Are UFOs Actually Demons in Disguise?

Speaking on a podcast earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance—a convert to Catholicism—theorized that UFOs might be a demonic trick.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” Vance said. When asked to expand, he noted that “every great world religion, including Christianity, the one I believe in, has understood there are weird things out there. . . there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there.”

Vance made sure to note that his views weren’t grounded in any sort of secret information to which he was privy, saying he had not had time to dive into any confidential government information about UFOs. But the idea that UFOs should be seen through more of a religious lens than a strictly scientific one is not new, and one we’ve even touched on earlier.

As we close out this four-part series about what everyday Americans should think about UFOs, we are joined by two people who have put a lot of thought into the religious aspect of all this: Diana Pasulka and Ross Douthat.

Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is the author of American Cosmic, which examined UFOs as both a religious and nuts-and-bolts technological phenomenon. She has visited the scene of a supposed UFO crash site in New Mexico looking for the elusive hard evidence of intelligent life beyond our planet. A practicing Catholic, Pasulka also combed through Vatican archives looking for clues as to what these things might be. Her new book, out in July, is The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.

Douthat, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, is a UFO-curious Catholic himself. After President Donald Trump promised to release the government’s UFO files in February, Douthat wrote about his four big questions on the subject for the White House in a Times essay.