> Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing.
I like Camus, and most would categorize my philosophical beliefs as some breed of Nietzschean, but I think it's very important to develop a deep an understanding of other attitudes as possible, and I don't think this is generally true. For example, CS Lewis is widely loved by evangelicals [1] and he literally wrote fiction laying out how he thought aliens would fit within that cosmology[2]. There is really nothing in particular that would change theologically. Of course it may change things culturally.
More interesting to me, and what I was referencing, is that many evangelicals (and others, famously the orthodox Seraphim Rose) interpret UFO activity as spiritual phenomena, and attribute it to demons. Some of these works are certainly thought-provoking, if you can suspend your preconceptions going into them. [3] Certainly if I am to believe in the reality of the underlying incidents and were forced at gunpoint to attribute it to intelligent entities, I actually find the idea of "demons messing with people because they hate us" more persuasive than the absurd utopian idea that aliens are using their magic tech to fly across the galaxy so they can "uplift" us or any of the other nonsensical motivations usually given.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-man-thinking-cs-lewis_b_8...
[2] His space trilogy.
[3] Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in particular has an interesting chapter or two about this. What I found particularly intriguing is the idea that the actual incidents are not actually new, with descriptions of historical parallels, and we're simply interpreting ancient phenomena in a different way due to cultural changes, and the brief analysis of the psychological impact of UFOs, which is almost uniformly very negative to witnesses.