Monsignor Stephen J. Rossetti spent years as the chief exorcist for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. Then he said out loud what he believed about UFOs, and his archbishop stripped him of the role.

In a message posted May 29 to the YouTube page of his St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, Rossetti warned that unidentified aerial phenomena are not visitors from distant galaxies but manifestations of something far older and far darker. The Pentagon had released its first batch of files on unidentified anomalous phenomena just weeks earlier, on May 8, urging the public to draw its own conclusions. Rossetti drew his.

The fallout was swift. Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., removed Rossetti as an archdiocesan exorcist and cut ties with the St. Michael Center entirely, AP News reported. McElroy said Rossetti's public statements "linking UFOs to demonic presence" and the center's social media activity "gravely undermine the Church's very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism."

The episode raises a pointed question: In a culture saturated with UFO speculation, government disclosure campaigns, and breathless media coverage of aerial anomalies, is a Catholic exorcist really the one who went too far?

What Rossetti actually said

Rossetti did not claim to speak for the Church. He was careful to note that his view is personal, not doctrinal. As The Christian Post reported, Rossetti told viewers plainly:

"There's no question in my mind, personally, again, this is not de fide, but it's my personal belief, that probably many, if not most, of these UFO sightings are, in fact, demons; and they can do things that we can't do, such [as] the speed and all sorts of things that human beings can't do."

He grounded the warning in his experience as an exorcist. Demons, he said, prefer to operate unseen.

"But there's a danger here... as an exorcist, I wanted to raise that danger: and that is that demons like to hide, they don't want us to know they're around. They don't want us to know what they're doing because they're more effective when we don't realize it. And they can kind of get into your head... and manipulate things in the world to influence us to do evil."

Rossetti described encounters with what he called "shadow men" and "beast-like creatures", phenomena he attributed not to extraterrestrial biology but to demonic entities capable of manifesting in the physical world. His conclusion was not panic but faith. He urged listeners to put on what Scripture calls "the armor of God," referencing Ephesians 6:12.

His closing message was direct and pastoral, not sensational. He told viewers to trust in Jesus and not to lose themselves in speculation about UFOs or what he called "friendly ghosts."

"Remember, our fight is against principalities and powers, evil spirits, Satan and his minions. But in the end, we trust in God. Just follow the rules; as I tell people, stay in the boat, follow the rules, they're there to keep you safe. The church is not trying to control you, they're trying to keep you safe from the evil one.... But trust in Jesus. We have a great joy in the Lord, and our eyes are fixed on Heaven."

He wasn't alone

Rossetti is not a lone voice. Father Chad Ripperger, an exorcist serving the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, made similar arguments during a March interview with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan. Ripperger said he had identified ten distinct parallels between reported alien abduction scenarios and the behavior of demons during cases of possession.

"So, if you strip the veneer of the alien aspect of it off, then in point of fact, what you're dealing with is just, they're just demons."

Ripperger went further, suggesting that some of the aerial craft seen moving in ways that defy known physics could be what he called a "diabolic mirage", rare but possible within Catholic theology. "A lot of this stuff, not all of it, but a lot of this stuff is just diabolic in nature," he said.

Christian apologist Gary Bates explored similar territory in his 2004 book Alien Intrusion, which examined UFO phenomena through a biblical lens. The argument that unexplained aerial encounters have a spiritual, not extraterrestrial, dimension has a longer history in Christian thought than most mainstream commentators acknowledge.

The broader context includes reports that Pope Leo XIV recently convened an exorcist delegation at the Vatican amid what has been described as a global rise in occultism. The Church, at least at the highest levels, appears to take the reality of demonic activity seriously, even if individual archbishops draw the line at connecting it to flying objects in the sky.

The archbishop's response

Cardinal McElroy did not dispute the existence of demons. Catholic doctrine affirms their reality. What McElroy objected to was Rossetti's public linkage of demonic activity to the UFO phenomenon, a connection the cardinal said undermined the Church's careful theological framework.

The New York Post reported that the archdiocese severed its relationship with the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal in addition to removing Rossetti from his exorcist role. The move sent a clear institutional signal: whatever exorcists may believe privately, public speculation about the demonic origins of UFOs crosses a line.

Whether that line is theological or political is worth considering. The Pentagon's May 8 document release invited public engagement with the UFO question. A group of charismatic pastors claimed last month that they held a clandestine meeting with U.S. officials who warned them to prepare their churches for disclosure. The names of those officials and pastors remain unidentified.

In that environment, a veteran exorcist offering a spiritual interpretation of the same phenomena seems less reckless than the cardinal's rebuke suggests. Rossetti explicitly labeled his view as personal belief, not Church teaching. He pointed people toward Christ, not conspiracy.

A culture losing its bearings

The broader pattern here matters more than any single priest's YouTube video. American culture is in the grip of a fascination with the unexplained that often bypasses the most obvious explanations, including spiritual ones.

Government agencies release files and invite speculation. Media outlets treat every blurry cockpit video as potential proof of alien life. Podcasters build audiences around abduction stories. And when a man whose actual job involves confronting what the Catholic Church identifies as evil says, "This looks familiar to me," the institutional response is to silence him.

The same culture that can barely bring itself to name evil when it appears in plain sight, whether in a father who spoke of demons before committing unspeakable violence against his own children or in the routine horrors that fill local news, suddenly finds the word "demonic" too provocative when applied to lights in the sky.

Rossetti's message was not a call to fear. It was a call to discernment. He told his audience not to worry about UFOs or aliens but to keep their eyes on Heaven. He warned that the real danger is not what flies overhead but what creeps into the human heart when people stop believing in the spiritual dimension of reality altogether.

That message sits uncomfortably in a secular age. It is even more uncomfortable, apparently, for some within the Church itself. But for millions of Christians who take Scripture at its word, who believe that the struggle described in Ephesians is not a metaphor, Rossetti was stating the obvious.

The question of whether churches are prepared for a moment of heightened public interest in the supernatural is not hypothetical. Reports of the charismatic pastors' alleged meeting with U.S. officials suggest that at least some in government think religious communities need to be ready. Meanwhile, churches face tangible threats that have nothing to do with the skies above.

Accountability runs one direction

There is something instructive about how quickly institutional authority moved against Rossetti. A priest who spent his career in one of the Church's most demanding and least glamorous ministries, confronting what his faith tradition identifies as real evil, was removed for offering a personal theological opinion on a YouTube channel.

Compare that speed to the institutional sluggishness that has defined so many other failures of accountability in American life. Politicians who shift their public persona depending on who is paying face no consequences. Bureaucrats who preside over policy disasters keep their jobs. Officials who mislead the public about everything from border security to inflation face no removal.

But a priest who says demons might explain UFOs? Gone within days.

Rossetti himself seemed to anticipate the tension. His closing words were not defensive. They were pastoral: trust in Jesus, stay in the boat, follow the rules. The Church, he said, is not trying to control you. It is trying to keep you safe.

Cardinal McElroy clearly disagreed about where the boundaries of that safety lie. Reasonable Catholics can debate whether Rossetti's public comments were prudent. But the substance of his warning, that a culture drunk on the unexplained should not forget the spiritual realities its own tradition affirms, is harder to dismiss than the archdiocese seems to think.

When the government opens the door to UFO speculation and invites the public in, it should not surprise anyone that men who deal professionally with the demonic have something to say about what might be on the other side.

The real question is not whether Rossetti went too far. It is why a culture so eager to believe in aliens is so reluctant to believe in the alternative.