One might think that the religion in its vast array of guises continues to be a potent force in human societies. And of course in some ways it remains so, especially in the conservative, reactionary, often proautocracy, sometimes violent flavors that are causing so much trouble around today’s world – think of the Russian Orthodox church in bed with Putin and his war, and the Evangelical driven MAGA fast working to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy. But at the same time theism is in grave crisis as it suffers enormous losses in popularity in much of the world. Most of the first world has been highly secularized for decades. Even the United States, long thought the last bastion of popular western religion Christianity especially, is seeing the churches losing ground like a downhill skier (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume31/paul), with membership down forty percent since the turn of the century to under half the population, The Southern Baptists are shrinking, those who do not believe in God were a mere few percent when Ike was president, hit near a tenth in the 2000s, and are nearly a fifth if not more these days. Bible literalism is down to a fifth as creationism is slipping, while support for evolutionary science grows. As Ronald Inglehart detailed in Religion’s Sudden Decline (and https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/03/26/around-the-world-many-people-are-leaving-their-childhood-religion), theism is in big demographic trouble in much of the second and third worlds as well. So much so that about half of the people of the globe and even more among Americans no longer think religion has the answers to societies problems. 

So what is going on here? 

That the rumor based global urban legend that is primary product of the religious industry is taking it on the statistical chin is not really surprising. After all there is this thing called modernity. Like how science has removed any need for the existence of a divine creator while seriously damaging the concept – had science instead verified the existence of special creation then I would not be writing this article would I. And there is how widespread middle class prosperity has proven toxic to theism, with many folks dropping interest in attaining the speculative divine aid and comfort of gods here and beyond when they are getting their daily and lifetime middle class needs met here in the real world. Linked to that is the powerful secularizing force that is the corporate-consumer-industrial society that has been doing a bang up job converting folks from pious, frugal, church goers into materialistic hedonists who go into debt buying lots of stuff much of which they don’t need while spending Sundays at the Home Depo and watching the big game rather than listening to a minister tell them about seeking the grace of Christ. Do not forget the disgust factor, what with religion having a long history of immoral acts – obviously it has not come anywhere close to solving humanities problems – and the vast suffering that a creator if one exists has allowed to occur. Starting in Philosophy and TheologyI explained how the premature deaths of some 50 billion children, half of those born, throws a big wrench into the gearing of the belief that there is a benign, loving God (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1). You might think this is more than enough to explain why assorted clerics around the planet are in a panic about the historically sudden decline in the product that their industry is selling. To the degree that some are lashing out with extreme violence and rule by divine minority against the forces of secularization in their furious effort to reestablish the dominance they enjoyed up to just a century ago.

But there is another aspect of modernity that is giving popular religion a sucker punch in its vulnerable supernaturalistic belly, an item as far as I know what not been discussed to date. And that secularization force is….

Aliens.

Especially, ancient aliens. 

Not actual ancient aliens that visited our pretty little planet in ancient times and in the process set up human civilizations while being mistaken for the gods that silly people then worship. The possibility that they really existed being very, very minimal to say the most. It’s the new, thrilling and hip belief in ancient astronauts, the exciting new and modern creation myth, that is helping wreck that old timey, yawn inducing religion. 

Let me explain. To begin, the notion that extraterrestrial beings were or are visiting our humble globe pretty much did not exist in say 1800 when theism in multitudes of guises was pretty popular over most of the planet – but don’t push that too far, China was never all that divinely inspired for example. 

Science driven by technology in a potent feedback loop was for the first time in history advancing with amazing rapidity in the 1700s. And while doing that began to sometimes spin off pseudoscientific silliness. In the early 1800s claims arose of telescopes spotting aliens on the moon which drove popular frenzies. In the late 1800s going into the new century the legit but over enthusiastic astronomer Percival Lovell announced that there was a grand civilization on Mars. Running with that H.G. Wells came up with the first popular aliens are all too here and now fiction story The War of the Worlds, a brilliant literary accomplishment that has never been topped (It has a predreadnaught battleship engaging in close in combat with the Martian tripods!). Around about the same time the first reports of UFO/UAPs were popping up, in the form of vague claims of blimp like craft of the air of seemingly unearthly origin. It cannot be overemphasized how novel this all was to the human experience, no one back in 1776 would have imagined such a thing. 

Circa 1900 Christians were in a good mood. In America almost all were followers of Jesus, mainly Protestant with a fair number of Catholics. It was a Christian nationalist, very conservative and oppressive political and cultural power – promoting contraception was outlawed — that dominated via a tyranny of the majority rule that appeared unshakable. The improvements in communications and travel in the 19^th century made possible by the new SciTech had allowed the belief to spread around the globe, leading to the then widespread and now forgotten Watchword Movement that predicted further big advances of His Word in the coming century. Which did not happen. 

Why?

Western culture went topsy-turvy in the 1920s with the advent of the radical flapper culture that with astonishing suddenness trampled on traditional mores. A little noted aspect of the remaking of the western society was the beginning of the first Sci-Fi magazines starting with Amazing Stories, soon followed by the syndicated Buck Rogerscomic strip, which in turn led to the cheapo film analogy. There was that flap over the Orson Welles radio broadcast of that other Welles book. The notion of alien visitations was being steeped into the popular consciousness, beginning with youth that would age with time. Time for an important but little noted factoid. Very hard at best to both believe in a divine Christian creator who crafted a unique humanity in his own image and then saddled it with original sin, and intelligent extraterrestrials populating the galaxy at the same time. Makes no dogmatic sense and could get you sent to Hell for that heresy-blasphemy stuff and who wants that. Kinda like believing in both Vishnu and Jesus, just not kosher. 

World War 2 was a colossal science fiction become the real deal struggle – long range radar, grand naval battles where the ships never saw one another, giant fleets of miles high flying ponderous bombers trying to fend off hordes of zippy fighters, cruise missiles, long range ballistic missiles, city busting A-bombs; Churchill’s “war of the wizards.” After the conflict Sci-Fi aliens really took off with the set of great epics generating authors – Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon. Science Fiction was no longer just kids’ stuff. 

But that was deliberate fiction. Matters began to spin way out of the reality zone in the summer of 1947 when a private airplane pilot thought he saw a formation of amazing craft skipping across the sky at stunning speed like saucers on water over Washington state. Had it not been for the societal normalization of super sophisticated alien beings in fiction, the pilot may well have kept his mouth shut. Instead he pitched his story to a procedurally slack, readership hungry press that ate it up tabloid style, creating the first big UFO/UAP flap, as well as the term flying saucer dashed out by a sloppy headline writer (the pilot did not use the term). Shortly after in New Mexico a top secret spy balloon crashed. Instead of fessing up, the military was OK with the press presenting to the public it as another sizzling saucer scene. A tactic to be often employed by the military to divert attention from the secret earthly projects it actually is up to. Since then a gullible public has happily bought into a lot of the look over there not here distractions. 

Now the corporate-consumer culture kicked in. Looking to make bucks off the saucer craze, the B-movie The Flying Saucer emerged in 1950 – ironically it was a US v. USSR Cold War spy flick, no aliens involved. But soon enough they were, with a series of films in which special effects creators lazily centered on the flying disc troupe – the oft spinning objects usually accompanied by the same old stock whir, whir, whir sound — in the likes of the super scary psychedelic Invaders from Mars (I’m still scared). the wide screen film version of War of the Worlds (sort of), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, the intellectual epic The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, The Mysterians, and of course The Thing from Another World. And it was not just aliens zipping about betwixt the stars in saucers for no apparent reason, it was humans in the Sci-Fi psychological classic Forbidden Planet. How much the stock saucers thing was the fault of slack designers versus producers demanding them as what audiences wanted I don’t know. The new wonder of the modern age, television, picked up the extraterrestrials and humans in saucers thing including episodes or the juvenile Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, the beloved Twilight Zone and the less so Outer Limits, and the more kids level Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space in which the Robinson clan heads out into the interstellar void in yet another damn glorified Frisbee. Never mind that it was 1997 for heaven’s sake.

As Gene Roddenberry created an adult themed Sci-Fi series with the somewhat perplexed but critical backing of Desilu head Lucille Ball, he told fictional space ship designer Matt Jefferies to NOT repeat the by then tired and tacky yet another saucer stereotype, thus the elegant USS Enterprise that actually looks like a plausible interstellar starship – 12 year old me was sold on the show as soon as I saw the beloved Constitution class starship. The budget so low it had to use made up humans as stand ins for ETs, Star Trek did tremendous work in promoting the idea that humanoid aliens are common. And that maybe we humans are the result of prehistoric alien intervention, that being mentioned. Also very grown up in content, and way better quality special effects wise, was the joint effort by the venerable Sci-fi writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke with topline movie maker Stanley Kubrick to produce the most ambitious science fiction movie yet seen – one that has ancient aliens being instrumental to the existence of Homo sapiens – the then gob smacking 2001 A Space Odyssey! 

It was not just fiction creators who were into the extraterrestrials thing. So were serious scientists who are prone to not be theists, among them Frank Drake and the famed science promotor Carl Sagan. The thesis being that sans the existence of a divine deity that created humans as the sole intelligence in an endless universe of billions and billions of star packed galaxies, naturally evolved ETs and their civilizations often ancient and super advanced should be a dime a dozen among the stars. The scientific way to find out? Search the heavens for signals being beamed between the extraterrestrials as they galactic chat with one another and listen in. Maybe send out a message and see if we get a reply in maybe a few centuries or more. Seeing as how there not being galactic aliens looked statistically unlikely Sagan and a co-author in their seminal work Intelligent Life in the Universe idly, and one can say socially naively, speculated that just maybe aliens had once had prehistoric contacts with early humans. Pseudoscience skeptics such as Sagan – nowadays replaced by the even more avuncular Neil de Grasse Tyson — have gone to tremendous lengths to deny the amateur aliens here and now concept for a variety of practical reasons that were laid out in the Philip Klass debunking classic UFOs — Identified in 1968. Among them that after three quarters of a century, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, not one well focused pic of an alien craft has popped up despite just everyone having a phone camera these days, nor a single artifact, much less an actual extraterrestrial saying hello, we are here, no fooling. After all, if aliens do not want us to know they are here, they would use super stealth tech to make sure we had not the slightest clue, and there never would be any actual sightings much less wreckage and bodies.   

Think about it. 

Such science based common sense and facts have kept matters from spinning out of control. But they have not halted the ET industry from selling the idea of alien visitors with intents good, ambiguous or grift evil in books and magazine articles. Spicing up the storylines were claims of people being abducted by the apparently unethical entities, starting with the loss of a training flight of WW2 era planes off Florida that was actually due to a geographically confused instructor, degrading weather and eventual loss of fuel. Also kidnapped were ordinary folk for whom the aliens seem to have an inordinate interest in their DNA never mind that that can be easily produced as desired in machines that one would imagine intelligences that can travel between the stars would have plenty of. 

Yet ETs were having a broad cultural impact. In the President Johnson era I was riding in a car with my folks and an aunt and uncle when one of them said that some prominent person was saying that aliens would soon announce their presence and solve the problems of a troubled world. The “adults” did not guffaw, my mom casually said she hoped so. My nonintellectual father being a subscriber to the pulp True Tales and Argosy loaded with tales of alien sightings I presumed they would not print what was not true – until the Klass book I came across in my high school library brought this budding scientist up short. Thanks Philip. 

But giving the space traveling ETs a big boost to the less science savvy general populace where the boosters, specifically the giant rockets that were putting people into orbit and beyond. If we just 60 years after the Wright Brothers barely puttered into the air in their wood and fabric flying machines people were heading for the moon – so who knew what hyper advanced alien technologies could do. And what we can learn from them. What about that Area 51 where either using wrecked alien craft, or in collaboration with ETs, we are either testing or have deployed super performance machines of the air. But if so why are we still putting out conventional winged aircraft powered by turbines (jet engines are in some respects simpler to manufacture and operate than those complicated reciprocating engines) not all that different from what the Nazis came up with, and not exceeding top speeds reached half a century ago. Shouldn’t fighters be ultra tech saucers or something of fantastic speeds that can soar into space? For that matter why are we still getting into orbit on the tops of boosters not all that diff from what the Russkies used to send the first Sputnik circling the planet? Literally, the R-7 the Russians send to the International Space Station is an improved version of their first 1950s ICBM. 

People are pretty dumb, we are auto gullible. Back in the day weird lights in the sky would be seen as evidence of the supernatural. Who does that these days? Folks who think they are commonsensical nowadays automatically imagine aliens when they see something they perceive out of human tech norms. It is the go-to option people have been trained to turn to since the 1940s. An amazing cultural transformation based on rumor. And a smashing victory of the secular over the religious paranormal. 

After the first couple of decades of the flying saucer craze the theological implications had gone little touched upon. Those of a religious bent were not paying much attention to what to them seemed fringe, childish silliness that had little to do with — and posed little risk to – to their grand ancient traditions and tales of divine supernaturalism that promised heavenly rewards or severe hellish punishments. It was science especially in the form of Darwinian evolution, and modernity that posed the clear danger to popular piety. So what if many were claiming to see unidentified discs in the sky and a few said they had been kidnapped into these machines. The Pope, and Billy Graham whose mega crusades were intended to revive supernaturalistic opinion in a secularizing world, paid ETs little if any mind. That was naïve. 

Not that there was much they could have done about the threat. 

Then along came Erich von Daniken. A man who would found a new secular creation mythos that now spans the world. Via a tome that went no holds barred for the guts of religion with a double bladed knife and twists it all the way in. In 1968 the convicted con-man published in Europe a best seller that was quickly picked up with the same success in the US, Chariots of the Gods. Possibly sparked by that chapter in Intelligent Life in the Universe, it took the ancient aliens premise and ran with it full bore. Misusing a pile of archaeological and historical items mixed in with old fables and scriptures, Von Daniken used creationist like sleight of hand propaganda tactics to contend that the whole magical divine religion thing is a mirage. That the “gods” were actually aliens that the clueless ancients not knowing any better mistook for supernatural entities. That Ezekiel spinning wheels thing? Aliens. Nazca lines? Aliens. Pyramids hither and yon? Aliens. Just about any leading edge creative idea or act that humans have had? Aliens. That publication coincided with the appearance of 2001 co-created by a respected thinker – next year Clarke would be sitting next to Walter Cronkite during the moon landing — surely boosted interest in a work that would have been unimaginable mere decades before. The book was followed by a film of the same name that garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature not making that up as the scientific community denounced the nonsense for what it was. 

That the professional scientists and skeptics like Sagan could not slap down COTG is not surprising. After all, science had grievously undermined the concept or a rendered at best speculative supernatural creator among a major, usually well-educated portion of the population. Smart extraterrestrials scientifically speaking are not only more plausible than magical gods, some legit scientists were and are saying that they should pack the galaxy. It follows that many alien civilizations should be countless millions if not a billion or more years older than our brand new technological civilization, and correspondingly vastly more advanced sporting SciTech that as Clarke explained would appear magical to us primitives.  In that case the ETs may have the ready ability to densely populate or at least explore our Milky Way, meaning dropping by our planet would at worse be like Cook visiting Hawaii — maybe not a walk in the park but not outrageously hard. If so then there is no reason to think aliens are only here now, they ought to have been mucking around Earth for ages. Nothing stopping them from getting it on with early humans, obviously. Of course such super beings and their amazing machines would like blow away mere human minds and could easily inspire whole religions. It all seems to make sense. As for those scientists who were on the one hand postulating alien civilizations and looking for their radio or laser signals, while vehemently denying they actually had anything to do with archaic humans, well, they are just a bunch of uptight egg heads who don’t dare to postulate the obvious lest they be disparaged by their colleagues. Or maybe there are in cahoots with the vast government conspiracy to hide alien visitations lest the populace panic – although why people would freak out if they knew has never been explained. And of course governments are trying to back engineer the alien machines that have crashed despite being super hi-tech craft. It is no wonder that the ancient ETs theme has proven a cash cow to Von Daniken, who used the early proceeds to pay off his legal problems and now resides in comfort in Switzerland, he still being alive. 

The above argument is as superficial as it is gravely defective. For starters the lack of actual evidence. If ETs have been hanging out with folks for millennia, then just how is it no actual trace of them has been turned up by archaeologists? Not the inferred speculations offered up by the paranormalist bunch. Just one super-duper hi tech device or exquisitely crafted tool made out of exotic materials would be compelling evidence. That there is nothing of the sort leaves Danikenism gravely weak at best. The images that seem to portray aliens and their craft? They have been readily explained by actual experts in ancient peoples as having entirely normal, societal-artistic terrestrial causes that have nothing to do with alien touristas. The pyramids built under the direction of aliens? Well first why?  They would do nothing for the ETs. They are just piles of rock of the type expected to have been fashioned by workers without hi-tech machinery, nothing unearthly exotic about them. The lodgings of the ordinary Egyptians who built the Giza pyramids have been excavated in detail and there is nothing odd about it – including no ET traces.  It is being increasingly shown that pyramids and other ancient grand structures were classic, government contracted, get them done cheap and fast projects in which most stones crudely cut with archaic tools were slapped together in a hurry, with rock wedges and debris filling in gaps between often irregular rows and mortared together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM3kpOF8ews, etc. — the new satellite scanning data that is claimed to observe amazing ancient excavations below Giza is likely to be a combination of noise and natural limestone caverns, that there is no means of immediately testing the wild assertions means they should be a big boost for AA). Only the surfaces that needed to look good were finely finished, and even they show evidence of slap dash assembly and filling in when necessary. That is the big evidence of interstellar influence? Really? 

Why didn’t the helpful ETs do things that would have been truly useful, like eliminate diseases while improving agriculture and providing contraceptives? Hmmm?  

But as bad as the AA hypothesis is, it is not as logic defective as the even more unrealistic, supernaturalistic god/s theory. And the new creation myth has been gaining ground. 

Von Daniken kept churning out product. And it’s not just him, he has been joined by Zecharia, Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and Brinsley Le Poer Trench. It’s a small scale industry with out of proportion impact. The always looking for cash TV business got into the act. 1977 saw the debut of the long lasting syndicated In Search of… hosted il/logically enough by former half alien Leonard Nimoy. Many episodes deal with ETs in a supposedly neutral you decide basis that is actually designed to favor the paranormal angle that being the way to get the don’t want to be disappointed by square negative news viewers coming back. Being in on knowing that the ETs are real theme being hip and fun. NBC wanted in on that so they worked with Jack Webb of Dragnet and Emergency fame of all people to do with ETs what he had with policing and emergency medical response. He poured through the Project Blue Book accounts which he did not seem to notice are nowhere near the real world reliability of police files – although with what we now know about police work maybe those files are also slack — and came up with Project U.F.O. A person actually involved with Blue Book was brought in to help out. Didn’t work though, there were only two short seasons. But it helped define the network pseudoscientific standards downwards when it came to matters not of this earth. 

The level of the saucer craze fluctuates. Aliens get the positive treatment in the entertainment media, via flicks like the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, the Men in Black series, Independence Day, Battleship, and most famously Spielberg’s adorable ET, and the it looks like a documentary Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which those lost naval aviators show up looking confused, and The X-Files has been seminal. The fictional machines the aliens zip around in are not always saucers, although the troupe continues. Remember how ETs or something were making increasingly intricate crop circles in England in an effort to communicate with humanity when sending text messages would seem more efficacious? That faded as the spoofers got tired of going to all the effort and crop losing farmers threatened legal action.  

And then there is cable. Before the turn of the century Discovery and A&E were putting out standard, informative, albeit rather bland documentaries on conventional subjects on nature and man. In their effort to garner legitimacy A&E brought on board distinguished CBS journalist Roger Mudd. But there were problems. I and my fellow dinosaurologists found that working with the documentary people was iffy. They would promise to toe the scientific line up front, but as the program developed they sometimes pushed the boundaries to get a better storyline, and even when we protested they would often do what they wished in the end. Ouch. And watching other programs the subject of which I am familiar with often have issues. Such as stock storylines that are not accord with topline research, inappropriate use of file footage — often the same off the shelf snippets on a given subject are repeated endlessly over the many years. The few programs that did an ace job of presenting the real story were often under the control of academics who actually knew what they were talking about. The bottom line is that many of those who produce docs are out to make money, are driven to save on production costs, and don’t care all that much about the contents of their productions as long as it makes some money. It’s a business, not altruistic education program. 

Another problem with mainline docs is that they don’t generate much revenue. Which is why the broadcast networks hardly ever do them anymore. As the 2000s began A&E and Discovery discovered how to boost their cash flows. “Reality” documentaries. Cheaper to produce, bigger audiences. Then they realized that edgy programming brought in the audiences. One topic is ghosts. The other big draw. 

Aliens.

Roger Mudd is long gone. Nowadays the A&E channel is more than anything about aliens. Especially long ago ancient extraterrestrials. In particular their flagship series Ancient Aliens in production since 2010 and still going strong. 240 episodes packed to the gills with paranormal propaganda and still counting. Whole broadcast evenings are dedicated to the aliens came to earth back in the day and if not for them we would at best still eating mammoth meat cooked over open pits. It is the cash cow of a money grubbing business who cares not one wit about the truth of the product they recklessly put out. And that is cable etc. which is fading. The action has been shifting to the web where the ever vaster podcast industry has even less in the way of quality standards — even cable does not touch flat earthism and creationism which thrive on Youtube et al.

There is of course cultural backlash to the growing AA inanity. As per the repeat Saturday Night Live skit in which Fed authorities interview alien abductees one of whom was kind of into it kink wise. But most wave it all away as being an idle idea that like flat earth belief rarely does harm, unlike that other creation myth industry that has been making big trouble over the millennia.

While flat earth geography remains fringe, AA is transforming the culture. When folks learn I research dinosaurs they often ask me the Big Four – are birds dinosaurs (yes like bats are flying mammals), were dinosaurs warm-blooded (yep), how do we know what color they were (we usually don’t, but of late preserved color pigments are giving us clues), and did the asteroid really kill them off (looks like, although massive volcanism going on down in India may have played a role). But I have of late received a new query. It starts with the asker looking at me as if I am going to tell them the real truth! So they make the ask. Was it aliens that actually killed off the dinosaurs to clear the way for humanity? I say no – can then see their disappointment that I am part of the conspiracy to hide the plain truth – and proceed to explain why the documentary biz is all about making money in part based on my personal experience and they don’t care what kind of schlock goods they put out as long as it generates revenue from the viewers whose interests are low on their priority list. I hope to at least sow some seeds of doubt. Worth a shot. 

It’s straight out of the alien visitor’s industry. That’s my personal experience of its rising effectiveness. To get the large scale demographic assessment we turn to the survey stats. In 1960 the number of Americans who imagined that old time ETs had been involved in human origins might have been in the few dozens if that and that was a lot more than say 1800. These days it is around 100 million plus, over a third of the population and rising (https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2018/10/16/paranormal-america-2018). And that is just America, the global believers in the con artist are many times that. 

Von Daniken has won. Ancient ETs is the fastest growing major creation belief system yet seen. The even more wild and wacky Scientology and Mormonism are nothing in demographic comparison (and they are no longer growing membership wise). From nothing to hundreds of millions in just half a century. That as theism is in parallel decline. One certainly has to do with the other. A question is, is theism going down because AA is going up, or the reverse, or both? 

It’s not rocket science the pun is intended figuring this one out. Being say a Christian who thinks a transcendent perfect mind of absolute power created the universe and sent angels and His Son to earth is not in good accord with believing nonhuman intelligences evolved around other stars, came here, and were mistaken for that God and his minions, and for other deities. That the latter belief has been growing by leaps and bounds thanks of late to A&E while theism plunges like a boulder off a cliff is not a coincidence. The first which arose because of the novel technologies of the 1900s must have a good deal to do in driving he latter that has been around for ages as was still doing pretty good in the mid 20^th century into increasing decline. As such aliens of the past is part of the greater complex that is modernity, expressed in the form of the corporate-consumer culture that is focused on extracting money from customers. 

And old time aliens have sex appeal big time. Face it you theists. You are a dour grim bunch telling everyone all the fun they can’t have while going on and on and on about that Jesus fellow being tortured to death on the cross for our sins. Sins? What a downer, man. And that Passion of the Christ was nothing more than a gag inducing snuff flick that few watch anymore. No way religion themed entertainment can compete with the ET product – Star Trek and Star Warsforever. Going to heaven? Where we are all to spend a glazed eye eternity worshipping His Lord without end? Looks like a never ceasing church service. Those sneaky aliens may not be telling us why they are here, but at least they are not preachy scolders. Because belief in aliens does not come packaged with the promises of great rewards that has been the driving force behind the popularity of theism, there has yet to be and probably never will be much in the way of significant dogmatic religions centered on ETs, the Heaven’s Gate cult being a minor exception that supports the greater rule. Theists may think that their opinions have a moral factor that aliens can’t provide. Well yeah, but not in the way they wish to think. What with scandals after scandals afflicting theism, its frequent alliance with oppressive cultures and regimes and the massive suffering of animals and children on the planet God supposedly created (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1), aliens as amoral as they may be are not looking all that bad compared to the dark sides of theism. When was the last time ETs were accused of abusing kids? 

And the ET creation myth has another big advantage over the theological alternative. It’s free or close to it! No chronic tithes. No pricey Scientology audits. Could hardly be a better deal.

AA is a significant factor helping drive down religion. That does not mean that the decline of the latter is not also creating space for more acceptance of old time ETs – the subject could use some formal scientific research it has not yet received — very likely both are underway in a twisted feedback competition between the errant paranormalisms of pseudoscience and supernaturalism. Sigh. 

Having a deep preference for realistic conclusions based as much as possible on objective, rational analysis of facts, scientists are not at all happy about the success of pseudoscientific Danikenism that insults our ancestors by saying they did not have the smarts to develop the infrastructure of civilization. Aliens had to tell the blockheads. And scientists are blockheads at best of engaged in a diabolical conspiracy at worse. But science keeps churning along because it is reality. Being mere and similarly wacky opinion religion is more vulnerable to the aliens mythos threat. 

While the scientific community has been paying attention to the anti-truth that is ancient aliens, the churches have not as they obtusely stumble along thinking it is atheism and its consort bioevolution that are its threats. That’s true, but not being able to see much outside their traditional cultural bubble they have been largely ignoring that other wing of modernity that proffers that ETs are the real gods thesis — ironically, an exception is that wackiest wing of Christianity, the fundamentalist young earth creationists, there are lots of rebuttals of extraterrestrials at Answers in Genesis. Not that they and the mainline churches are going to be able to do much about this fresh menace that suddenly emerged out of sketchy reports of unidentified aerial and other phenomena, and of being abducted by aliens over obsessed by human DNA. Why should any believe in magical forces that have not the slightest logical basis, over the possibility as remote as it logically is, that aliens are the creative agents. As bad as that is, at least that is more in accord with natural causes, not supernatural magic.

Whether the scientific community can eventually beat down ancient aliens is open to doubt. As per the latest wave of UAP fascination in the as always blurry images and vague accounts mixed with a new dose of military interest. But while ETs are a major annoyance for science, they are a dire danger to a failing theism.