The upcoming Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force report , due to arrive in Congress on Friday, signals a religious sea change in America. Meanwhile, the media’s campaign to normalize UFOs is seeding our minds with alien life forms.

As such, we are witnessing a fringe mythology rise up from moldy basements to explode across the prestige press.

The psychologist Carl Jung wrote in 1957, at a time when “flying saucers” were being spotted all over the planet, “We have here a golden opportunity of seeing how a legend is formed, and how in a difficult and dark time for humanity a miraculous tale grows up of an attempted intervention by extra-terrestrial ‘heavenly’ powers.” Half a century later, these celestial entities have hit the big time.

On June 8, the former director of the U.S. government’s latest, no-longer-secret UFO program, Luis Elizondo, told the Washington Post he’s convinced these aerial phenomena are “beyond next generation technology…50 to 1,000 years ahead of us.” Naturally, he postulated extraterrestrials. But it only got weirder from there. “This could be something that is extra hyper dimensional,” he speculated, “in a quantum physics sense. We know that the universe is full of shortcuts and loopholes.” Heavenly beings from the great beyond? Sounds eerily familiar.

This relentless messaging is comparable to CIA operatives going on national television to announce that Catholic relics really do possess spiritual powers, or that Hindu idols are literal windows to the gods. The only difference is that Luis Elizondo, along with numerous former intelligence agents , are bolstering a materialist, tech-obsessed worldview. If there are no deities up in heaven, that means human beings are the smartest entities in the universe—unless we’re not alone.

In recent years, the idea of god-like aliens has taken possession of the American psyche.

A 2019 Gallup poll found that “33% of U.S. adults believe that some UFO sightings [are] alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies.” To put that in context , Evangelical Protestants are only twenty-five percent of the U.S. population. Catholics make up only twenty percent.

In a nation where a quarter of the population reject […]