interesting theory
It tells us a lot about Americans.
slate.com
Americans replacing their belief in God with a belief in the "Mysterious"
"
Overall, Americans are coming to embrace the paranormal in a multitude of ways. Bader’s polling found that a majority of Americans believe in hauntings—a 16-point increase from 2005—and belief in psychic powers, while still relatively low, has roughly doubled in the past 15 years or so. These beliefs, he said, have been slowly but steadily growing.
As Bader sees it, one of the main reasons behind the general American embrace of the strange and paranormal is the long-running and steady decline of religious institutions. Churches, he said, can often serve as a kind of dampener on paranormal beliefs: Part of the role of a denomination is to lay out a particular creed. That creed may be supernatural—God, after all, is beyond the realm of scientific proof—but institutional religious doctrine does not usually include any mentions of space aliens.
Now that fewer and fewer people attend religious services, “it’s common in surveys to find someone who says, ‘I believe Jesus is the one and only son of God, and also my house is haunted, and there might be a Bigfoot,’ ” Bader said. “People didn’t use to believe all those things. Churches would say, ‘Here is the correct package of supernatural beliefs you’re allowed to hold.’ ”"
.....
"There’s a common misconception, he said, that Americans are becoming godless secularists; the reality, instead, is that Americans are leaving organized religion in droves but remaining
believers, in some way or another."
...
"What does it all add up to? The American response to unexplained aerial phenomena is clarifying—not about what’s in the sky, but for who we are: mistrustful people, lovers of the paranormal, eclectic in our beliefs, and trigger-happy (in word if not in deed). The New Jersey drone mystery may or may not get a clear explanation. But it has already told us something important about ourselves"