“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.

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.

RD: I’d put it this way: To the extent that I had an interest in the subject, it was primarily along some of the same lines as, I think, where Diana started out as an academic researcher on this subject, where I’m a Catholic, I’m interested in religion, and I’m interested in religious experience. I think there are ways in which elements of the UFO phenomena look sort of like characteristic—but at the same time, extremely bizarre forms of—spiritual and supernatural experience of the sort that would fit pretty comfortably inside a kind of William James–style account of the varieties of religious experience.

So that was sort of my baseline. And the reason I have become more interested in it, without achieving the level of expertise that Diana enjoys, is that the strange thing about the last five or 10 years is that a lot of people, both inside the government and around the U.S. government, have acted like there is something a little bit more objective associated with this. It’s not just something that you would analyze in terms of people’s subjective experiences. There are mystical experiences, there are weird encounters, but there might be something more concrete.

And I don’t have a coherent theory of what that concrete thing is. But it’s a very strange world where my sense is that people as diverse as Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio think that there might be something sort of hidden inside the vastness of the U.S. national security state related to this phenomena. I’m interested in it more than I used to be, because I feel like people in the government who are themselves not conspiracy theorists or anything like that are also very strangely interested in it as well.

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Gallaudet is a man with serious credentials. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he is the former head of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, has worked on anti-submarine warfare, ran the Naval Observatory, and eventually became the acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He’s also one of the most outspoken proponents of the idea that not only are UFOs real, but the government is hiding the truth about them. “We’re being visited by some kind of higher-order intelligence that we don’t understand,” Gallaudet told me. “And it’s happening often, frequently, in our airspace and in our water and in space.”

Gallaudet recalls participating in a naval exercise off the East Coast in 2015 and finding that pilots flying off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier, were not only seeing UFOs but getting so close that officers like him became worried about a midair collision. These sightings produced the famous GoFast video of a UFO, which the Pentagon later said was an object that appeared out of the ordinary due to an effect called motion parallax.

Gallaudet, who says his correspondence about the object was mysteriously wiped from his computer, is far from convinced by that explanation. And he’s particularly curious as to why so many UFOs appear to be flying over water and in some videos, appear to be disappearing beneath the waves. “If they want to remain unseen,” he told me, “that’s the place they would be.”

As you’ll see, Gallaudet is sincere in his beliefs. He’s testified before Congress about what he’s seen. He and his wife, a fellow oceanographer, are still on the lookout for more proof that UFOs are real. They are true believers, and Gallaudet is not at all shy about expressing his convictions. He says what the government has disclosed so far is “a fraction of the tip of the iceberg of what we’re really seeing day to day.”

In this episode, we also talk about former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who told Congress he regularly encountered UFOs while flying his F-18 fighter jet, as well as the accounts of other military whistleblowers like former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, former Army Colonel Karl Nell, and former Department of Defense officials Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo.

Now, this episode does get a bit freaky. We do discuss, for example, the possibility that Atlantis is not just real but findable. If you want to hear from someone who is a good deal more incredulous about this phenomenon than Admiral Gallaudet, be sure to check out my interview last week with professional skeptic Michael Shermer. You can also watch my interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

But, again, Gallaudet is a serious man and a former flag officer in the U.S. Navy. And he’s coming out with a new memoir about his experiences, Holding Fast in Heavy Seas: Leadership for Turbulent Times. He is worth listening to as we try to get to the bottom of all this ahead of President Donald Trump’s promised disclosure of UFO documents. Watch the video above, or check out a condensed and edited partial transcript of the interview below.

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The president’s announcement, at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, pushed the conversation about UFOs yet another step closer to the mainstream and further away from the swirl of conspiracy culture, even though Trump also sounded like he hasn’t made up his own mind about what to believe. “I figured this was a good crowd because I know you people, you’re really into that,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t know if I am.”

Why did the president treat the UFO announcement so lightheartedly? Was he trying to lower expectations? Or send a signal that he isn’t alarmed by what the government has found? What should we be looking for when the documents are released?

One person with a lot to say about the last question is physicist Avi Loeb. In the second part of this four-part series, the longtime Harvard University professor explains why he keeps an open mind about extraterrestrial visitation and what Americans should make of this phenomenon.

Loeb became a scientific celebrity in 2017 after the discovery of ‘Oumuamua, the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system. Most of Loeb’s colleagues were thrilled about the discovery but content to reason that it was likely a comet or meteor. Loeb, intrigued by ‘Oumamua’s unusually flat shape, proposed that it might be an alien artifact. While the scientific establishment criticized Loeb’s reasoning, he was undeterred, and has since suggested that another interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, could be some sort of alien craft.

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