Vice President JD Vance says he plans to dig through the federal government's most tightly guarded UFO files, and he doesn't expect to find little green men. He expects to find something darker.
In a podcast interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, Vance made a blunt confession: he believes the phenomena most people call aliens are actually demons. "I don't think they're aliens. I think they're demons anyway," Vance said, framing the remark through the lens of his Catholic faith.
The comments land at a moment when the Trump administration has signaled real intent to pry open decades of government secrecy around unidentified aerial phenomena. President Trump declared on Truth Social in February that he would direct the Secretary of War and other agencies "to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs)." Vance appears eager to follow through.
When Johnson asked him point-blank, "You gonna release all the UFO files?", Vance didn't dodge. "Ah, we're workin' on it," he replied.
But his interest goes well beyond a policy checkbox. Fox News Digital reported that Vance said he "was obsessed with the UFO files" when he first took office and that he intends to "get to the bottom" of the matter. That language echoes earlier remarks Vance made on the Ruthless Podcast, where he laid out his curiosity in plainer terms.
The New York Post reported that Vance told the Ruthless Podcast hosts he planned to spend part of the August recess investigating the topic further. "Like I'm obsessed with the whole UFO thing," Vance said on that show. "'What's actually going on?' 'What were those videos all about?' 'What's actually happening?'"
He promised to report back if he found anything.
That was months ago. Now Vance is going further, publicly tying his pursuit of classified UAP information to a theological worldview that puts him squarely outside the usual Beltway script on the subject.
Vance didn't toss off the "demons" line as a joke. He explained it at length. As the Washington Examiner detailed, Vance grounded his argument in religious tradition, saying every major world religion, "including Christianity, the one that I believe in", acknowledges that "there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain."
He continued:
"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."
Vance capped the thought with a line borrowed from Christian apologetics: "the devil's great tricks is to convince people he never existed."
Agree or disagree, the vice president was making a specific intellectual claim. He wasn't mocking the idea that unexplained aerial phenomena exist. He was challenging the reflexive secular assumption that anything unexplained must be extraterrestrial rather than spiritual. For a politician of Vance's stature to say that on a nationally distributed podcast takes a certain nerve, and reveals how seriously he treats both the subject and his faith.
Vance's comments don't exist in a vacuum. President Trump has put the weight of his office behind declassification efforts. His February Truth Social post left little room for ambiguity:
"Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!"
That directive puts a marker down. For decades, the federal government's posture on UAPs ranged from denial to studied indifference. Congressional hearings in recent years cracked the door open, but actual file releases have been slow, grudging, and heavily redacted. Trump's statement signals the White House wants the process to move faster.
Newsmax noted that official government reviews, including those by the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and NASA, have reported no verifiable or conclusive evidence that UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin. That finding cuts two ways: it undercuts the alien hypothesis, but it also raises the obvious question of what exactly the government has been hiding behind classification walls if the answer is supposedly "nothing interesting."
Vance isn't the only senior figure in Trump's orbit who has taken the UAP question seriously. The New York Post reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his time in the Senate, said in 2023 that some officials had "first-hand knowledge" of an alleged secret Pentagon crash-retrieval program. Rubio treated the claims as credible enough to warrant investigation.
That track record matters. When a vice president, a secretary of state, and a president all publicly express interest in the same classified topic, the bureaucratic machinery has a harder time running out the clock.
Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker has also weighed in publicly, discussing the disappearance of a retired Air Force general with ties to UFOs and other cases of top scientists reported missing or dead. The Fox News Digital article referenced Swecker's appearance on "Jesse Watters Primetime" in connection with those cases.
Strip away the headlines and the predictable social-media reaction, and Vance's position is straightforward. He wants the files opened. He wants the public to see what the government has. And he personally suspects that the phenomena, whatever they are, fit better inside a framework of spiritual warfare than one of interstellar travel.
That second part will strike secular Washington as eccentric. But Vance is a Catholic who has spoken openly about the role faith plays in his thinking. His willingness to say "demons" on a podcast, without hedging or laughing it off, reflects a man who takes his religion at face value rather than treating it as a campaign accessory.
The policy question is simpler: will the files actually come out? Trump has ordered the process to begin. Vance says the work is underway. The American public has been promised transparency on this topic before and received very little.
Conservatives have long argued that government secrecy breeds corruption and erodes trust. The UAP file question is a test case. If federal agencies possess information about unexplained aerial phenomena, whether the explanation is foreign technology, natural events, classified U.S. programs, or something stranger, taxpayers funded the collection of that information and deserve to see it.
The reflexive instinct of the national-security bureaucracy is to classify everything and release nothing. That instinct served the country during the Cold War. It has since become a habit that protects institutional reputations more than national security.
Vance and Trump are pushing against that habit. Whether the vice president's theological interpretation proves right is a question for philosophers and priests. Whether the government can keep stonewalling the public on what it knows is a question for elected leaders willing to use their authority.
The government has had decades to explain itself. If it takes a vice president who believes in demons to finally pry the vault open, so be it.
