Carlos M. N. Eire is a Cuban-born American historian and the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. A specialist in late medieval and early modern Europe, he writes on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, popular piety, death and the history of the supernatural. His scholarship on miracles and the "impossible" has made him a voice on religion in the UAP disclosure debate, and he serves on the advisory board of the Disclosure Foundation.

Eire was born in Havana in 1950. In 1962, at the age of 11, he and his brother left for the United States among the roughly 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children airlifted under Operation Pedro Pan. He earned a bachelor's degree in history and theology at Loyola University Chicago in 1973 and a doctorate at Yale in 1979, taught at St. John's University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and joined the Yale faculty in 1996.

His books include War Against the Idols (1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (1995), A Very Brief History of Eternity, the prize-winning survey Reformations (2016) and a 2019 biography of Teresa of Ávila. He reached a wide audience with Waiting for Snow in Havana, a memoir of his childhood during the Cuban Revolution that won the 2003 National Book Award for Nonfiction, followed by Learning to Die in Miami. They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2023) examines early modern accounts of levitation and bilocation, including the flying friar Joseph of Cupertino and the "Lady in Blue" legend of María de Ágreda. Eire wrote that he could not dismiss the testimony about Joseph's levitations as lies or mass hysteria, while holding that historians cannot settle whether anyone actually flew. The book won a 2024 American Academy of Religion award for excellence.

Eire spoke on religion at the foundation's 2026 Disclosure Forum in Washington on June 25, lecturing under the title "Religious Implications: The Impossible Made Real." The foundation later paraphrased his view that credible confirmation of non-human intelligence would not make religion disappear but would lead it to incorporate the phenomenon. Quoted in TIME that August, he said Christianity would face a particular hurdle because of its teaching that God became human, while noting that Jews, Christians and Muslims already accept that humans are not alone in creation: "There have always been angels."

On July 30, 2026, the foundation published A National Preparedness Framework for the Human Consequences of Disclosure, a policy brief Eire co-wrote with psychologist Jennice Vilhauer and former defense intelligence official Christopher Mellon. It urges a task force within the Department of Health and Human Services and an unclassified national preparedness strategy within 120 days. Eire's contribution brings a historian's long view of how societies absorb claims once considered impossible to a policy debate usually dominated by intelligence and defense voices.