Vice President JD Vance, the second in line to the presidency, is sharing his unconventional, Christian-based theory on life beyond Earth.
“I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” Vance, 41, told far-right YouTuber Benny Johnson in an interview published on Saturday, March 28.
“Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people, I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens,” Vance, who grew up atheist but converted to Catholicism as an adult, continued. “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.”
He added, “And I naturally go, when I hear about, sort of, extra natural phenomenon … to 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 we never existed.”
Johnson — who in 2024 was discovered to be secretly funded by Russian state media along with a handful of ultra-conservative social media influencers — asked earlier in the wide-ranging interview if Vance and the current administration had plans to “release all the UFO files.”
“We’re working on it,” Vance responded, referring to President Donald Trump’s February claim that he would be directing the proper U.S. agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” all government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. (No such files have been released at the time of publication.)
“It’s funny. When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files,” Vance admitted. “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.”
While public interest in possible extraterrestrial life is far from new, the possibility that we are not alone in the universe has hit an arguable fever pitch after former President Barack Obama seemingly confirmed that aliens do, in fact, exist.
“They’re real,” Obama, 64, told political podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen on February 13, adding that while he knows extraterrestrial life is real he has not personally seen any evidence that could definitively prove their existence.
“But I haven’t seen them,” he continued. “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility — unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Two days later, Obama clarified his shocking comments via Instagram.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of [Cohen’s] speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” the former president said at the time. “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. I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
