who completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan, finding aliens would inflate the old tension between the particularity of Abrahamic revelation and the universality of its message to cosmic proportions: “Among all creatures of the universe, why did this happen to humans on Earth?”
“The theologians will be busy,” said Mr. Ruhmkorff.
Well, maybe not too busy. For Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe, who has given lectures at Chabad House of Toledo, the matter is quite simple: God can create life anywhere. That life, if intelligent, doesn't need to be Jewish, but it does need to decide between the objective realities of good and evil. Might the universally binding code of morality revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai be revealed to aliens in Alpha Centauri? Possibly. How? “That's God's business.”
For Muslims, meanwhile, there is “more than enough” to suggest aliens are possible, said Ahmad Deeb, imam of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo.
The Quran mentions inter-dimensional beings of fire older than humanity, known as Djinn. Due to their strange nature, many are considered Muslim despite not practicing Islam exactly as Prophet Muhammad taught it. The same might hold true for non-human intelligences elsewhere.
Do those other intelligences exist? Maybe. The Quran's first chapter refers to God as the "Lord of the Worlds." Verse 70 of Chapter 17 specifies that God favored humanity over some of his creation — not all.
“Allah elevating the children of Adam does not in any way exclude other intelligent life,” said Imam Deeb. “Normative theology has always had doors open for these fascinating discussions.”
Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and distinguished Quranic commentator Abdullah ibn Abbas once saw, in a verse referencing “seven heavens and of the earth, the like of them,” evidence of a multiverse: “Seven earths: In every earth is a Prophet like your Prophet, an Adam like your Adam, a Noah like your Noah, an Abraham like your Abraham and a Jesus like your Jesus.”
THE LIKE OF THEM
Thomas Wertman, the Ohio state director of the Mutual UFO Network, still recalls when a rotary club in an eastern Ohio town invited him to give a talk at the local church. They had him speak from the pulpit.
“To be very honest,” said Mr. Wertman with a laugh, “I felt like the Antichrist.”
Some Christians would probably agree — and non-Christians too. Thomas Paine, penning a scathing polemic in his 1793 book The Age of Reason, articulated the standard extraterrestrial challenge to Christianity: Why would the God of “millions of worlds” come to “die in our world”? And must each world be redeemed through his sacrifice? This theological quandary, Paine charged, renders Christianity “little and ridiculous.”
Father James Bacik, a distinguished theologian and former pastor of Corpus Christi University Parish in Toledo, doesn't find Paine's challenge very challenging. Is Christ and his sacrifice universal or particular to humanity? Neither: “Christianity is a universal faith for people on Earth,” and it's “at least conceivable in theological terms that there could be savior figures, God incarnate, in other civilizations in ways that are unique to that world."
From Giordano Bruno in 1588 to Paul Tillich to Father Bacik's own mentor, Karl Rahner, Christian theologians have addressed Paine’s question with speculations that run the gamut from sophisticated exclusivism to a soft inclusivism reminiscent of Judaism and Islam. Perhaps extraterrestrials know Christ by a different name, or don’t because as sinless creatures they never needed to be saved.
“Theology adjusted, and it is still adjusting,” said Peter Feldmeier, chair of Catholic studies at the University of Toledo. “The idea that this would be fatal to traditional Western religions suggests that religion is not in dialogue with modern scientific thought. Typically it is.”
SPACE BROTHERS
Dan Winters, a former police officer, had been investigating government cover-ups and secret societies when he finally discovers the shocking truth: UFOs are a Satanic deception, their “alien” pilots fallen angels and demons setting the stage for the Antichrist.
The plot of Perilous Times Shall Come, a 2016 novel by Springfield, Ohio native and creation evangelist Arv Edgeworth, expounds a hypothesis popular in some conservative evangelical circles. Its ufological interpretation of Christian eschatology is just one example of how UFOs, and the alien myths tied to them, have rewritten traditional religiosity in increasingly novel ways.
Raelians worship aliens as god-like saviors; Mormons and Scientologists embrace extraterrestrials in their cosmologies. Then there are the individuals beyond categorization.
Brian Graupner, of Lima, doesn’t know how many aliens have contacted him, but does know they're God's creation and are concerned for our spiritual wellbeing. How can Mr. Graupner be so sure they mean well, when he’s awoken with triangular markings on his body and blood in his bedsheets? The light from their craft, which bathes him in “a rush of love like you’ve never felt before.”
Mr. Graupner’s experience is not new. In a 1995 article, Mr. Bader noted a tradition of UFO “contactees,” stretching back to George Adamski meeting Venusian prophets in the 1950s, that tell of “happy, spiritual encounters” with benevolent “space brothers.”
There is no Pope of the paranormal. Anyone can claim an experience. The result, Mr. Bader said, is “the Wild West.” Every conceivable path leads to the mountaintop. This decentralized pluralism has cross-pollinated with religious belief to produce highly idiosyncratic spiritual experiences.
The first time she saw a UFO in 1995, “sucking up” the water of a Lima reservoir, Jan Maccabee experienced euphoria so intense “it felt like I’d died and gone to heaven.” She felt it again decades later, when a fairy — only visible through her camera lens — descended from a triangular craft onto her leg.
Ms. Maccabee volunteers no explanation for these encounters, which fuse medieval folklore, modern technology, and religious ecstasy. They draw from UFO and Christian mythologies, yet belong to neither. That hasn’t stopped Ms. Maccabee from finding validation in the Bible.
“Whose to say,” she asked, referencing John 14:2, “that the house of many mansions isn’t many universes?”
‘VISITORS HERE’
“So what do you think they are?” asked Bob Prater, LAURA’s vice president. The assembled members had just finished watching UFOs: The Pentagon Proof, a TMZ documentary. “Think they're from another solar system, or...?
'“Another dimension,” said Mr. Krick.
“You think another dimension?”
Mr. Krick shrugged. “Well, I've seen them appear and disappear out of thin air. I think they could be right beside you and you wouldn't know."
“I believe there is another dimension,” said Rod McGuire. “There is. Tommy [Bowman] entered another dimension” — heaven. “He's sitting there right now, watching.”
Several members murmured their agreement. Mr. Krick nodded. “We're all just visitors here.”
Spaces like LAURA, where ufological concepts and religious convictions comfortably fraternize, are likely to keep proliferating. But their mainstream heyday is still a ways off.
“Discussion about aliens simply never comes up in church, in my experience,” said Mr. Feldmeier, and he expects serious theological discussion about extraterrestrials will wait “until scientists demonstrate their reality.”
But why wait? For Father Bacik, contemplating extraterrestrial life helps us both appreciate our “great dignity and worth” and “develop a proper humility — that there are other intelligent creatures, and that we could learn from them.”
Ultimately, “it sets up a dialogue that is both affirming and challenging,” said Father Bacik. “Even thinking about extraterrestrial life reminds us that God is greater than anything we can possibly think of. God is unimaginably vast, and wonderful, and beautiful.”
First Published August 29, 2021, 11:00 a.m.
