Both everyday life experiences and psychological theories, including neuroscientific approaches, suggest that individuals can be in affective states they are not consciously aware of. Still, psychological science has a hard time incorporating unconscious affective states as appropriate assessment procedures and concomitant data analyses are absent or scarce. Here we investigated whether existential threat in form of terrorism reminders induce unconscious affect in soldiers on standby for deployment to a country with an increased terrorism threat. To do so, we used an economical procedure for the indirect assessment of affect, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; , and contrasted it with a measure of explicit affect. Relative to reminding participants of a television evening, implicit negative affect was higher and implicit positive affect was lower after terrorism reminders. No significant effects were found for self-reports of negative or positive affect. The present study demonstrates the existence of unconscious affect as experimentally manipulated by existential threat and measured by the IPANAT. We discuss the findings with respect to situational factors that might moderate the degree to which affect becomes consciously aware or remains unconscious as in the present case.