The Nation of Islam is an American religious movement founded in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, led from 1934 to 1975 by Elijah Muhammad and rebuilt from the late 1970s by Louis Farrakhan. Of its teachings, the one that enters UFO history is the Mother Plane, also called the Mother Ship, the Mother Wheel or simply the Wheel, a vast craft that the movement identifies with the wheel described in the opening vision of the Book of Ezekiel.

In Elijah Muhammad's teaching, the Mother Plane is "a small human planet" about half a mile across, carrying smaller "baby planes" that travel to Earth; an Associated Press summary of his writings described a manmade vessel orbiting the Earth and loaded with 1,500 planes or wheels. Scholars of the movement report its teaching that Fard Muhammad and his scientists live aboard, and Farrakhan has said that Elijah Muhammad himself is alive on the craft. The doctrine is eschatological: as scholars describe it, the Mother Plane is to appear above the Earth and take the righteous aboard while the baby planes place bombs whose detonation ends the existing world order, which the Nation identifies with white rule, before a new world is established. Elijah Muhammad expected this in 1965 or 1966, and the movement has taught that space programs and missile defense are futile defenses against the craft.

Farrakhan gave the doctrine a personal dimension. He has said that on September 17, 1985, at Tepoztlán, Mexico, he was carried up to "a Wheel, or what you call an unidentified flying object," and heard Elijah Muhammad speak to him there, an account he presented at a Washington press conference on October 24, 1989. Before the movement's 2011 Saviours' Day convention near Chicago, which included a panel on UFO sightings, national assistant minister Ishmael Muhammad told the Associated Press that the interest reflected a core belief.

Mattias Gardell's history of the movement documents the teaching in detail, Edward E. Curtis IV has discussed the Nation alongside other UFO religions, and the Mother Plane is a recurring case in research on UAP and religion. In a 2012 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Stephen C. Finley of Louisiana State University argued that the 1985 experience is the most significant religious event in Farrakhan's life, and he reads the Wheel as a counter-mythology that gives Black believers symbols to identify with; his 2022 Duke University Press book, In and Out of This World, examines how Farrakhan's Mother Wheel discourses shape his interpretation of Black bodies. Manhattanville College religion professor Jimmy Jones told the Associated Press in 2011 that the emphasis was "a way that the Nation of Islam defines itself."

Posts on UFO forums in 2026 revisited the doctrine, arguing that the movement talked about unidentified flying objects for decades before the subject reached the mainstream. Through Elijah Muhammad's writings and Farrakhan's 1985 account, the Mother Plane has remained part of the Nation's teaching across its modern history, and it is the main reason the movement appears in academic studies of UFO religion.