Vice President JD Vance wants answers on UFOs, and he's giving himself a deadline: before he leaves office. In an interview released Friday on conservative commentator Benny Johnson's podcast, Vance revealed he is "obsessed" with the subject and plans to use his access to the nation's most sensitive intelligence to pursue it.
When Johnson asked whether the Trump administration would release all of its UFO files and whether Vance had "peeked" at any of them, the vice president was surprisingly candid.
"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'm going to get to the bottom of it."
According to The Hill, he admitted he hasn't looked yet. Not for lack of interest, but for lack of time.
"I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I'm obsessed with this."
Then came the line that will generate the most headlines. Vance said he doesn't think the unexplained aerial phenomena people keep spotting are extraterrestrial in origin. He thinks they're something else entirely.
"I don't think they're aliens, I think they're demons anyway, but that's a longer discussion."
That quote will be clipped, mocked, and stripped of context within the hour. It shouldn't be. Vance wasn't riffing. He was articulating a worldview shared by millions of Americans and grounded in thousands of years of religious tradition.
"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."
Vance described his instinct when confronted with phenomena that resist easy explanation. He said he naturally gravitates toward the "Christian understanding that, you know, there's a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there."
This is not fringe thinking. The idea that unexplained phenomena might have a spiritual rather than extraterrestrial origin has a long intellectual pedigree, from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis. Vance is simply saying what a lot of churchgoing Americans already believe: that the secular establishment's preferred framework, little green men from distant galaxies, isn't the only serious lens through which to view the unknown. The media will treat the "demons" comment as disqualifying. They always do when a public figure takes Christianity seriously in public.
The current wave of UFO conversation didn't start with Vance. It started with Barack Obama putting his foot in his mouth last month on a separate podcast, where he declared that aliens were "real." The next day, he scrambled to walk it back, posting a clarification on Instagram.
"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention, let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there."
He also said he "saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us."
So Obama said aliens are real, then said he hadn't actually seen evidence of them, then blamed the format of the interview. That's three positions in 48 hours. The man who once lectured the nation about "the right side of history" couldn't hold a consistent line on whether E.T. exists.
President Trump, ever the showman, seized the moment. A few days after Obama's flub, Trump pledged to direct the Department of Defense and other agencies to release their files about UFOs and "alien and extraterrestrial life" to the public. He also noted, referring to Obama, that declassifying the records "may get him out of trouble."
The White House registered the domain names "Alien.gov" and "Aliens.gov" earlier this month. Whatever you think about the subject, that is a government preparing to put something in public view.
The substance here matters more than the spectacle. For decades, the federal government has treated UFO-related information as something the American public couldn't handle. Classified programs operated in the dark. Congressional oversight was spotty at best. Whistleblowers were ignored or discredited. Both parties share blame for this, but the reflexive secrecy belongs to the permanent bureaucracy more than any single administration.
Vance mentioned he had previously planned trips to Area 51 and New Mexico, but the timing never worked out. That he's talking openly about using his classification access to investigate is, at minimum, a commitment to transparency that previous administrations never made with any seriousness.
Trump previously told reporters he did not know if aliens were real. That's an honest answer. Compare it to Obama's whiplash tour from "they're real" to "well, statistically" to "I was just doing a speed round." One administration is promising to open the files. The other couldn't keep its story straight for a single news cycle.
Whether the truth turns out to be extraterrestrial, spiritual, or boringly terrestrial, the American public deserves to see what its government has been hiding. Vance says he's going to find out. Three years is a long time at the very tippy-top of the classification. Plenty of time to look.