JD Vance Offers Up Bonkers Christian Theory For What UFO Sightings Actually Are—And The Side-Eye Is Real

Vice President JD Vance is being widely criticized after he claimed during an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson's podcast over the weekend that UFO sightings are actually "demons."

Vance said he is “more curious than anybody” about whether life exists on other planets, but offered his own Christian conspiracy theorist twist on the subject when asked about President Donald Trump's order to different agencies to "begin the process of identifying and releasing government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life."

He said:

"When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files, but then you start getting really busy getting worried 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."

When asked whether he had “peeked” at any of these files, he said:

“I actually haven’t. I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.”

"I've already had a couple of times where I'm like, 'Alright, we're going to Area 51, we're going out to New Mexico, we're going to get to the bottom of this, and then the timing of the trip just didn't work out. Trust me, anybody who's curious about this, I'm more curious than anybody and I've got three years of the very tippy top of the classification." ...

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion."

That final remark prompted Johnson to ask for clarification, and Vance replied:

"Well, look, I...I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people — I think that the desire to describe everything celestial… 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, you know, there's a lotta good out there, but there's also some evil out there. I think that one of the devil's great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”

You can hear what he said in the video below.

People were not impressed.

In 2013, the CIA formally acknowledged the existence of Area 51—though not the UFO crashes, extraterrestrials, or staged moon landings long associated with it.

Declassified documents referred to the 20,700-square-kilometer installation by name after decades of U.S. officials refusing to confirm it publicly.

In The Age of Disclosure, a 2025 documentary that alleges an “80-year cover-up of non-human intelligent life,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shown saying unidentified objects have been observed over nuclear facilities, adding that presidents have sometimes operated on a “need-to-know basis” to preserve deniability.

David Grusch, who served in various intelligence roles and combat in Afghanistan, claimed in 2023 that the U.S. government possesses and has been actively concealing multiple craft of "non-human" origin.

While the U.S. military has shifted its terminology to UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Grusch maintains the government and its contractors have been retrieving such materials for decades. According to The Debrief, the analyzed objects were determined to possess "non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin."

Grusch's claims are supported by similar reports from other sources, including a defense contractor who briefed Defense Department officials in 2020 on discoveries related to "off-world vehicles not made on this Earth," as reported by The New York Times.