In Brief: Vice President Vance Thinks UFOs Could Be "Demons" or "Angels"

In an interview with the New York Post, Vice President JD Vance said that he believes UFOs could be either angels or demons and speculated that flying saucers may be supernatural forces that intend to harm humanity. "​I’m a big believer that there are things out there that we can’t explain. And so if another person sees an alien, maybe I see an angel or a demon. So, I’m a big believer that there are like spiritual forces working on the physical world that a lot of us don’t see and a lot of us don’t understand and a lot of us don’t appreciate."

Vance made the comments to the Post's Pod Force One podcaster Miranda Devine, who described herself as a "mad UFO-lunatic," a description Vance said also applied to him. Vance, a Catholic convert, added that he does not know the origin of UFOs but interprets them through a religious lens.

“Is it aliens or is it our guardian angel, or is it aliens or is it a not so guardian force that doesn’t care about us or in fact actively wishes us harm?” Vance continued. “I don’t know the answer to that question. What I try to do is I try to say my prayers, I try to be as good of a person as I can be and I try to do a good job. And, hopefully, that’s all I need to do.”

Religious believers have interpreted UFOs as demons or angels since 1947, when Kenneth Arnold reported that a pastor had warned him that flying saucers were demonic only days after his famous UFO sighting kicked off the flying saucer craze. Derived from the Biblical description of Satan as the "prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2), the idea of flying sky demons traces back to the Nephilim, whose souls, in the apocryphal texts like the Book of Enoch and Jubilees, were turned to demons and allowed to fly through the air to menace humanity.