Brother Guy Consolmagno is an American planetary scientist and Jesuit brother who directed the Vatican Observatory from 2015 to 2025 and is often called "the Pope's astronomer." A specialist in meteorites and asteroids, he has argued for decades that discovering life elsewhere would not threaten Christian belief, while remaining skeptical of claims that aliens have visited Earth. That combination has made him a frequently quoted Catholic voice whenever extraterrestrial life or UFOs are in the news.

He was born in Detroit on September 19, 1952, and attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 and 1975 and a doctorate in planetary science from the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 1978. After research and teaching posts at Harvard College Observatory and MIT, he spent two years from 1983 teaching astronomy and physics in Kenya with the Peace Corps, then became an assistant professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

Consolmagno entered the Society of Jesus in 1989, took vows as a brother in 1991 and was assigned to the observatory, where he curated the Vatican meteorite collection and in 1996 joined a meteorite-hunting expedition in Antarctica. Pope Francis named him director in September 2015, and he served until 2025, when Fr. Richard D'Souza succeeded him; he is now director emeritus and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. He has published more than 70 refereed papers on meteorites, asteroids and the evolution of small Solar System bodies, received the Carl Sagan Medal for public communication from the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in 2014, has asteroid 4597 Consolmagno named for him, and in 2025 began a term as president of the Meteoritical Society.

His books on faith and science include Brother Astronomer (2000), Intelligent Life in the Universe? (2005), on Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (2014), written with his fellow Jesuit Paul Mueller. He has said that "religion needs science to keep it away from superstition," and he places any alien beings within the same creation as humanity, a position that runs through the wider Catholic discussion of extraterrestrial life and UAP.

On May 13, 2026, the program Vatican Access released an interview in which Consolmagno, described as a member of the SETI Institute advisory board, discussed UFOs days after the U.S. government's first release of UFO files. In clips shared by UFO accounts he said the evidence for alien visitors was no better than in 1948, criticized unreliable testimony and authors selling books, and described belief in aliens as a substitute religion. He also drew on Thomas Aquinas and G. K. Chesterton to describe possible aliens as fellow creatures of God. The religion scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka responded to the interview two days later. The episode showed him in his familiar public role: an astronomer who supports the scientific search for life beyond Earth but sees no case that visitors have already arrived.