Don’t Panic!
If we discover alien life, many people think there will be mass panic. If we faced an alien invasion, clearly that would be true. But Professor Albert Harrison from the University of California suggested that the mere announcement of the discovery of alien bugs, or even of the detection of a signal from another civilisation, would have little effect. Opinion polls already show that large numbers of people believe in alien life, with many believing we’re already being visited. Add to this the fact that sci-fi movies have embedded the idea of aliens firmly in people’s minds. As an example, NASA announced in 1996 that they’d found a Martian meteorite containing evidence of fossilised life. President Clinton made an announcement, David Bowie’s song Life on Mars got a lot of airplay, but people got on with their lives. Even the alien autopsy film got a mention in Harrison’s presentation, as an example of hoaxes embedding belief of alien life in popular culture.
Religion
It’s often stated that discovery of other civilisations would undermine and shatter world religions. Delegates weren’t so sure. Professor Ted Peters, a theologian, briefed the meeting on some survey results that suggested that rather than undermining people’s religious beliefs – whatever their faith – it would strengthen them, by making God’s creation seem even bigger and more wonderful. Not everyone agreed. Paul Davies thought Christians, in particular, would have a problem, given their central belief that Jesus died to save us. If we discover other civilisations, it would raise the awkward question, why just us?
One amusing part of this presentation showed that the polling data suggested that generally speaking, people thought their own religion would cope, but that people from other religions might have some difficulty! In fact, the data and interviews showed little differences in how people from different religious denominations would respond – though the sample size for non-Christian respondents was quite small.
All this ties in neatly with what the Catholic Church has been saying recently. In May 2008 (at almost exactly the same time as the National Archives published the first batch of MoD UFO files) José Gabriel Funes, Head of the Vatican’s observatory, gave an interview where he said that extraterrestrial life might exist. He went on to say that “this is not in contradiction with our faith, because we cannot establish limits to God's creative freedom”. Some ufologists have suggested that this means the church “know something” and that, perhaps, they’re part of an Establishment plan to acclimatize the public to an extraterrestrial reality, prior to an official announcement – “Disclosure”. I suspect the church are just being canny and covering all the bases, in case something does turn up.
here are the last UK files to have been released. 
