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.
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.
