Are Aliens Just Demons?

One of the loudest claims in Christian UFO talk right now is pretty simple:

“These so-called aliens are just demons. If you rebuke them in the name of Jesus, they flee. Every time.”

It has a certain emotional punch. It gives Christians a clean category and a sense of control. But if your entire theology hangs on “every time,” then one honest counterexample, one black swan, topples the whole thing. And the more you actually dig into abduction literature, deliverance stories, and Scripture, the harder it is to keep repeating that slogan with a straight face.

This is not about denying the power of Jesus. It is about refusing to prop up a lazy generalization that shrinks the Bible’s picture of the unseen realm into something far smaller and flatter than God actually gave us.

The “Rebuke Test” And Why It Fails As A Universal Rule

Groups like CE4 Research (Joe Jordan and others) have collected testimonies where people in abduction-type experiences cried out to Jesus, and everything stopped. Some Christian writers repeat the number “hundreds of cases” almost like a mantra.

I do not doubt those people. If someone in terror calls on the name of Jesus and an experience ends, praise God. That fits very well with the biblical pattern that Christ has authority over every power and principality (Colossians 2, Ephesians 1).

The problem is what people do next.

They turn a set of testimonies into a universal law: If the entities leave when you invoke Jesus, they must be demons. Therefore, all aliens are demons. Meaning, every real experience of “aliens” will end when you rebuke them in the name of Jesus.

That last jump is where the wheels come off. Once you claim “this always works,” you have stepped into falsifiable territory. If even one person, in a genuinely similar experience, cries out to Jesus and nothing immediately changes, the universal claim is done. Now you are stuck blaming the victim’s faith level instead of admitting your theology was too neat.

And here is where the broader data starts to matter.

Abduction Research Does Not Support A Jesus Only “Off Switch”

Ann Druffel spent decades as a UFO researcher and wrote How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction. She is not a Christian apologist. She catalogued a whole list of resistance techniques that experiencers reported as effective:

•Mental struggle (forcing yourself to move a finger or toe, breaking paralysis)
•Physical struggle (fighting back instead of staying limp)
•Righteous anger and “protective rage” over loved ones
•Support from family members
•Metaphysical methods (visualizing shields, white light)
•Appeal to spiritual beings (including but not limited to Jesus)

In other words, the events sometimes stop when people pray, but also when they swear at the entities, when they get furious and push back, or when they visualize protective light. In one summary of Druffel’s work, prayer to Jesus “helped somewhat,” but intense verbal threatening, meditative techniques, and other methods “accomplish the same result” as mental struggle.

That does not fit the claim that “they only flee from the authority of Christ, therefore they must be demons.” The pattern looks more like this: Entities back off when the person’s will snaps out of passive terror and becomes focused, resistant, and intentional, whether that focus is Jesus, rage, or some New Age visualization.

And then you have the other hard problem Christians almost never talk about publicly: People who sincerely pray, love Jesus, and still report long-term harassment or repeated experiences. For them, the “one and done” story simply does not match reality. Some Christian researchers quietly admit this and pivot to explanations about “legal rights” or “hidden sin,” which only proves the point. The Rebuke Test is not a clean, universal diagnostic after all.

So at best, “calling on Jesus” is one of several mechanisms that can interrupt whatever is happening. At worst, some folks are cherry-picking the success stories and building a whole demonology while ignoring everything that does not fit.

The Bible’s Universe Is Way Bigger Than “Angel Or Demon”

Now let’s talk theology. Because the other half of the problem is not the data, it is the tiny grid people try to force it through. For many modern Christians, the unseen world has exactly four categories:
•God
•Angels (all identical, all beautiful, all good)
•Satan
•Demons (all identical, all ugly, all liars)

That framework is not from Scripture. It is from flannelgraph and pop culture.

When you actually read the Bible on its own terms, you get a crowded, layered, and frankly weird cosmos.

The heavens are not empty.

Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” That is not just clouds. In Hebrew, “the heavens” includes the sky, the stars, and what we would now call deep space.

Nehemiah 9:6 goes further: “You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve all of them, and the host of heaven worships you.”

There is a “heaven of heavens” that has its own “host.” That word is used for starry armies and for intelligent beings. So from the start, the Bible is comfortable with a universe full of life, visible and invisible.

Jesus Himself says in John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” Some theologians, like Fr. Thomas O’Meara in Vast Universe, argue that this picture of “many stations” fits a creation where God loves to fill space with life, not leave most of it sterile.

The Vatican’s own astronomers have said openly that discovering alien life would not threaten the faith, and that such beings would be treated as part of God’s creation, possibly even as “extraterrestrial brothers.”

So when Christians insist “there cannot be any other intelligent life, therefore aliens have to be demons,” they are defending a small universe, not a biblical one.

The Divine Council And The “Zoo” Of The Unseen Realm

The scholars who helped popularize the “Divine Council worldview” (most notably Dr. Michael Heiser, author of The Unseen Realm, Angels, Demons, Reversing Hermon) point out that the Hebrew word elohim does not just mean “God with a capital G.” It is a term for beings whose primary home is the spiritual realm.

Scripture applies "elohim" to:

• Yahweh Himself
• Members of God’s heavenly council (Psalm 82:1, “God has taken His place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgment”)
• Disembodied human dead (1 Samuel 28:13)
• Territorial beings over nations (Deuteronomy 32, Daniel 10)
• Other spiritual beings, both loyal and rebel

So “angel” is a job description (messenger), not a species. There are many kinds of elohim. Just like “mail carrier” tells you what someone does, not whether they are American, German, or Brazilian.

The Bible also distinguishes different categories of rebels: Sons of God or Watchers who cross boundaries and take human women (Genesis 6, referenced in 1 Enoch, 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6). They appear embodied, technologically savvy, and capable of teaching forbidden knowledge, which sounds more like the “ancient astronaut” template than a whispering poltergeist. Nephilim, the giant hybrid offspring, biological and violent. Demons, the disembodied spirits of those hybrids in Second Temple tradition, restless, roaming, and obsessed with inhabiting bodies.

Demons in that framework are not the same thing as fallen angels. They are body-hungry leftovers. Which leads to a key point: Demons are portrayed as disembodied beings desperate to occupy biological hosts. They do not fly hardware and run breeding labs. They cling to nervous systems.

So if some “grey” style entities are in fact real, physical, repeatable occupants of craft, the biblical categories that fit better would be the Watchers type, or lesser members of the “host of heaven,” not demons in the New Testament sense. In short, “all non-human intelligences are demons” is not biblically accurate. It is spiritual shorthand that collapses an entire spiritual ecosystem into one word.

Biblical Beings Are Already Weirder Than “Aliens”

Another thing you often hear is “they look creepy, so they must be demonic.” As if God’s loyal servants are contractually obligated to look like chubby babies with wings.

Read Ezekiel. He sees living creatures that are part human, part animal, covered in eyes, surrounded by glowing intersecting wheels that move without turning. They shine like burnished metal, flash like lightning, and change direction instantly. That is Ophanim and Cherubim territory. Those scenes read like high strangeness before you ever get to Roswell.

If a modern fighter pilot reported: “A spinning wheel, metallic, full of lights like eyes around the rim, moving in any direction without banking,” we would call it a UFO. Ezekiel calls it part of God’s mobile throne.

Seraphim are “burning ones,” serpent-like, with six wings. In Numbers 21 the same Hebrew word refers to fiery serpents that bite the Israelites. Reptilian, winged, luminous, weird.

None of that is cute or familiar. Yet Scripture calls them holy.

So “it looked strange and non-human” is not a solid test for “demonic.” God’s own throne room is full of beings that would get labeled as monsters on a modern internet forum.

So What Do We Do With The “Aliens Are Demons” Crowd?

There are some fair instincts hidden inside the bad argument. They are right that powerful non-human entities can lie, deceive, and lead people into false religion. They are right that Christ has authority over every unseen power. They are right that some experiences marketed as “benevolent aliens” look a lot like updated versions of old occult contact.

Where they go off the rails is when they take one tool of discernment and pretend it is the whole toolkit. If abductions sometimes stop when people call on Jesus, that is perfectly consistent with His cosmic lordship. But once the same kinds of experiences also stop through righteous anger, profanity, New Age shielding, or simply breaking sleep paralysis with physical struggle, you can no longer claim “see, they only respond to the name of Jesus, therefore they must be demons, therefore all aliens are demons.”

The data itself refuses to stay in that small box. And Scripture refuses to stay in that small box. It shows a vast, populated creation in heaven and on earth. It shows a Divine Council with multiple ranks and roles. It differentiates between angels, Watchers, hybrid offspring, and demons. It describes holy beings that look more “alien” than anything on a Netflix documentary.

So the honest Christian answer to the alien question is not “they are all demons, full stop.” It is closer to: We live in a universe filled with visible and invisible creatures that Christ made and rules. Some are loyal, some are hostile, some are probably neutral. If non-human intelligences are visiting or interacting with us, they belong somewhere in that hierarchy. Our job is to test the spirits, refuse deception, and keep our loyalty with Jesus no matter what walks out of the shadows or out of a craft.

That still gives you spiritual authority, but it does not pretend that a slogan and a handful of testimonies are enough to map the entire cosmos. The heavens declare the glory of God. Not the comfort of our favorite talking point.

Humans are not the center of the universe; Christ is.

A few years ago, I traveled to hear Timothy Alberino speak in Nashville. During the Q&A someone asked about alien abductions and spiritual warfare, and Alberino said something that hit me harder than almost anything else I heard that weekend. He said, “You cannot rebuke a grizzly bear in the name of Jesus.” Everyone laughed, but the point was sharp. A grizzly bear is not a demon. It is not a fallen angel. It is not a spiritual entity. It is a physical creature living within the boundaries of its nature. If you walk into its territory and it charges, shouting the name of Jesus is not going to magically rewrite the world’s operating system.

The authority of Christ is absolute, but it does not turn natural threats into spiritual ones. It does not turn a bear into a demon simply because the encounter is frightening. That moment stuck with me because it exposed the flaw in the “rebuke equals demon” logic. People assume that if invoking Jesus does not immediately work, something is wrong with the victim. Or they assume that if it ever works, the entity must be demonic. Alberino’s illustration ripped that apart. We do not get to determine an entity’s nature based on one type of response. Not every threat is spiritual warfare. Some things are biological, paraphysical, or simply part of a larger creation that is bigger than our categories. And that ties directly into what Alberino argues in his book Birthright.

Christians Are Not the Center of the Universe

In his book, Birthright, Timothy Alberino confronts a quiet but deeply ingrained theological assumption. Many Christians have been taught that humanity is the center of creation. Everything exists for us. Everything in the cosmos orbits around human importance. Alberino dismantles that idea from the ground up. Colossians 1:16 says that everything in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities were created by Jesus and for Jesus. The point is not subtle. The universe was not made for humans. The universe was made for Christ. We are not the main character in the cosmic narrative. We are supporting actors in a story that began long before Adam and extends far beyond Earth.

What sets humanity apart is that Adam was created in God's image. That does not imply we are the only intelligent beings God made, only that our purpose and identity are rooted in something unique.

That is the part most modern Christians never wrestle with. They build a worldview where humans are the absolute center, angels exist to help us, demons exist to fight us, and anything non-human that shows up must be one of those two categories. Alberino’s point is that Scripture never teaches this. The Bible presents a populated universe centered on the supremacy of Christ, not the supremacy of humanity.

So when people say “aliens must be demons,” what they really mean is “we assume creation revolves around us, so anything non-human must fit into a human-centered theological box.” But the Bible’s story is much older, wider, and grander than the narrow lens of human self-importance.

Once you grasp that creation exists for Christ rather than for us, the idea of other intelligences or other species of spiritual beings stops being a threat. It becomes exactly what Scripture already says. A cosmos filled with thrones, dominions, hosts, watchers, living creatures, and sons of God, all created through Him and for Him.

And that realization does more to expose the weakness of the "aliens are demons" claim than any rebuttal ever could.

Why This Matters

Because if Christians keep clinging to a tiny, two-category universe, we are going to be blindsided the moment something steps into the open. The world is already preparing for disclosure, contact, or at the very least, a massive cultural shift around the UFO conversation. People are hungry for answers. They are looking everywhere except the Church because the Church keeps repeating slogans instead of doing the hard work of discernment.

This matters because immature theology creates fear. It traps believers in a reactionary mindset where anything unfamiliar must be demonic, and anything complex must be ignored. That kind of fear does not honor Christ. It does not prepare His people. It does not reflect the cosmic scope of the Scriptures we claim to believe.

It matters because the Bible already gave us categories large enough to handle a populated universe. It already told us that creation was built for Christ, not for human comfort. It already described beings stranger than anything on a UFO documentary. Ignoring that does not make us faithful. It makes us fragile.

Most of all, this matters because deception thrives in small worlds. When Christians limit the unseen realm to angels and demons, they lose sight of the bigger story. They stop testing the spirits. They stop thinking critically. They stop anchoring themselves in the authority of Christ over all things seen and unseen.

A mature believer does not panic when faced with something unfamiliar. A mature believer recognizes that Christ rules the entire hierarchy of creation, visible and invisible. So the question is not whether aliens are demons. The question is whether the Church is ready to think biblically when the world demands an answer.


Resources:
1. Timothy Alberino
• Birthright

2. Dr. Michael Heiser
• The Unseen Realm (Expanded Edition)
• Angels
• Demons

3. Ann Druffel
• How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction

4. Fr. Thomas O’Meara
• Vast Universe

Note: Some of the resources listed above use affiliate links, which help support the work of The Iron Remnant at no extra cost to you.