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If UFOs come from another planet or another dimension, were they sent by the same God who has been revealed to us in any of the major religions? Nothing in the UFO phenomena, the fundamentalist complaint goes, requires belief in the one, true God, while much in it contradicts the God portrayed in the Bible and Christian tradition. The New Age: A Christian Critique by Ralph Rath (1990) discusses UFOs, typically for such literature, with extreme credulity. It serves their purpose to accept UFOs as real and revile them as instruments of Satan and the Antichrist, rather than to use the blade of scientific scepticism. That tool, once honed, might accomplish more than just a limited heresiotomy.

The Christian fundamentalist author Hal Lindsey, in his 1994 religious best-seller Planet Earth - 2000 AD, writes,

I have become thoroughly convinced that UFOs are real... They are operated by alien beings of great intelligence and power ... I believe these beings are not only extraterrestrial but supernatural in origin. To be blunt, I think they are demons... part of a Satanic plot.

And what is the evidence for this conclusion? Chiefly, it is the eleventh and twelfth verses of Luke, Chapter 21, in which Jesus talks about ‘great signs from Heaven’ - nothing like a UFO is described - in the last days. Typically, Lindsey ignores verse 32 in which Jesus makes it very clear he is talking about events in the first, not the twentieth, century.

There is also a Christian tradition according to which extraterrestrial life cannot exist. In Christian News for 23 May 1994, for example, W. Gary Crampton, Doctor of Theology, tells us:

The Bible, either explicitly or implicitly, speaks to every area of life; it never leaves us without an answer. The Bible nowhere explicitly affirms or negates intelligent extraterrestrial life. Implicitly, however, Scripture does deny the existence of such beings, thus also negating the possibility of flying saucers... Scripture views earth as the center of the universe... According to Peter, a ‘planet hopping’ Savior is out of the question. Here is an answer to intelligent life on other planets. If there were such, who would redeem them? Certainly not Christ... Experiences which are out of line with the teachings of Scripture must always be renounced as fallacious. The Bible has a monopoly on the truth.

But many other Christian sects - Roman Catholics, for example -are completely open-minded, with no a priori objections to and no insistence on the reality of aliens and UFOs.

In the early 1960s, I argued that the UFO stories were Grafted chiefly to satisfy religious longings. At a time when science has complicated uncritical adherence to the old-time religions, an alternative is proffered to the God hypothesis: dressed in scientific jargon, their immense powers ‘explained’ by superficially scientific terminology, the gods and demons of old come down from heaven to haunt us, to offer prophetic visions, and to tantalize us with visions of a more hopeful future: a space-age mystery religion aborning.

The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard wrote in 1989 that

abduction reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of divine beings.

He concludes:

Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing with it seem simply to have found their way home again, where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things go bump in the night.

Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content, about abduction by strange, telepathic, aerial creatures who ooze through walls, with the details filled in by the prevailing cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? Others, who have not personally