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 thinkthey’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’veeven 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 ofreligious studiesat the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is the author ofAmerican 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, isThe Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.
Douthat, a conservative columnist forThe 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 Housein aTimesessay.
Watch the video above, or check out a condensed and edited partial transcript of the interview below.
Will Rahn:How did you become interested in UFOs?
Ross Douthat:I would say that I had never had really strong interest in what gets called UFOlogy, or anything associated with the landscape of abduction narratives or any of that stuff, really at all until the late 2010s, when my own newspaper,The New York Times, published a series of stories on the subject. But the core thing that got published was footage from Navy pilots and national security footage, basically showing what people are supposed to call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
Will Rahn:We just call them UFOs here.
Source: Drudge Report
