Your understanding of incentives is backwards. Politician's stock portfolios aren't fixed in stone. They can sell their Oil & Gas and then short it, or more importantly invest in whatever single company they would steer the commercialization of a new power source to. Defense stocks go up, not down, when people discover there is a new threat we need to arm ourselves against with newer weapons because the old ones were inadequate. And major religious organizations wouldn't suffer at all if aliens exist - I know of no major religion that denies the existence of alien life. Meanwhile, during turmoil, more people turn to religion.

> No more tithing or mandatory donations to a god when there are now species from another planet coming and going as they please, and are likely thousands of years ahead of us.

While certainly there would be tension caused by the canonical issues, I don't think people will stop making pleas to what they perceive as higher powers. I would expect that such a shocking revelation would cause more people to flock to the church because they suddenly realize how small and powerless they are.

Yes, but the whole thing about "(insert deity of your choice here) made man in his own image" that seems to be quite prevalent throughout most major religions gets debunked almost immediately if there's some bipedal creature that predates our entire civilization showing up in a hyper-advanced spacecraft.

There are no higher powers if someone rolls up being able to do what our current understanding of physics calls magic or has no way to explain it.

As someone raised southern baptist but no longer religious, they'll just change the meaning behind the phrase.

"He made us in his own image in the sense of our spirit"

"He is imperceivable and therefore He may take many forms" (I.E. when God was a flaming bush)

Or my fave, "He works in mysterious ways".

The church will adapt as it always has for millennias.

Agreed. The various scriptures would simply be reinterpreted to align with our current understanding.

Even if some scripture explicitly stated that aliens do not exist, the existence of aliens would not disprove, or even diminish the possibility of the existence of God. From the perspective of practitioners it would simply mean that whoever wrote that scripture misunderstood what was told to them. In other words, man is fallible, and easily forgiven for misinterpreting the word of God. I honestly believe that the arrival of aliens wouldn't even prove to be a minor speed bump for organized religion.

"Surely THIS piece of logic will be the one which topples the concept of Religion"

Successful conspiracies seem hard to keep a cap on when they get too big. If this is the first leak of something true related to actual materials, it could spur the few non-evil congressman to dig further and cause further leaks. If this is a true conspiracy and they had complete control, all of this UAP stuff wouldn't have popped up in the media and in congress in the past few years.

Nah it would spur the evil ones more. Knowing what companies got tech access first would be worth billions when insider trading.