OK, so the CharisMAGA crowd is currently abuzz with talk of UFOs and aliens and thus, in their scheme, of spiritual warfare and demons and “Nephilim.”
Before we get into what set all this off and dive into how this oddball wing of American Christianity is handling this topic, let’s just remember that the possibility of extraterrestrial life is not wholly alien to mainstream Christian theologians. Plenty of thoughtful, reasonable Christians have considered many different aspects of what it would mean for us Christians from Earth to encounter intelligent beings from somewhere else in this vast universe. Read up on the Vatican Observatory or check out C.S. Lewis’s “space trilogy” and you’ll see that this is not some startlingly new idea or some obvious existential threat to all that Christians believe.
Again, lots of thoughtful Christians have given this a lot of thought for a long time and they have a lot of fascinating, deep, intriguing ideas about what contact with extra-terrestrial intelligent life would mean in terms of our earthly theology (and, for that matter, in terms of the theology of our newly discovered neighbors).
But none of that has anything to do with this story. This is just a televangelism-meets-The Weekly World News freak-show freak-out.
What happened was, allegedly, some “influential pastors” were invited to a meeting where they heard from “people from the government” about the impending disclosure of government secrets about evidence of alien life, alien spacecraft, UFOs, UAPs and, it seems, everything the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files was so eager to cover-up and deny.
“End-times prophets say we’re about to find out aliens are demons,” Rick Pidcock writes for Baptist News.
“The rumors are real,” pastor Mike Signorelli wrote on X. “I was brought into a private briefing with other pastors. No phones, no cameras, no recordings. We were told plainly: Disclosure is coming, and what follows will shake the faith of many. If pastors don’t start preparing their people now, it will be too late.”
Pidcock notes that “the idea of the U.S. government meeting in an Airbnb in the backwoods of Tennessee with a group of Pentecostal pastors to tell them to warn their parishioners not to be deceived by the imminent alien disclosure” seems unlikely, but these YouTube pastors and “prophets” all insist that is what happened.
“There were a large number of pastors that had been invited to go to a certain state to hear some men in the United States government and others share with them a concern that they had,” began pastor Perry Stone.
He recalled his friend who was in attendance telling him, “Perry, what they’re about to release — from what we’re hearing, there’s going to be a release concerning aliens and concerning unidentified flying object spacecraft that some of the people who were in the meeting were telling us as pastors, you need to prepare your people and you need to get ready to answer them for what you’re about to hear being released.”
It might be easy for many to dismiss Perry’s claims as the rantings of someone pretending they’re in the know. But Perry is friends with White House Faith Advisor Paula White and ministers with her often. Given the fact that he actually does have connections to the government, it doesn’t seem likely he’d feel the need to completely make up his connections to the government.
And he’s not the only one. … Bishop Alan DiDio of Revival Nation Church affirmed, “I was in this meeting, and it’s absolutely true.”
He clarified in a later video that there were actually two separate meetings. He said his understanding was that Perry Stone was referring to the first meeting, in which DiDio was not in attendance.
He called it “the strangest meeting I’ve ever been invited to in my life.”
“So imagine me in this situation,” he began. “Someone I know who has extensive experience within the armed forces, I shall say, tells me about the legitimacy of this meeting and invites me to this meeting. I go to this Airbnb in the middle of nowhere Tennessee, on a dark, it was at night, on this dark road in the middle of this neighborhood, and I’m asked when I get on the property to turn my phone on airplane mode. This is weird, guys. This is not sensationalizing it, it is sensational, it’s weird. And we go into this meeting with, I don’t remember all the people who were there … but I know Mike Signorelli was there, I know that Joseph Z was there, I know Ben Hughes was there, and I think Fred Price was there. There were a few others there, so between a half a dozen to a dozen, something like that.”
He said, “The people in the meeting who were leading the meeting have access to government intelligence and are in the know. And I believe they believe what they were telling us. And I believe they know what they were talking about.”
I have to disagree with Pidcock here. Perry Stone may be friends with Paula White, but he and the other CharisMAGA C-listers at this meeting are exactly the kind of people who “feel the need to completely make up their connections to the government.” And they’re exactly the kind of guys who’d fall for it every time if somebody flatters them with an invitation to a “secret meeting” with “the government.”
These are the kind of preachers and “prophets” that 20 years ago I would have described as far out on the fringes of charismatic and Pentecostal evangelicalism. But that’s what’s so fun about American Christianity in 2026 — what used to be the far-out fringe is now the mainstream. So it’s not just fringe YouTube “prophets” buzzing about UFOs and aliens and this supposed secret meeting warning of a disclosure day (that just so happens to coincide with the upcoming release of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day). It’s also members of Congress like Lauren Boebert, who has weighed in on social media with her thoughts about aliens and demons and the Book of Enoch.
Just take a look at Perry Stone’s YouTube video about all of this:
Stone tells us that the purpose of this secret meeting with secretive “people from the government” was to allow these pastors to prepare their followers for the shocking news about to be released, but instead of doing that, Stone suggests it’s all a conspiracy by, I suppose, a different, more nefarious group of people from the government spreading disinformation to deceive those about to be left behind by the imminent Rapture.
And then Stone hints at a half-dozens other conspiracies, suggesting that all of this makes more sense if you just accept the existence of a Luciferian kingdom in a pre-Adamic world as taught by the great theologian Finis Dake.* But Stone says he doesn’t have time to get into all that just now. He has too many books and DVDs and conferences to sell, please click the buttons to like and subscribe to his channel, etc.
Stephanie Jo Warren has a good discussion of how this new effort to make UFOs and aliens the next Big Scary Thing fits into a pattern for the religious right, and what we can expect as these YouTube preachers start mining the Book of Enoch and talking about “Nephilim.”
Or, I guess, really about the ghosts of the Nephilim, since that weird little biblical interlude is from Genesis chapter 6 and none of these biblical giants seems to have hitched a ride on Noah’s ark in the following chapters.
That passage in Genesis actually has very little to do with what these folks are getting at when they use the word “Nephilim.” The biblical Nephilim are dazzlingly weird. The folklore and pop-cultural expansion on that passage is much, much weirder. This quickly becomes a David Ickes meets Erich von Daniken meets Frank Peretti hodgepodge of human-alien-fallen angel hybrids. And no amount of “spiritual warfare” gloss can change the fact that such mythology ultimately becomes obsessed with bloodlines and ethnic purity and very quickly rips through “the antisemitic line of no return” like a sprinter crashing through the tape at the finish line.
Maybe it’s not incidental, or coincidental, that a bunch of white pastors met to discuss all this “in the backwoods of Tennessee” at the same time that other people from the government were rushing to reinstate a Jim Crow gerrymander in the state. That’s about the only recent news that Perry Stone does not cite as a “sign of the End Times,” but it sure seems like it’s a sign of something.
* Finis Dake was, among other things, the author of the Dake Annotated Reference Bible, an idiosyncratic commentary beloved by many Pentecostal preachers. Dake worked on that commentary for years, including during the six months he spent in prison for transporting a 16-year-old girl across state lines “for the purpose of debauchery.”
Oh, and Dake was also the author of a pamphlet titled “30 Reasons for Segregation of Races.” See, that’s the thing about loopy conspiracy theories involving a hollow earth or “pre-Adamic” civilizations. They seem like they might just be harmlessly bonkers, but scratch the surface even a little and it’s all antisemitism and white supremacy. That train is never late.
N.B.: Stone describes what he was told about this meeting as including information about “very strange reptilian-looking creatures and other things that almost sound like something out of a sci-fi movie or an Orson Welles book.” Stone thinking about War of the Worlds and subsequently mixing up H.G. Wells and Orson Welles might be the most relatable moment in this video.
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