Aliens and UFOs—a Bible Perspective

Guess which famous media personality made the following statements: “I firmly believe there are intelligent beings like us far away in space ….” “I can’t imagine that we’re the only [planet] that has life. That would be a terribly egotistical thing for us to say as a planet.” “It is interesting to speculate about life on other planets.”

These remarks are not from an atheist science presenter like Richard Dawkins or Neil deGrasse Tyson. They were made by the late televangelist Billy Graham, one of America’s most prominent religious leaders of the 20th century.

Graham wasn’t alone among religious figures who thought this way. José Gabriel Funes, former director of the Vatican Observatory, famously asked in a 2008 interview: “How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere? Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’?”

Many people think belief in God and belief in aliens are not mutually exclusive. And belief in aliens is growing. A November 2025 YouGov poll claims 56 percent of Americans believe “aliens definitely or probably exist.” Prominent podcasters Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, who are both religious believers, have frequently stated to their millions of listeners and viewers that aliens exist.

Even governments take the potentiality of extraterrestrial aliens seriously. The governments of the United States, France and other nations have special programs investigating unidentified flying objects. Some of these programs go back decades. In 2023, Mexico’s joint sessions of Congress held an infamous meeting where a self-proclaimed “ufologist” exhibited supposed alien mummies discovered in Peru. (The ufologist, Jaime Maussen, is a notorious huckster.)

The vast majority of ufo sightings have been debunked or are otherwise debunkable. In one instance, pilots on two separate flights saw strange lights zipping across the sky over the Pacific Ocean and logged them as uaps (unidentified aerial phenomena, another common term). It turned out those lights were Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. One analysis suggested that of 69 uaps reported to the Federal Aviation Administration between January and April 2023, over a third could be explained by Starlink alone. Other common identities of mistaken ufo sightings include drones, aircraft, balloons and even birds.

But such common explanations don’t fit with every example. There are ufo sightings that cannot be readily explained through physical, scientific explanations. A famous example surfaced in 2017 when the New York Times released a U.S. Navy video that “showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns,” the Times wrote, “something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.”

Are aliens real? Are they visiting Earth? If they aren’t, how does one explain ufo sightings and other strange phenomena?

What does the Bible reveal about the existence of aliens? The Trumpet analyzes world events according to the premise that man must live by every word of God (Luke 4:4) and that all of God’s words are truth (John 17:17). The Bible reveals the origins of the universe and man’s place in it. It should therefore have something to say about whether there is life on other planets.

Why the Universe

The first verse of the Bible details the creation of the universe and its relationship with the creation of Earth: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The late theologian Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in his landmark book Mystery of the Ages: “In the Authorized Version, the word heaven—singular—is used. But the original Hebrew as Moses wrote, and as other translations render it, is in the plural—heavens—implying that the whole material universe was created simultaneously with the earth. This is plainly stated in Genesis 2:4: ‘These are the generations [beginnings] of the heavens [plural] and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.’”

Notice: God created the entirety of the universe in the same general period of time. But the Earth is singled out as special. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:26-27). God made Earth the domain of man. Man is a special creation, made in God’s image. God stresses this three times in two verses. God sees man as so special that He gave man rule over every other physical creature on this planet.

“Man was made to have (with his assent) a special relationship with his Maker!” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “He was made in the form and shape of God. He was given a spirit (essence in form) to make the relationship possible” (ibid).

This “spirit in man” is what gives man his intellectual capacity (Job 32:8; 1 Corinthians 2:11). It it able to join with God’s Holy Spirit, thus developing a relationship with God and making one “joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:16-17).

What is the converted Christian then called to inherit? The Apostle Paul continues in Romans 8, with commentary in brackets from Mystery of the Ages: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation [all the suns, planets, stars, moons] was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation [stars, suns and moons now in decay and futility] has been groaning in travail together until now” (verses 19-22; Revised Standard Version).

The Apostle Paul, citing Psalm 8, further wrote in Hebrews 2:6-8: “But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands: Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.”

Mr. Armstrong continued: “Is it possible God could mean what he says (‘all things’)? Nothing excluded?” He noted that in the Moffatt translation, “all things” is translated as “the universe.” “In other words, for those willing to believe what God says, He says that He has decreed the entire universe—with all its galaxies, its countless suns and planets—everything—will be put under man’s subjection” (ibid).

This truth of the real purpose of man is so astounding it is hard at first to comprehend. But it is biblical.

Mystery of the Ages delves into far greater detail, but the Earth’s unique character, the special creation of man and his potential of entering a relationship with God, and the emptiness of the rest of the universe prior to man inheriting it, leaves no room for sentient aliens “doing their own thing” on other worlds. As Mr. Armstrong wrote, “There is no evidence either in God’s revealed Word, nor in science, that any of the planets in endless outer space had been inhabited with any form of life” (ibid).

This, however, isn’t the end of the story. The Bible also reveals the existence of other beings who did come down from the heavens.

Demons

Scripture shows that before man’s creation 6,000 years ago, angels inhabited Earth. When God issued His challenge to Job, He said: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7). The Bible uses stars to symbolize angels (see Daniel 8:10 and Revelation 1:20). Angels, as the Bible reveals, are created spirit beings on a lesser plane than God but far more powerful than mortal man.

Over the Earth, God placed an archangel named Lucifer. Lucifer allowed vanity to seize and corrupt him, motivating him to attempt a coup against God. Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-17 record this event. Lucifer became Satan the devil. Those angels he deceived—apparently one third of all of them (Revelation 12:4)—became demons.

“Satan is the author of darkness,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “The rebellion of the angels had caused the darkness. God is the author of light and truth. Light displays and enhances beauty, and also exposes evil. Darkness hides both” (ibid).

What kind of power do these kinds of spirit beings have? The Prophet Ezekiel, describing righteous angels, illustrates a telling example.

He describes a fantastic angelic vehicle that serves God’s spiritual transportation. “And each went straight forward; wherever the spirit was about to go, they would go, without turning as they went. Among the living beings there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving back and forth among the living beings. The fire was bright, and lightning was flashing from the fire. And the living beings moved rapidly back and forth like flashes of lightning” (Ezekiel 1:12-14; Amplified Bible).

“Ezekiel saw this great, luminous vehicle with wings and revolving wheels moving at lightning speed,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in Ezekiel—The End-Time Prophet. “It never had to turn; it would move instantly in any direction. Men had never seen anything like this—it looked like torches or lightning darting around. This was quite a vehicle—so awesome that Ezekiel had trouble even explaining it.”

Again, most claims of ufo sightings have natural, physical explanations. But doesn’t the description of the Ezekiel 1 vehicle sound like the physics-defying flying objects governments have such a hard time identifying?

“More and more people,” Mr. Flurry said in a December 2019 Key of David program, “even on television, are beginning to see that ufos, or unidentified flying objects, are real. But they don’t know what in the world they could be. But if they understood their Bible, well, you have armies of demons, millions of them, and they’re obviously behind this if it is real. And I suspect it is.”

Pilots claiming to have seen ufos “obviously were not given a vision from God,” we wrote in 2020. “But Satan and his demons have the means to show off amazing vehicles they may have access to. This could have been what [observers] saw. Of course, their reason for doing so would be to deceive mankind about the plan of God for the universe. Surely Satan would like man to believe there are extraterrestrials out there, if for no other reason than to blind mankind to God’s purpose for man and the universe” (theTrumpet.com/21933).

“This invisible spirit world (Colossians 1:15-16) is very real, but because it is invisible it has been a mystery,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “The fact that holy angels and evil spirits are invisible does not negate their existence. In truth the invisible spirit world is more real than the material and the visible” (op cit).

The concept of aliens originated as atheists’ attempt to rationalize things they can’t explain based on their models of the universe. The devil likes it that way. It allows him to remain hidden and unexposed while simultaneously manifesting himself to unknowing victims and deceiving them into what he wants them to believe.

The more ignorant one is of Satan’s “devices” (2 Corinthians 2:11), the more vulnerable one is to them. Satan is extremely active in this world today. It is only through the Bible’s revelation that he can be exposed and combated. Satan’s deception and involvement with mankind is prophesied to increase (Revelation 12:9-12). Only staying close to God and His Word can guarantee safety.