The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.

“Christians do not have to renounce their faith in God just because of new unexpected information of a religious nature regarding extraterrestrial civilizations,” said Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Vatican astronomer and theologian.

Once believers will have verified that these alien civilizations come from another planet, he said. They will have to conduct a “rereading of the Gospel in light of the new data.”

In sum, most of these observers believe the Catholic faith is strong enough to withstand the test of extraterrestrial life. Be it in the Jazz scene in Star Wars or Captain Kirk’s deck, be it tall blue Avatars or helping E.T. “phone home,” there will always be “space” for Catholicism.

On the contrary, Klein notes, religious traditions have always believed that we share both Earth and the larger universe with other intelligent beings: angels, demons, demigods, jinn and other kinds of nonhuman intelligences.

We’ve lost that mindset in the developed West as Klein’s worldview has become dominant, but in a course I teach for theology majors titled “Animals, Angels and Aliens: Beyond the Human in Christian Thought,” I try to help my students understand and appreciate a wider, more open-minded view of the universe, and how recognizing the existence of other powers and principalities might break down their largely myopic worldviews.

“There's a hall of fame of the people who've contributed the most to the counting effort, and six of the tokens are people who are in the top ten last time I checked the listing. So presumably, they were the people who've done the most counting,” Watkins told Motherboard. “They were part of this bizarre Reddit community trying to count to infinity and they accidentally counted themselves into a kind of immortality.”

not a balloon. they do not hover.

"Because it was much smaller than the suspected Chinese spy balloon, there were fewer safety concerns about downing it over land, so the decision was made to shoot it down when it was possible. That happened over water.

The mystery around what exactly the flying object was lingered late into Friday night. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement saying it was “not a National Weather Service balloon.”

“They do not hover,” said NOAA spokesperson Scott Smullen."

After speaking with several of the naval aviators who observed the unknown craft, NASA’s chief is convinced that the pilots “saw something, and their radars locked onto it.” Asked to speculate about the nature of the phenomena, Nelson – an Army veteran, former senator and ex-astronaut – responded, “Who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”

As surprising as his answer may be, Nelson is only the latest high-level official to hint that UFOs may have otherworldly explanations.

Asked in June about the military’s recent encounters with mysterious craft, former President Bill Clinton – like Nelson – responded by pondering the vastness of the universe and the high probability of life existing beyond Earth. Similarly, former President Obama speculated about the extraordinary implications if recent incidents involved otherworldly objects. Of note, Clinton and Obama retain access to top-level intelligence briefings.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Queried about the Navy’s encounters with UFOs, former CIA director John Brennan speculated that the objects might “constitute a different form of life.” Channeling Clinton, Obama and NASA’s Nelson, Brennan stated that “it’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.”

In much the same vein, former CIA Director James Woolsey, a longtime UFO skeptic, recently signaled openness to the possibility that such encounters have otherworldly explanations.

John Ratcliffe, former President Trump’s director of national intelligence, is particularly vocal about UFOs.

In a series of interviews, Ratcliffe ruled out secret U.S. technology and cited “high confidence” intelligence assessments to eliminate foreign adversaries as possible explanations for the most compelling UFO encounters. According to the former head of U.S. intelligence, some UFOs exhibit “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.”