The Exorcist and the UFO Files

Last week, the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert McElroy, removed one of the most recognizable Exorcists in the English-speaking world. Monsignor Stephen Rossetti — a priest and a clinical psychologist, with nineteen years in the role and a large online following — had said in a video that he believed many, even most, UFO sightings were in fact demons. The cardinal’s answer was blunt: the claim “gravely undermines the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons, and exorcism.” Rossetti said he was saddened, asked forgiveness for any way he had been unfaithful to the Church’s teaching, and stepped down. It made the headlines you would expect. A Catholic exorcist, removed for talking about aliens.

The timing was not an accident. We are living through what its promoters call disclosure. After decades of rumored cover-up, files have been released, hearings have been held, and a steady parade of credible-sounding officials has come forward to say, in effect, that something is out there and the government has known for a long time. If you have spent any time online this past month, you have seen the clips: a former official insisting it is real, a documentary built on classified careers, a soldier who reportedly said he would be “forfeiting his life” if he spoke on camera.

And yet look at what actually arrived. Reports, a few declassified images, some degraded footage, a smear of light that resolves into a triangle if you want it to. This was supposed to be the moment, the awaited release, and it produced no body, no craft you can walk around, no signal anyone can decode — only more testimony about evidence held somewhere else by someone who cannot quite show it to you. We carry eight billion cameras in our pockets, and the most consequential object in human history still cannot hold focus. If this is the best the long-awaited disclosure can do, it is hard to imagine the next round doing better.

Two Ways to Fill the Sky

Here is what almost no one says out loud. Rossetti and the disclosure crowd, who look like opposites, are standing on the same ground. Both assume there is a real, intelligent object up there. They argue only about who is flying it. One side fills the silence with civilizations; the other fills it with demons. Watch the two of them long enough and you see a pendulum — the culture swinging from a science-fiction heaven crowded with neighbors to a darkened one crowded with spirits — and you start to suspect that both swings exist for the same reason: to keep the sky from ever being empty.

Take the demonic reading first, since it is the one that cost a man his post. There is a real instinct behind it, and Rossetti is no fool. He has spent his life in the unglamorous work of deliverance, and he can feel that the science-fiction picture of the cosmos — endless worlds, no Creator, salvation arriving by spaceship — is spiritually corrosive. He is right about that. But to answer it by declaring the lights demonic is the equal and opposite error. Pure spirits do not crash. They do not leave wreckage in a desert or register on a fighter jet’s sensors as forty thousand feet of climb or get recovered as bodies. And there is a deeper problem of proportion. The tradition has long held that when the angels were tested, a third fell and two-thirds did not; there are, to put it crudely, twice as many holy angels as fallen ones. Ezekiel saw wheels within wheels and rims full of eyes and did not call it a demon. He called it the glory of the Lord and fell on his face. If something truly uncanny is ever in our sky, the odds and the Scriptures both say it is far likelier to be an errand of heaven than an ambush from hell. To reach for “demon” first is not vigilance. It is a flinch.

The World in Quarantine

Both swings of the pendulum — the crowded heaven and the haunted one — are fleeing the same possibility, and it is the hardest one to hold. C.S. Lewis put a name to it nearly ninety years ago. In his novel Out of the Silent Planet, Earth is called Thulcandra, “the silent planet.” It is silent not because the universe is dead, but because our world is the one in quarantine: the bent planet, sealed off from the rest of a living, ordered, unfallen creation because of its rebellion. The silence overhead, in Lewis’s telling, is not proof that no one is there. It is the sound of our own exile.

Lewis was not only spinning a story. He returned to the question in earnest, asking what other rational beings would actually mean for the faith. Would they be fallen, like us? Would they need saving? The questions sound like pulp until you slow down on one word inside them: rational. Because intelligence — real intelligence, the kind that could build a ship — is not what most people assume it is.

Intelligence Is Not a Dial

We tend to picture intelligence as a dial, running from simple creatures up through clever ones to us, and presumably onward to something cleverer still. Aristotle saw it differently, and I think he had it right. He noticed that the soul, the life-principle of a living thing, comes in genuinely different kinds. A plant lives and grows but does not sense. An animal senses, moves, remembers, even solves problems, but does not reason. A human being reasons, and reason is not merely a faster animal mind. It is a different category altogether: the power to think in abstractions, to ask whether a thing is true, to weigh whether an act is good, to wonder why there is anything at all. A dog is not a slow person. It is another kind of creature. There is no smooth ramp from instinct to insight. There is a line, and you are on one side of it or the other.

This is why the alien question is far less open than it feels. If there is life out there — microbes under some ice, even animals grazing a far meadow — it changes nothing about the faith; Genesis already calls a teeming creation good. But a civilization that builds a craft to cross the dark between stars has not simply climbed higher on the animal ladder. It has reason. And reason never travels alone. It arrives carrying moral agency, the knowledge of good and evil, the freedom to choose between them, and the ache for a meaning it did not give itself. You cannot have the starship without the kind of soul that could sin. Which places any such beings exactly where we stand: rational, free, and therefore either innocent or fallen — and if fallen, in need of rescue.

Once, for All

And here the faith says something it cannot take back. The rescue already happened, once. The Word became flesh — not flesh in general, but this flesh, in a particular womb, in an occupied province, under a named governor. Hebrews says He died once for all. Paul says that in Him all things were created, in Him all things hold together, and through Him all things are reconciled — all things, not all humans. St. Irenaeus called it recapitulation: the whole of reality gathered up and re-headed in the one Christ. There is no second Calvary scheduled on a second world. If other fallen minds exist, they are not waiting for a savior of their own; they are already included in ours, the way every human who has ever lived is included without a separate cross for each. And the beings who did fall and were offered no Incarnation at all — the rebel angels — stand as the reminder that redemption was never owed and never automatic. It was fitted to us. To this flesh.

The single death is not too small for a large universe. It is the hinge the universe turns on.

There is one more tell, and it is the quietest. The most important thing that has ever happened in this universe happened twenty centuries ago, in a stable, to a poor family in a backwater of an empire. And a handful of foreign astrologers, reading the night sky with the crude instruments of the ancient world, noticed it and came. They crossed deserts to kneel in front of it. So ask the obvious question. If the heavens truly hold a civilization advanced enough to slip between the stars and hover over our missile silos, where were they at the manger? The wise men found their way to the one event that mattered. The star-farers were no-shows. Either they are not there, or they were never part of this story, or the story was never about them.

We Are Not Alone

Strip the pendulum down and you find the same motive at both ends. The science-fiction heaven is comforting: we are ordinary, one signal among many, and someday someone kinder and cleverer will answer. The haunted heaven is thrilling: the drama is cosmic, the war is real, and we are on the front line. What neither can bear is the still point between them — that we may simply be alone, that the silence is exactly what it sounds like, and that it is not absence but address. That takes more faith than aliens ever would. It asks you to believe that a personal God made a universe this size and set within it one creature who could look up, understand what he was seeing, and say thank you — and that this does not make us small. It makes us responsible.

Which brings us back to the sentence everyone has started repeating, from the Pentagon podiums to the comment sections. We are not alone. The disclosure dreamer means the dark is populated, that somewhere out there is a peer who will finally make contact. The believer says the very same four words and means something the dreamer cannot afford to mean: that we were known before we were formed, knit together in the womb, addressed by name, and that the quiet overhead is not an empty room but a held gaze. Only one of those is consolation. The other is just company, and company has never once forgiven a sin.

The Church, for its part, has refused both swings of the pendulum. It has never declared that we are alone and never declared that we are not; a Catholic may believe there is life on other worlds and remain in good standing, because the question is honestly open and the faith does not finally hang on the answer. That balance is what Rossetti lost hold of, and what the disclosure industry never had. The files will keep dribbling out. The footage will stay blurry. And the real question was never whether the sky is occupied. It is which of those two sentences you are living inside — and what would have to change in you if the silence were not empty, but listening.

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