We’re definitely living in very weird times, and the Overton Window has shifted on so many topics – but I gotta say, hearing the current Vice President of the United States JD Vance straight up announce that he believes UFOs are actually demons made me do a serious double-take:
Responding to interviewer Benny Johnson’s question on the topic of UFOs and aliens, Vance responded:
I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons. Anyway, that’s a long story…
I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people, I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything 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.
And I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra natural phenomenon, that’s where I go to, is the Christian understanding that, there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there. And I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.
Earlier, Vance had told Johnson that when he first came into office, he was “obsessed with the UFO files. And then you start getting really busy worrying about the economy and national security and things like that. But I’ve still got three more years as vice president. I will get to the bottom of the UFO files.” To do so, Vance considered going to Area 51 and to New Mexico, but “the timing of the trip just didn’t work out.” But he asked people to trust him, because “I’m more curious than anybody. And I’ve got three years of the very tippy top of the classification, I’m gonna get to the bottom of it.”
Those of us of a certain age will remember that Dennis Kucinich’s admission during the lead-up to the 2008 US election that he had seen a UFO was viewed by many as a massive faux pas in his bid for the Democratic nomination. Less than 20 years later, it seems admitting to UFO belief (demonic UFOs, but still UFOs) is now something politicians drop into interviews willingly.
Now, far be it from me to ascribe too much deeper meaning to anything JD Vance says, given his fungible, some might say sociopathic, personality, and willingness to say whatever he thinks his audience needs to hear, especially if it scares them into voting Republican (do the demonic UFO aliens eat people’s pets too?). And I might add, if he truly believed that UFOs are demons, perhaps he’d have ‘looking into the UFO files’ pretty damn high on his to-do list, given his supposed Christian beliefs and the apocalyptic threat that demons flying around our skies would therefore pose…
But Vance’s mention of ‘demonic UFOs’ certainly does raise an eyebrow given the growing mythology in recent years about an alleged shadowy cabal in the US government, known as the ‘Collins Elite’, who are said to believe UFOs are demonic in nature. The existence of the supposed fundamentalist Christian group within the Pentagon was first ‘leaked’ to UFO researcher and author Nick Redfern, and went on to form the main topic in his 2010 book Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife.
To the Collins Elite, the goal of UFO entities was to orchestrate a global paradigm shift: supplanting belief in God and Jesus Christ with the idea that they themselves were humanity’s creators, and ultimately ushering in the Antichrist and the battle of Armageddon. (Which, given Peter Thiel’s interest in the topic of the Antichrist, and his patronage of JD Vance, is a whole other thread somebody might like to pull on?)
More recently, those involved in the ‘Pentagon UFO whistleblowers’ scene have also made reference to similar ideas. In an interview with NewsNation in 2024, former US intelligence officer and UFO disclosure activist Lue Elizondo alleged that the Collins Elite is “alive and well”.
It exists. I encountered elements of that group firsthand. There are religious fundamentalists inside the Pentagon and inside the U.S. government — and specifically the intelligence community — that have a very strict interpretation of their philosophical belief system.”
He recounts one specific encounter with a high-ranking member of the so-called Collins Elite — a conversation that sounded like a threat to him.
“Someone stopped me in the halls of the Pentagon and said, ‘Have you read your Bible lately?’ And I was kind of surprised by the question. ‘I know what the Bible says. What, may I ask specifically, do you mean?’ He says, ‘You know, what we’re dealing with are our demons. These are demonic beings. And we shouldn’t be looking at them.’”
The idea that UFO occupants could be related to demonic entities has been explored for many decades now: As far back as the 1960s, UFO researchers such as Jacques Vallee’s (most notably, in his seminal Passport to Magonia: From folklore to flying saucers), were making a connection between elements of encounters with aliens, and folklore about fairies, demons and other supernatural beings of old. However, Vallee wasn’t so much saying UFOs were demonic, as saying that all these different phenomena might have a similar origin but manifest differently to us based on our beliefs.
(Religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal said as much to us as well in our recent interview with him, noting that people often try to explain these phenomena “through a religious belief system, so they’ll say it’s demons or it’s angels or it’s God or it’s whatever…you explain something by reducing it to your worldview.”)
But then from the 1970s, Christian fundamentalists started seeing UFOs and reports of alien contact as manifestations of Satan. It’s interesting to note how, up until this time, the appearance of the UFO phenomenon in the late 1940s had often been viewed as a possible mode of ‘technological salvation’ from nuclear war and/or environmental collapse – a higher intelligence coming to our rescue, determined to save us from ourselves. But that seems to have engendered an opposite reaction from Christians who then saw them as ‘false prophets’ of a kind, seducing us away from the only true saviour, Jesus Christ.
Religious scholar Christopher Partridge wrote about this development in his 2004 paper “Alien demonology: the Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities“:
[I]t is not surprising that those sections of the Christian community most vulnerable to satanic panics understand the extraterrestrial to be, quite literally, a demonic manifestation. As Ted Peters notes, ‘During the decade of the 1970s numerous magazine articles and books appeared that dramatically challenged the alleged existence of UFOs and depicted the entire phenomenon as a Satanic plot’ (Peters, 1995, pp. 197e198).
As with the demonisation of elves in late Saxon England, so extraterrestrials have been demonised in order to fit the good-evil dualism of the Christian world view. William Alnor, for example, makes the following statement: ‘I believe UFOs are real, but they represent a demonic delusion from the other side. I also believe that some of the flying vehicles they allegedly arrive in may be the work of fallen angels; they are not physical, but they are very real’ (Alnor, 1998, p. 160).
Randall Baer insists that ‘there is a profoundly potent force behind whatever the UFOs really are. That force is definitely demonic in nature and has extraordinary brainwashing effects on people’ (Baer, 1989, p. 109). Douglas Groothuis, operating with a similar hermeneutic of suspicion, writes: ‘Christians should reinterpret [extraterrestrials] as very possibly the malevolent masquerading of some very low demonic beings and monsters’ (Groothuis, 1988, p. 31).
Reflecting a key theme of Christian demonology, the purpose of these space demons, writes Frank Allnutt, ‘is to confuse people about the true source of salvation, the Lord Jesus Christ’ (quoted in Peters, 1995, p. 199). That is to say, continuous with Christian demonology, the principal purpose of the extraterrestrial is to interfere spiritually by tempting persons to look elsewhere for salvation, thereby disrupting their relationship with God.”
Whether his comments were inspired by decades-old Christian UFO literature, or a shadowy cabal within the Pentagon, with JD Vance just a (failed) heartbeat away from becoming the most powerful person on the planet we should probably pay some attention to this strange belief: It could be being used purely for propaganda purposes, pushing those interested in the topic of UFOs towards fundamentalist Christian base, or it could literally be because JD Vance thinks UFOs are about to usher in the apocalypse. Which, given he might soon have his hands on the nuclear football, would be concerning…
