Where The Space Aliens Live, According to Mormon Prophets

God, in constructing these materials into creations and worlds, has done it for a wise and noble purpose. The great purpose that He had in view was that intelligent beings should occupy these creations. No law was given to our Earth and its materials, or to the planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the various asteroids, merely for the sake of giving laws; but the Lord had a useful design in view, namely, to add to His own glory and to the happiness of millions of His sons and daughters who should come to people these other worlds I have named.” Elder Orson Pratt, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in Wonders of the Universe

Mormonism has its eyes on the stars. By the middle of Joseph Smith’s career, he had crafted a unique cosmology, placing his nascent religion into the physical universe. No vague metaphysical definition of God here — Heavenly Father has a physical body, travels the stars, and lives on a solid planet, just like we do. Extraterrestrials live in other planetary systems, each with a unique God and — as per the Mormon temple ceremony — a bespoke creation story.

The rest of us heathens yearn for First Contact. Look at all the breathless pop science articles alleging that astronomers have discovered proof of alien life. Odd radio signals, mysterious asteroids, strange chemical signatures on Venus, and malfunctioning FLIR cameras on F-18 fighter jets all allegedly point to imminent First Contact. It’s faith, maybe, or the normal reaction to looking out at the stars and wondering why our fragile little world seems so profoundly alone.

But who needs radio telescopes when you have men (and only men, natch) that can see with their spiritual eyes and, filled with the glory of God, behold our cosmic neighbors? 

Mormon prophets opining about ET is the logical outcome of a theology attempting to position itself in the physical universe. Like us all, the prophets have looked at the stars, but instead of letting their minds wander into the void, they, with prophetic certainty, have pounded the pulpit and declared the cosmos inhabited. No mystery here. Jesus has made aliens.

Join me as we dive into the inhabited cosmos of Mormonism. Starting with the sun and heading out into the greater universe, we’ll look at where the aliens live, according to the Mormon prophets.

 "...we do not know how many inhabited worlds there are, or where they are. But certainly we are not alone." Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, 1990.

The Sun

The sun shouldn’t need an introduction. It’s bright, hot, and — depending on whether or not you believe Joseph Smith and Brigham Young — inhabited.

The legendary Boston mayor Josiah Quincy (please read the name as Bostonian would: quin-zee) visited Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844 as the Saints were constructing their new temple. Joseph Smith’s charisma impressed Quincy, leading the mayor to predict that Smith would become a notable historical figure. That said, Quincy also found Smith’s vibes bizarrely monarchical, and believed that Mormonism could only appeal to “feeble or confused souls who are looking for guidance.” 

The new Mormon temple, in particular, fascinated Quincy. It was a unique building, especially for the frontier. Among its peculiarities were the “sunstones," bizarre faces carved into a relief of the sun. The carvings have a squashed face as if a bee has stung the stone. A pronounced unibrow, puckering lips, and dead eyes further accentuate the uncanny valley-ness.

As Smith and Quincy toured the temple grounds, a stone carver looked up from his work on a sunstone and asked “General Smith” if the face came to the prophet in a vision. Smith concurred but pointed out that the nose was wrong.

An odd humanoid shape set on the sun… a Solarian, perhaps?

By the mid-19th century, the Saints, including their new prophet Brigham Young, were openly theorizing about sun dwellers. A Deseret News article from that year describes sunlight as coming “from the places where just and wise beings preside.” 

Brigham Young, from 1870:

“Are not all ignorant? I rather think so. Who can tell us of the inhabitants of this little planet that shines of an evening, called the moon?... When you inquire about the inhabitants of that sphere you find that the most learned are as ignorant in regard to them as the most ignorant of their fellows. So it is with regard to the inhabitants of the Sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is? Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain.”

Yet again, in his journal, and more unhinged:

“What is in the Sun? Can astronomers tell who lives there? No. Astronomers say it is 95 millions of miles from the Earth to the Sun and [yet] its heat is so great [that it makes] us want to get up on high ground. Now know that millions of inhabitants dwell there! [The Sun] is filled with the glory of the Gods.”

Here’s a little rant which FairLatterDaySaints (née FairMormon) provides as “context.” Presumably Young said this after somebody pointed out that sun beings are absurd:

“It has been observed here this morning that we are called fanatics. Bless me! That is nothing. Who has not been called a fanatic who has discovered anything new in philosophy or science?  I will tell you who the real fanatics are: they are they who adopt false principles and ideas as facts, and try to establish a superstructure upon a false foundation. They are the fanatics…”

Let’s leave the sun for now, we’ll come back to it, because the inhabited sun is a Mormon doctrine that has stuck around for longer than you’d think, up into the space age.

Mercury

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, has always been a challenge for astronomers. Being so close to the Sun makes it hard to observe from the ground, and its particular orbital characteristics make it nearly impossible to reach via spacecraft. The Sun pulls everything towards it, and the flight from the Earth to Mercury gives any spacecraft ample time to accelerate so quickly that it will overshoot the little planet. You need to fight the Sun’s pull and slow down to reach Mercury, but not too much, or else you can’t achieve a stable orbit when you reach the planet. Because of these unique challenges, only three spacecraft have reached Mercury: Mariner 10, MESSENGER, and BepiColombo. 

Mercury is a hell world, tidally locked with one side always facing the Sun. This side bakes in the nuclear heat, while the opposite side freezes. Not a pretty place to live, or so you would think. According to Mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow, this rocky slice of purgatory is inhabited and not by coffee drinking sinners.

John Heinerman recounts the story in People In Space. Heinerman is a fundamentalist Mormon alternative medicine kook who believes that garlic can cure basically everything. People In Space is a weird little book where he synthesizes UFO conspiracy theories with the teachings of Mormon prophets. I’ve taken it as inspiration for this article and the source for some of the following quotes.

Although Heinerman is clearly somebody with limited scientific credentials, I don’t see any reason to discount what he says about Mormon teachings. This isn’t a non-Mormon attempting to discredit the Mormon prophets. Heinerman believes in Joseph Smith just as much as any other Mormon.

Heinerman interviewed a woman named Lucille Snow Tracy in the 1970s. Tracy was the daughter of Lorenzo Snow, the fifth prophet of the Mormon church and a polygamist. In 1871 — when Snow was 57 years old — he married the 16-year-old Minnie Jensen. Decades later, Jensen gave birth to Tracy. Snow was in his mid-80s, which is how you have the daughter of a 19th-century polygamist alive in the 70s.

Earlier in his life, Snow was given a special blessing by Mormon founder Joseph Smith that promised him: “Thou shalt have power to translate thyself from one planet to another; and power to go to the moon if thou so desire.” Snow was always destined to travel the stars.

Tracy recounts that a month after Lorenzo Snow’s death, her sister had a vision of the dead polygamist. In the vision, Snow chatted away about visiting the planet closest to the Sun (Mercury) and meeting the strange inhabitants of the world. He said they were “awkward in their movements and backward in the manner in which they lived…” and being “of short stature tending to medium height…” 

In fact, Snow compared them to “Preadamites”, an old-timey Mormon name for early hominids. An obscure debate has raged for years among Mormon leaders as to whether Adam and Eve were really the first humans on Earth, or whether the early hominids can work with a creationist theology. Astral Lorenzo Snow confirmed that the early hominids existed, and people like them are living on Mercury.

The Moon

While Joseph Smith was elusive about the sun, he was pretty clear about the existence of Lunar ETs.

Moon inhabitants found their way into Mormon theology pretty early. Oliver B. Huntington, an associate of Smith’s, reported in 1892:

“As far back as 1837, I know that he said the moon was inhabited by men and women the same as this Earth, and that they lived to a greater age than we do — that they live generally to near the age of 1,000 years. He described the men as averaging near six feet in height, and dressing quite uniformly in something near the Quaker style.”

Also in 1837, we have a record of Mormon leaders giving Patriarchal Blessings. In these ceremonies (which in Joseph Smith’s time you could experience for a fee of $1), Mormon men called patriarchs to channel the voice of God to foretell the future of the blessing recipient, a practice that survives into modern-day Mormonism. Blessings in 1837 promised prominent Mormons the power to teleport to other planets for missionary purposes. Lorenzo Snow got such a blessing.

Philo Dibble, the awesomely named Joseph Smith superfan, also recorded being told that the moon had 6 foot tall alien Quakers living on it. Another early Mormon remembered Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith’s brother, bluntly confirming that “the Sun & Moon is inhabited & the Stars.”

Hyrum Smith even allegedly wrote and published a pamphlet about the Lunarians but in the astral plane. John Powell recorded a vision in which Hyrum Smith visited him and handed over a pamphlet called A History of the Creation of the Moon & Its Inhabitants. The pamphlet included an illustrated depiction of the moon's creation, but since it exists in the spiritual realms, we can't confirm its existence.

Smith wasn’t the first mid-19th century New Yorker to theorize about lunar inhabitants. In 1835 New York Sun published a series of articles about supposed life on Earth. Presaging Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast, the authors presented the information as cold scientific truth. The articles were read widely, eventually becoming known as the Great Moon Hoax. Unlike Smith, the authors of the Hoax said the Lunarians were like bat-men. Edgar Allen Poe also attempted to start his own Moon Hoax that same year with a fictional short story about a lunar explorer discovering Lunarians.

Stargazers have theorized about moon people for years, with rumors perpetuating even today, even though the moon is well surveyed. An example: the Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 spotted a weird boxy rock (nicknamed the “Mystery Hut”) in 2021. People jumped right to the alien conclusion, comparing the sighting to the TMA-1 anomaly depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, further photographs proved the Mystery Hut was just a weird rock.

Yutu-2 never claimed to be a prophet, though.

The City of Enoch in Space (And Super Earth)

While less well-known than other Biblical prophets, Enoch has his own fan club of religious misfits. Despite only getting a few verses in Genesis (or perhaps because of the esoteric mystique), theosophist Helena Blavatsky connected the antediluvian patriarch to her magical system. Apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books have fleshed out Enoch’s life, including Joseph Smith’s contribution to the genre The Pearl of Great Price.

According to LDS theology, Enoch founded a city so righteous that God took the whole metropolis physically from the Earth, only to return before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The city was called Zion, a name Joseph Smith also used for a hypothetical utopia of the Saints and the reason you can get a checking account at Zions Bank or test your fear of heights at Zions National Park.

So where was Zion before its fanciful journey, and where is it now?

Answer to the first question: the Gulf of Mexico. As per Wilford Woodruff, the fourth prophet of the LDS church: “Joseph also said that when the City of Enoch fled and was translated it was where the gulf of Mexico now is. It left that gulf a body of water.”

And where is it now? As you probably guessed: in space!

Elder Orson Pratt, who we’ve run into a few times now, taught in 1854 that:

“However far the Zion of Enoch may be from the Earth’s appointed orbit, it is certain, according to the promise of God, that it will return again to the Earth at the Second Coming of Christ. We can hardly believe that this city was taken away beyond the limits of the Solar System.” 

I imagine the city looking like the Hyrule Temple map in Super Smash Bros: Melee, floating somewhere in space but not beyond the heliopause. Zion didn’t instantly zoom into interplanetary space — it slowly rose into the sky, as if God was careful to not pulp his righteous city dwellers in a high acceleration maneuver.

A 1922 edition of the Mormon periodical Millennial Star reported that the City of Enoch was still floating in the upper atmosphere during the time of the Tower of Babel, around 2000 BCE, in the Young Earth creationist LDS chronology. The author, George Laub, speculated that the Tower was built in an attempt to reach the floating city.

Apostle Heber C. Kimball, one of Joseph Smith’s closest friends, said that Smith gave Zion’s altitude at the time at around 70 miles. That’s not in the upper atmosphere. The official point at which the Earth’s atmosphere gives way to outer space (the Kármán line) is set at 62 miles, making Zion Earth’s first orbital habitat, around 4,000 years before the Soviet Salyut 1. Since then, it’s been a-wander through our solar system, evading all forms of detection.

This isn’t the only time God has flung chunks of the Earth into space. Eliza R. Snow, a polygamist wife to the first two Mormon prophets, wrote in her diary that Smith taught her the Earth was 90 times bigger when it was first created.

Where the hell ninety Earth masses are flying around in the modern solar system is anybody’s guess.

The Planet of the Lost Tribes

According to the Bible, when the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel in 722 BC it embarked on a mass deportation campaign. The Israelites were a confederation of twelve tribes, but through deportation, only two remained within the original Israelite territory. The rest were moved across the Euphrates and integrated into Assyrian society. 

A key belief in Mormon eschatology is that these tribes will return from their exile before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. When Joseph Smith wrote down the key beliefs of his new church he included: “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes.” This doctrine survives today. Mormon children recite the line above, the current prophet Russell Nelson talks about it frequently, with the missionary program seen as the tool to accomplish this prophecy.

But where exactly are the Lost Tribes? According to the early church leaders, they are on their own planet.

Traditionally the story starts something like this: The Lost Tribes, after their conquest, started to wander North, eventually finding themselves inside the Arctic Circle. As per Elder Orson Pratt, they “evidently had a highway made for them in the midst of the Arctic Ocean and were led to a land in the neighborhood of the North Pole.”

Once up North, they were, according to Joseph Smith, sent into outer space. Here’s a quote from Charles Lowell Walker’s journal about the journey. Also, note that the Papyrus mentioned was the document from which Joseph Smith “translated” the Pearl of Great Price, but Walker references teachings on the Lost Tribes that don't appear in the modern standardized version of the book.

“Brother Joseph Smith gave a very interesting lecture on the scattering and gathering of Israel. Said that the Papyrus… gave an account of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel… also a diagram showing their present location [in space], also of the City of Enoch.”

Like the city of Enoch, the Lost Tribes were moved physically, on a chunk of Earth. From Daniel Allen:

“...Joseph further said that men might hunt for them but they could not find them for they were upon a portion of this planet that had been broken off and taken away.” 

Martha Cragun Cox wrote down some more details about this planet:

“The Prophet said… that at the North Pole is a convex or cup-shaped [depression] with the deepest sea resting there. The planet that belonged to that part of the world would in time return to its place, strike the Earth at the part, completing the sphere.”

Ok, ok, you might have some objections at this point. Why have we not found this extra planet? Wouldn’t two planets colliding create a cataclysm fit for a shitty Roland Emerich movie? Never fear, the Prophet is here to answer your questions.

Why can't we see it? 

“...they are hid from us in such a manner and at such an angle that the Astronomers cannot get their telescopes to bear on them from this Earth.”

Won’t this annihilate the Earth? As per Eliza R. Snow’s recollections, who we’ve met earlier: 

“... when the two planets or other objects are traveling in the same direction and one of them with a little greater velocity than the other, it would not be disastrous, because the one traveling faster would overtake the other.” 

This implies that the Planet of the Lost Ten Tribes is co-orbital with the Earth, which should make it easy to find. Eliza R. Snow also recorded that Joseph Smith pointed out the location of the planet, directly contradicting his other statement that it was impossible to see. Here’s how to find the planet on your own:

“... a twinkler to the right and below the Polar Star, which we would judge to be about the distance of 20 feet from here…”

Snow was smitten with this teaching, even going as far as to include a hymn about the Lost Tribes and City of Enoch planet in the 1873 Mormon hymn book. Of course, this one didn’t make the cut in later hymnals.

Abrahamic Worlds

The most famous unique Mormon planet is Kolob, which comes from the detailed Mormon cosmology in the Pearl of Great Price. I’ll be writing a separate article for this cosmology, so stay tuned.

Every Star, with Its Own Planetary System and Own God

Returning to the sun, the idea of LDS Solarians survived into the space age. Joseph Fielding Smith, who’s other wrong prophecies about spaceflight I covered here, theorized about sun inhabitants.

“It is my opinion that the great stars that we see, including our sun, are celestial worlds; at least worlds that have passed on to their exaltation or other final resurrected status. This is in conflict, of course, with the teachings of men, who declare that the sun is losing its energy and gradually cooling off and will eventually be a dead world. I do not believe the Lord has any such thing in his plan. The Lord lives in ‘everlasting burnings’ we are informed. President Brigham Young has said that this earth when it is celestialized will shine like the sun, and why not?” (Doctrines of Salvation 1:88-89)

This teaching has some interesting implications for Mormon theology. The celestial kingdom and resurrection of the dead will only happen after Jesus Christ returns. Seeing as he hasn’t, according to JFS this has already played out on other worlds. If JFS is to be believed (and he is considered a prophet to the Mormons), the sun is the result of another planet going through its own End Times and Final Judgement. JFS also taught that each star system has its own God.

“…the great universe of stars has multiplied beyond the comprehension of men. Evidently each of these great systems is governed by divine law; with divine presiding Gods, for it would be unreasonable to assume that each was not so governed.”

Mormon theology doesn’t believe in one God overseeing the whole universe. Rather, each system has its own Divine Being, Elohim only covers ours. The Voyager probes and two Pioneer probes have now left our star system and are traveling through interstellar space, making them the first manmade objects no longer under the influence of the Mormon God, allegedly.

This isn’t some esoteric doctrine from the past. I listened to a General Authority teach this in a private meeting in the early 2010s, and the doctrine still survives in the secret Mormon temple ceremony’s retelling of the Genesis creation myth. Elohim and Jesus confront Satan after Adam and Eve eat the fruit and have this exchange. Emphasis mine:

ELOHIM: Lucifer, [Lucifer returns.] what hast thou been doing here?

LUCIFER: I have been doing that which has been done in other worlds.

ELOHIM: What is that?

LUCIFER: I have been giving some of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to them.

Venturing back into the realm of real astronomy, Joseph Fielding Smith’s insistence that the sun is not cooling is obviously completely incorrect. All stars cool during their lifetimes and evolve into different states. Our sun will become a red giant before losing its outer layers and exposing its core. At this point, it will be a white dwarf star, a stellar remnant. This process will happen, it’s an outcome of entropy ultimately. If JFS is right (he’s not), then stellar remnants and evolved stars don’t exist, so here’s three images that are anti-Mormon lies.

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover: The lines here are data from CP 1919, the first discovered radio pulsar. Pulsars are rapidly spinning, magnetized neutron stars. Since neutron stars are the collapsed core of a supergiant star, this image is a deception of Satan, according to Joseph Fielding Smith.

Event Horizon picture: This is the first direct image of a black hole, taken in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope. Black holes are stellar remnants, so once again, they can’t exist if stars don’t evolve. Common Mormon folklore tells that black holes are the location of Outer Darkness, the ultimate hell for apostates. This cannot be the case if JFS is right.

V838 Monocerotis picture: This stunning picture of a red giant and its dust cloud is a bitter lie, designed to deceive the Saints of the true nature of the universe. It’s so sad to not be able to look out into the stars without having to deny the existence of these beautiful structures because of a paranoid fear that Satan will deceive you.

That’s it. That’s where the aliens live if you believe the Mormon prophets. I don’t, so I’ll stick around for the only prophesied First Contact date I care about: April 5, 2063. Real ones know.