What is the true story behind unidentified flying objects seen in the night sky over every corner of the planet for generations?

Are they, as leading UFO expert Stanton Friedman insists, strange visitors from another planet, or planets, so advanced in technology they are equipped to zoom in and out of Earth’s atmosphere at will?

Does the secret actually lie within the spiritual realm, as some fundamentalist Christians maintain?

Many a Web site advocates the position that UFOs are nothing more than demon spirits, part of Satan’s army, released in the “last days” to delude earthlings and provide a convenient explanation for the antichrist to explain the Rapture of the saints just before the seven-year Tribulation unfolds.

In a recent telecast, noted biblical author Jack Van Impe touted this idea, but his staff didn’t respond to a request by The Register-Herald for a detailed account.

Nor was there any answer to a similar inquiry posted at the headquarters of Hal Lindsey, author of “The Late Great Planet Earth,” a best-seller on biblical prophecy in the early 1970s.

Friedman, a nuclear physicist, is a leading lecturer lined up for a two-day UFO summit this weekend in Charleston.

The Friday-Saturday event comes almost 55 years to the day of the invasion by the so-called “Flatwoods Monster” in Braxton County, one that inspired two books by Frank Feschino, another key speaker at the Charleston gathering.

Feschino will be autographing his latest effort, “Shoot Them Down,” chronicling what he says was an aerial battle along the Atlantic Coast between aliens and Air Force jetfighters.

Friedman says one of the bigger objections to getting the truth spread about UFOs in modern times has come from the fundamentalist camp.

He quoted the late Rev. Jerry Falwell as dismissing so-called aliens as “the work of the devil,” and insisting there is no intelligent life beyond Earth.

“What an insult to God if this is the best He could do,” Friedman countered in a Register-Herald interview.

A new film titled “Unidentified,” produced by a Christian filmmaking outfit, explores the demonic theory in fiction.

As two magazine writers dig into a sighting in a small Texas town, a veteran government worker whose former agency was involved in the UFO controversy for years before his conversion, tells them, “I think the world is going to end soon and we’re living in the last days. As Christians, we believe that the Rapture is the next big event on God’s calendar. The devil knows this and he’s going to do everything he can to explain the event away. Now, that’s where the UFO phenomenon really comes into play.”

A spokesman for John Hagee Ministries in San Antonio said he has heard the famed preacher’s sermons more than a decade but cannot remember any of them addressing UFOs.

“So I imagine that either he feels there is not much credence to the existence of UFOs, or that their existence is unverifiable, inconsequential in comparison to other, more pertinent issues, or a case of mistaken identify,” Edward Martinez said.

There is no mention of UFOs in the Bible as modern man understands the term, he said.