Charlie Duke walked on the Moon in 1972, and nearly 55 years later the Apollo 16 pilot says the UFOs people keep reporting aren’t visitors from another planet. He thinks they’re demonic.
Duke, now 91, laid out the view in a recent CBN News interview with Billy Hallowell. He says UFOs are real, but their purpose is to pull people away from Christian truth. “The Lord says what we’re seeing is real, but the devil can appear as an angel of light, the Bible says. And so what I believe is the UFOs are trying to turn us away from the truth and run after these alien beings, which are really not beings at all. They’re demonic.”
He points to 2 Corinthians 11:14 for support. He also admits the belief hasn’t always landed well: “I felt like UFOs were demonic, but I was saying that at rotary clubs and stuff like that, and people were laughing me off the stage.”
Years ago, after enough of that skepticism, Duke says he prayed for a sign. He asked God that a specific businessman friend, someone who never talked about science or anything strange, would bring up UFOs at breakfast the next morning.
Duke says it happened, and he treats the timing as confirmation. The account rests on his memory alone, with no corroboration from the friend.
None of this traces back to anything he saw in space. Duke has said repeatedly that across his NASA career and his Apollo 16 flight he never witnessed a UFO or anything he couldn’t explain. The only odd thing he described was light flashes beyond Earth’s Van Allen belts, later confirmed to be cosmic rays hitting the retina.
His stance is a personal reading of faith. It is not a NASA position and not scientific evidence. Other Apollo astronauts have seen it differently, including Edgar Mitchell, who spent years promoting extraterrestrial contact and cover-up claims. Duke isn’t moved by any of it.
