JD Vance is a believer in aliens and demons (Photo by Drew Hallowell/Getty Images)
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During his Friday appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance opened up about UFOs, expressing his personal belief that aliens are “demons.”
Vance’s unexpected comments drew bemusement on social media.
Vance isn’t the only White House official who wants to believe—the Trump Administration’s recent registry of aliens.gov is suspected to be the first step of President Trump’s promise to release “Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” due to “tremendous interest shown.”
What Did JD Vance Say About Aliens And Demons?
On Johnson’s podcast, Vance described himself as “obsessed” with UFOs, but said he was too busy to visit Area 51 and start investigating. However, Vance assured Johnson that he would eventually find answers.
“I’m more curious than anybody,” Vance said. “And I’ve got three years of the very tippy-top of the classification. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
Vance then casually referred to aliens as “demons,” prompting further inquiry from Johnson.
The vice president went on to explain that reports of extraterrestrial activity fit neatly into the framework of his Christian faith.
“Celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people, I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything as otherworldly—to describe it as aliens. I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain,” Vance said.
Vance concluded his theory by stating that one of the “devil’s great tricks” is to convince people that he “never existed.”
It’s a startling statement from the vice president of the United States, but then again, we live in strange times, and UFO sightings are taken more seriously than they used to be.
Over the last few years, several congressional hearings have investigated claims of extraterrestrial sightings, with no exciting conclusions to be drawn (although, some sightings remain unresolved).
Former president Barack Obama recently went viral after expressing his own belief in aliens to podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen.
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51.” Obama said.
Obama’s comments sparked a frenzy of online speculation, prompting him to clarify his beliefs via an Instagram post, writing:
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Vance might be attempting to go viral too, but he isn’t alone in dubbing extraterrestrials “demons.”
Alien Folklore Is Becoming Stranger
Aliens, demons and other supernatural creatures have long crossed paths, melded together in the strange, extremely online soup of conspiratorial folklore.
Early alien sightings were associated with physical craft, the unknown disks spotted by pilots described as “flying saucers” in the late forties, but the sixties and seventies saw an increasing amount of believers and skeptics refer to alien encounters as spiritual experiences.
After all, the technical explanations start to sound increasingly silly over time—how many UFOs are going to crash-land on Earth before they fix their navigation systems?
Like Obama, many scientists are confident that life exists on other planets, but have no reason to believe that interstellar travel is possible, or that aliens have visited Earth.
By recategorizing aliens as demons, believers are free to speculate, beyond the realm of logic.
Nowadays, influential commentators such as Tucker Carlson regularly refer to aliens as “demons.”
Carlson even has a story about being scratched by some kind of alien-demon entity while sharing a bed with his wife and four dogs (he claims the scratches were not caused by the dogs, but the internet isn’t sure about that).
As government interest in alien sightings grows, the legitimization of the phenomenon has led to UFOs being renamed UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), but it hasn’t quite stuck.
The counter-cultural elements of UFO folklore are starting to fade as the government embraces the mystery, but perhaps Vance’s beliefs will inject some old-fashioned fire and brimstone into the topic.
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