A more or less official public recognition of UAP/UFO existence cannot help but cause the religious to question or re-address their beliefs in a deity -- and all the steps it took historically to reach the point where congregations accepted the mind food fed to them.
Attempting to reconcile evidence of strange things in the sky, if not occasionally on the ground, with both ancient and contemporary teachings, wizards of The Faithful must be hard at work currently with the spiritual meat grinder. Some will insist UFOs represent harbingers of miracles to come, while others see flying demons intent upon doing harm. A significant number among the clergy would certainly interpret visions of airborne enigmas as angels. Will reports of religious icons seemingly dripping tears or blood be replaced with sculptures of space aliens? Let the lack of either identity or purpose serve no part among various religions in determining one's impression of the unknown.
One thing is for certain: No matter your brand of faith, its proponents are doing everything possible as you sleep to merge doctrine in some way with whatever explanations ultimately may arise from all of this UFO talk. Nobody wants to be left behind, and absolutely nobody wants to become as irrelevant and unappetizing as old cheese in a rat trap.
The collision of UFOs with religious beliefs is not new, of course. As a teenager of the fifties and sixties I regularly invested (if that's the word) in books about UFOs, and among the most noteworthy on the religious side was The Bible and Flying Saucers, a thoughtful and daring book written by the Rev. Barry Downing. Then again, if you wanted to fall off the cliff of rational thinking to clutch your faith with no holds barred, I barely recall Laura Mundo's Flying Saucers and the Father's Plan (if you embraced George Adamski and gobbled up everything printed by Saucerian Publications, this one's for you). Oh boy. The fact that so many books of that era relied upon the term, flying saucers, rather than UFOs hardly aided in promoting the phenomenon's public credibility, and the proliferation of generally unhinged "contactees" applied a certain kiss of death upon the topic.
As we await "the good stuff" from government files (personally, I am not optimistic about the best evidence coming forth), we can be sure that people shall continue with the need to "believe in" something, be it God, Jesus, Mohammad, Nefertiti's reincarnation, their cat or a loaf of moldy bread. But don't "believe in" UFOs when you should instead believe solely in the evidence, the proof, however and wherever it exists.
