For decades, the possibility of alien life was easy to dismiss as science fiction or conspiracy bait. Serious public institutions rarely treated the subject as something worth discussing in daylight.
But the public conversation has changed over the last several years. In 2023, a former intelligence official, David Grusch, testified before Congress that he had been told of a government program involving the recovery and reverse engineering of “non-human” technology. Former Navy pilots also testified about unexplained aerial encounters, giving the subject a level of institutional seriousness it had rarely received in public. And over the last several months, President Donald Trump has shared that his administration to plans to release some “very interesting” UFO files.
“We’re going to be releasing a lot of things that we haven’t,” Trump said Wednesday at a White House event celebrating NASA astronauts. “I think some of it’s going to be very interesting to people.”
At the same time, the scientific search for life beyond Earth has grown more serious. NASA still says no life beyond Earth has been found, but astrobiology is no longer a fringe field, and researchers continue to study planets and moons that may have conditions suitable for life. Recent James Webb Space Telescope research on the exoplanet K2-18 b, for example, detected potential biosignatures that scientists called significant while also stressing they do not confirm alien life.
All of this has pushed old questions into a new place, and for Christians, those questions get theological fast. Where would nonhuman intelligence fit in creation? Would it change how we understand angels? Would it complicate the Gospel? And why have so many churches barely touched a subject Scripture may already give us categories to discuss?
Timothy Alberino, author of Birthright and a lecturer who studies the intersection of UFOs, theology and the supernatural, believes Christians have spent too long treating the subject as either a joke or a threat. His concern is not that believers will ask too many questions. It’s that they have not been given a serious enough framework for asking them.
“The word demon does not suffice to explain the phenomenon,” Alberino said. “It has no explanatory power when you’re dealing with nuts and bolts craft and you’re dealing with biological bodies.”
Alberino’s argument starts with a category problem. Christians already believe in intelligent beings who are not human and do not originate from Earth. Scripture calls them angels, heavenly beings, sons of God and hosts of heaven. Modern culture might use different language, but the underlying idea is not new to Christianity.
“The Bible unapologetically introduces us to a race of beings who are not human and not from planet Earth,” Alberino said.
For Alberino, the issue is not whether Christians should accept every UFO claim at face value. The issue is whether Christians have a theology sturdy enough to handle the possibility of nonhuman intelligence without defaulting to fear or oversimplification.
He argues many believers are unprepared, largely because later Christian tradition trained them to imagine heaven and heavenly beings as purely disembodied and immaterial.
“The idea that angels and angelic beings and heavenly beings in general, and heaven, is a strictly disembodied spiritual place — that was not the idea of the early church,” Alberino said.
In Scripture, encounters with heavenly beings are often physical. Abraham prepares food for his visitors. Lot hosts them in his home. Elijah is taken up in what the text describes as a chariot of fire. Alberino believes those passages should not be flattened into metaphor simply because modern readers are uncomfortable with their implications.
“I think sometimes we as Christians think we are obligated to read the Bible like Iron Age people,” Alberino said. “We’re not. There’s no such obligation.”
His point is not to turn the Bible into a UFO manual. His point is that the biblical world is already more complex, more physical and more populated than many Christians assume. Scripture presents a universe filled with created beings, some loyal to God, some opposed to him and all ultimately under the authority of Christ.
From there, Alberino moves to the central theological claim: extraterrestrial life would not dethrone humanity because humanity was never meant to sit at the center of the story.
“The biblical worldview is the Christocentric paradigm,” Alberino said. “Christ, the Son of God, is at the center of the universe. The universe belongs to him.”
A Christ-centered framework changes the stakes. The existence of other beings would not shrink humanity’s value or rewrite the Gospel. It would simply expand the scope of creation.
“Our place in the universe is not affected whatsoever by the disclosure of extraterrestrial beings,” Alberino said. “As I said, the Bible already discloses extraterrestrial beings.”
Christ’s mission, in that framework, remains specific.
“He became a man to redeem mankind,” Alberino said. “He didn’t become something else to redeem something else. He became one of us.”
Those convictions anchor his broader point: new information about the universe does not require Christians to reinvent their faith. It may require them to deepen it.
Right now, Alberino believes the Church is lagging behind the conversation. Culture is asking bigger questions about life, consciousness and humanity’s place in the universe. Many Christians are still answering with dismissiveness or fear.
“Right now we’re doing… a very poor job of representing a well-constructed theory, a biblical theological position that accommodates the realities of the phenomenon,” Alberino said.
A more thoughtful approach, he argues, does not mean abandoning discernment. Not every claim deserves credibility. Not every story is true. Alberino himself believes deception will play a role in how these conversations unfold.
“There’s a deception afoot,” he said.
Even so, deception is not a new category for Christians. The New Testament already accounts for false teachers, misleading signs and competing claims about truth. The presence of other beings, if confirmed, would not introduce a new kind of problem. It would expand an existing one.
“I don’t understand what the controversy is,” Alberino said.
For Christians trying to process the conversation, his advice is less complicated than the topic itself.
“I would hope that Christians would seek to gain a more mature understanding of the UFO topic, not dismiss it, not laugh at it, not be afraid of it,” he said.
Fear has always shaped the alien conversation, both inside and outside the Church. The unknown tends to trigger worst-case scenarios. Science fiction has trained people to expect invasion. Conspiracy culture has trained them to expect cover-ups. Christian culture has sometimes trained them to expect spiritual danger behind every unfamiliar idea.
Scripture offers a different reflex. Encounters with nonhuman beings in the Bible rarely begin with explanation. They begin with reassurance.
Fear not.
Alberino believes that still applies.
Christians do not need to panic if the universe turns out to be more populated than expected. The Gospel does not hinge on human exclusivity. The mission does not shift. Christ remains central. Humanity remains loved.
“I just think it’s time for Christians to grow up if we’re going to comprehend the reality that’s in front of us,” Alberino said.
