This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on June 25, 2026.
While the Trump administration and their voters seem increasingly hostile to releasing the Epstein Files, they’re continuing to release UFO files. The images, videos and written testimony have led to a constant stream of speculation and questions over the past month, not only about what the files depict but about what they might mean for our views of religion.
These are some of the questions Stephen Spielberg explores in his new film, Disclosure Day. “If a real ‘disclosure day’ was to occur, there would be ontological shock,” Spielberg said in an interview with USA Today. “All of our foundational realities would be shattered and blown apart by a new foundational reality that some of us would accept and others would reject. There would be a big shake-up in the world; it would shake certain core, fundamental beliefs.”
Since conservative evangelicals have unprecedented power in the federal government, and since mainstream evangelical theology has become more like 20th century fundamentalism over the past few decades thanks to the rise of violent authoritarianism, one wonders how the disclosure of aliens might shake the fundamentalists among us.
What disclosure means for inerrancy
According to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, “Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history.”
Article XII further states: “We deny that biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.”
These assertions about the Bible being inerrant in issues of science and history are why many fundamentalists believe in the young earth creationist narrative that God created the entire universe just 6,000 years ago, and that all humanity descended from Adam and Eve, who were specially created apart from the animals rather than through a process of evolution.
As Answers in Genesis puts it: “In a biblical worldview, we don’t expect alien life to exist.”
Because of this presupposition, the existence of aliens would appear to shake up their belief in inerrancy and scriptural authority. As Answers in Genesis puts it: “In a biblical worldview, we don’t expect alien life to exist. The Bible tells us Earth was formed to be inhabited and the other celestial bodies were created for signs, seasons, days and years.”
To fundamentalists, the entire universe is earth centric. Because they believe God’s ultimate drama is a hierarchy of authority and submission being played out on earth, they have to fit any unusual phenomena into their narrative for the earth. And because the genealogies in the Bible add up to about a 6,000-year-old earth, the entire universe must not be older than 6,000 years.
So to fundamentalists, there could not be a civilization of aliens who were far more ancient than humans because they would be far more ancient than the universe itself.