As the film Disclosure Day rolls out in cinemas, director Steven Spielberg is once again pushing audiences to imagine what contact with extraterrestrial life might look like and what it might mean for religion on Earth just as UFO sightings, talk of an 'alien hybrid' Jesus and fringe flying saucer faiths are edging into the mainstream in the US and beyond.
The new wave of UFO fascination has not arrived out of nowhere. In recent months, unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs in official jargon, have migrated from late-night forums to the political and religious establishment. The Pentagon in May released a hefty cache of UFO files with almost no explanation, an information dump that invited the public to connect the dots themselves. Only weeks earlier, former US President Barack Obama lit up the news cycle by declaring in an interview that 'statistically' the universe is so vast that the odds of life out there are good, before stressing he had seen no evidence in office that aliens had actually contacted Earth.
