They're Demons! An Infernal Explanation Is Rapidly Becoming a Major UFO Theory

​I will admit to being surprised by the sudden turn ufology took into Satanic Panic. Over the last few weeks, the leading lights in government ufology appear to have reached a consensus that UFOs are in fact demons. Literal demons. From Hell. After Vice President JD Vance announced his belief that flying saucers are the Prince of the Air’s private jets, all hell—metaphorically—broke loose in the UFO world, with other Republicans jumping on the license to talk about Fallen Angels, Nephilim, and demons. This culminated over the weekend in a New York Times report about the possibility that flying saucers are aerial demons—a claim so absurd that it’s hard to imagine another time when the Paper of Record would openly entertain such a thought.

​The article came only hours after Tucker Carlson devoted his show to the role of Nephilim and demons on the earth and was pegged to recent claims that ex-government operatives met with pastors to warn about the religious crisis UFO “Disclosure” might produce.
 
The Times article does not indicate that the paper made any effort to verify the identity of the two men who allegedly briefed the pastors, nor to inquire into whether they had any current connection to government. Religion reporter Ruth Graham appears to have simply taken Pastor Alan DiDio at his word.
 
Graham interviewed omnipresent religion scholar and paranormal enthusiast Jeffrey Kripal about the sky demons, and his response was, frankly, shocking for a scholar of religion, more Ancient Aliens than scholarly:

“The U.F.O. topic in particular is a big challenge to any religious worldview,” said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has compiled an archive on paranormal subjects, including accounts from U.F.O. “experiencers.”
 
In Dr. Kripal’s view, the origin stories of many earth-based religions can be read as descriptions of encounters with unexplained entities of unknown provenance.
 
“The gods have always come from the sky, and we call that religion,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of words in the Western canon for these entities of the middle realm, so my own feeling is that when religious people look out and they see entities that don’t fit into their religious world, they call them demons.”

​The gods have most decidedly not always come from the sky—a claim that derives more from ancient astronaut theorists than from religious studies. There are certainly cultures that associated the gods with the sky. Ancient China, for example, saw the gods as manifestations of heavenly power centered on the celestial pole. There are other cultures, like the Maya, where the connection is more ambiguous, positing the firmament as all that existed before the formation of the Earth. But in the Near East, the primeval gods were typically born from primeval chaos, from the earth, or from the elements. They do not, in general, arrive from the sky. For instance, the Greek gods were explicitly not sky gods. The Olympians were born from the Titans, who were born from the Earth itself (after being impregnated by Heaven) and lived in the earth, on mountains, or in the sea. Similarly, Mesopotamian mythology posited a primeval ocean from which the first beings sprung, until a god (Marduk in the Babylonian version) created land from the body of the chaos-monster Tiamat. As Sanchuniathon reported, the Phoenicians shared the same belief, that from Chaos and the primeval waters, the first gods (the Overseers of the Heavens) emerged, and the gods of the pantheon were born on Earth.
 
The Celts did not have one universal creation myth, but the story of Eiocha tells of the first gods being born on the primeval Earth, while Polynesian myths share with Near Eastern stories the idea that in the primal chaos Heaven and Earth mated, producing the first gods from the Earth itself.
 
Indeed, many cultures would not be able to conceive of gods that came from the sky because they believed the Earth was the center of creation and the sky was a dome covering it. Mesopotamia, Greece, Canaan all agreed on this, and cultures as far away as ancient China and North America had the same idea. Even when the gods were associated with “Heaven,” heaven was not always necessarily considered outer space or the sky but some other dimension that stood outside of physical reality or sat atop the dome over the earth.
 
In short, the situation is much more ambiguous than Kripal makes it sound. While many stories can be read as having a heavenly component, it is only modern UFO mythology that transforms the otherworld of heaven into outer space and travel from the divine realm to the human one as a literal descent from the sky.
 
But that isn’t really the point, is it? Believers are looking for ways to link UFOs to pagan gods, whom the Church already declared to be fallen angels or demons thousands of years ago. Anything that reinforces that identification helps.
 
Therefore, it was unsurprising that yesterday, Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a Catholic priest and well-known exorcist (he describes himself as the Chief Exorcist for the Archdiocese of Washington), hopped on the bandwagon, posting to his pastoral YouTube channel that UFOs are in fact demons in disguise: “Not too long ago someone who had a particular gift—and we’ve documented that gift—and she was shown a picture of a UFO, and she said it’s a demon.”
 
Demon enthusiasts also jumped on comments from Rep. Lauren Boebert, who told Real America’s Voice this week that in the still-classified UFO files, “There is a lot to do with even ‘portals,’ and I’m interested in more information of that coming out as well. […] Is there breeding between these biological beings and humans? […] We’re just asking the questions.” Of course, mention of portals, like the CIA files mentioning Noah’s Ark or the FBI files mentioning Bigfoot, does not make them real. She then gave the game away by adding that the true issue is that defense contractors are “too big” to answer to Congress and these questions are a way of imposing accountability on entities that think themselves more powerful than the government.
 
Conservative religious types on social media ignored that context and instead linked Boebert’s comments to the Nephilim and Watchers, speculating that the government has proof that the Watchers teleport from another dimension to mate with humans, as the Sons of God did to the daughters of men in Genesis 6:4.

Rep. Tim Burchett claimed on NewsNation that these religious fears about demons and Nephilim have led people in the Pentagon to block or slow-walk the order by President Trump to release UFO files. “They’re gonna take this high road and say it’s gonna disrupt religion,” Burchett said. “I don’t buy that. As a Christian, that doesn’t affect me one bit. I think they need to disclose everything.” 
 
All of this talk of demons and Nephilim is logical in a perverted way, I suppose. If your fundamental belief is that God chose Donald Trump as His representative on Earth, born to usher in the Millennium, then it stands to reason that Satan would send his minions to fight Trump’s divinely blessed military in an attempt to stave off the Second Coming. 

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UPDATE 6/3/2026: The Archdiocese of Washington removed Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist following his social media claim that UFOs are flying demons, saying Rossetti contradicted the Church's teachings on demonic entities.