Vance turns from war and shutdown politics to UFOs
JD Vance spent part of the weekend talking about something that, for once, was not the war in Iran, rising prices, or the continuing mess at US airports. On the conservative Benny Show podcast, released Saturday, the vice-president said he plans to dig into his long-running interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors.
The conversation came as the conflict in Iran continued, petrol and grocery prices kept climbing, and a partial government shutdown carried on disrupting airports. Vance, who has largely stayed quiet about Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East and is said to oppose it, was asked whether he had looked through any of the files on unidentified flying objects, now often called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, that the president has promised to release.
“I actually haven’t,” Vance said. “I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.”
'I think they’re demons anyway'
The discussion then moved, inevitably, into the question of what these supposed visitors actually are. Vance, who presents himself as a devout Christian, said his thinking is shaped by religion.
“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said.
When Johnson asked him to explain, Vance offered a brief theory that mixed celestial mystery with Christian doctrine.
“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 said.
“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, is the Christian understanding that, you know, there’s a lot of 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.”
Washington’s latest round of alien theater
Vance’s comments and his promise to “get to the bottom of it” arrived just as both Trump and former president Barack Obama were being pulled into the same familiar debate over what the government knows about UAPs.
Obama was forced into a quick clarification last month after telling the American podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens were “real.” A social media statement sent out hours later said he had simply meant to keep pace with the rapid-fire questioning, and that if aliens were real he “saw no evidence during my presidency.”
Trump, not one to miss a chance to join a conversation already drifting into the absurd, posted on Truth Social that he had ordered agencies “to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life… and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting, and important, matters”.
Earlier this month, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency registered the web domains alien.gov and aliens.gov and added them to the official government website registry, which promptly set off another round of speculation about what the government may or may not know.
Asked whether the files would actually be released, Vance kept his answer short.
“We’re working on it,” he said.
