A UFO expert has leveled accusations at the Pope, alleging that he is concealing “extraordinary” alien secrets within the Vatican.
Steve Bassett, a UFO lobbyist in Washington, insists that it's evident the Catholic Church is aware of the existence of alien life and has concealed evidence in their archives.
As the executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, Bassett pointed out that the church has subtly suggested the existence of UFOs in religious artwork.
He told The Sun: “The Catholic Church, we have always known, has been aware of this subject going back perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years.
“It's gone so far as to say whoever these beings are, the Church would be happy to baptise them if they wanted to be baptized.”
Bassett alleges that the Vatican library houses centuries of knowledge about aliens, with experts attempting to gain access to the Vatican Apostolic Archives.
However, they require permission from the Holy See, the supreme governing body of the Catholic Church. They will then need to sift through thousands of years of records, spanning 50 miles, to substantiate their claims.
This follows last year's statement by former intelligence officer David Grusch at a US congressional hearing, where he claimed the government was concealing evidence of “non-human intelligence”.
Grusch suggested that the US has likely been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s and possesses fully intact pieces of “craft” of a “non-human origin”.
He also mentioned that Italy discovered one of the UFOs in 1933, and Pope Pius XII at the time relayed the findings to President Franklin Roosevelt.
Bassett believes that this discovery could provide evidence that the US government was aware of extraterrestrial life before the infamous Roswell incident in 1947.
This event, often associated with conspiracy theories, suggests that a crashed US Air Force balloon was actually a UFO and only intensified Bassett's determination to delve deeper into the archives.
He said: “As far as I know, there have been many, many books written on the research of this phenomena and it's the first time I'd ever heard about this potential crash in '33.
“Who exactly found it? What was the process in which it finally got to us? What was the role of the Catholic Church? How many people in our government even knew about it at the point that Roswell happened?
“Obviously the people at Roswell didn't, because they put out a press release that they found a flying saucer so clearly that there was no significant impediment to putting that story out at the time.”
However, Marco Grilli, secretary to the prefect of the archives, expressed skepticism about Grusch's claims, telling Catholic News Service that he did not know where Grusch sourced his information, adding that “one can laugh at it”.
Religious professor Diana Walsh Pasulka also revealed that the Vatican is now teeming with accounts of paranormal occurrences.
She told CNS: 'The historical record is filled with these kinds of events, the people at the Vatican, they don't even know where to look; it's in their basements. But they aren't really prioritizing orbs that are bothering nuns in the 1800s.”