JD Vance, the current vice president of the United States, recently reiterated his view that so‑called ‘aliens’ are in fact demons. He said:
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. And I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra-natural phenomenon, that’s where I go, is the Christian understanding that, you know, there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there.
Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Bill Maher’s show and affirmed that she believes in demons and that extraterrestrials could in fact be “fallen angels” cast out of heaven. What began as a conversation about UFO secrecy ended with Greene suggesting UFO entities might literally be demonic, leaving Maher visibly taken aback. These are not fringe pastors saying this on late‑night AM radio; these are well‑connected Republican politicians speaking in front of large national audiences.
Folklorists and anthropologists have long known how this kind of reasoning works. Marshall Sahlins famously argued that Hawaiians made sense of Captain Cook’s sudden arrival in 1778 by folding him into their existing ritual and mythic framework, identifying him with the god Lono because his timing coincided with a festival cycle devoted to that deity. Sahlins called this broader pattern ‘mythopraxis’: people use myths not just as stories about the past, but as active templates for interpreting and organising new historical events in the present. Mythopraxis is myth‑in‑action, a way of taking puzzling novelties and domesticating them by slotting them into familiar sacred scripts.
Sahlins’s thesis has sparked heated academic debate, with many scholars doubting that Hawaiians ever truly regarded Cook as Lono. Yet even if we acknowledge this dispute, the underlying idea remains anthropologically useful: communities often ‘recognise’ the unprecedented by assimilating it into what their symbolic universe already provides. In that sense, Vance is doing something structurally similar when he encounters reports of UFOs and “naturally” classifies them through pre‑existing Christian demonology.
This lens also illuminates the psychology of alien abduction and encounter reports. Scholars of religion and anomalous experience have long noticed the overlap between nightmarish encounters with demons and modern accounts of hostile extraterrestrials: beings who paralyse, violate, or terrorise sleepers, who seem to cross physical and spiritual boundaries, and who leave the experiencer both shaken and oddly certain something ‘really’ happened.
Historically, Western Christians spoke of incubi and succubi; in a more secular, technological age, the same broad phenomenology has often been reframed as grey aliens and abduction narratives. In all of these cases, hallucinations, hypnagogic imagery, and sleep paralysis loom as plausible mechanisms, but the interpretive frame – demon or alien – does the cultural work of making sense of the terror.
Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson argue in their book, The Exorcist Effect, that horror films and religious belief now interact in a recursive loop. The 1973 film The Exorcist, marketed as “based on a true story,” both drew on existing Catholic demonology and, in turn, reshaped how Americans imagined and even experienced demonic possession; cinematic tropes migrated into actual exorcism claims and practices. Laycock and Harrelson call this the “Exorcist effect”: religious ideas inspire horror media, and then horror media feeds back to intensify and standardise later religious experiences.
If we map that cycle onto Vance’s comments, things look even more tangled. Obsessions with demons are hardly new, but The Exorcist and its imitators have given contemporary believers a vivid, Hollywood‑inflected vocabulary for thinking about evil spirits. That visual and narrative repertoire can then be extended outward: once we have a ready‑made script about invisible malevolent forces invading bodies, it becomes easy to project it onto any ‘uncharted territory’, from psychological distress to unidentified aerial phenomena. Yet demons, at least in classical theology, are immaterial spirits that can move between bodies; Vance, by contrast, talks as if these entities might be fully corporeal, sky‑travelling agents that behave like aliens but are ontologically demonic. Logical consistency is not the point here; the point is to impose some narrative order on what feels mysterious and threatening.
From a human perspective, this is all understandable. Faced with ambiguous stimuli – lights in the sky, strange dreams, historical shocks – people reach for the interpretive tools their culture hands them. But with possible extraterrestrial life, the stakes are unusually high, and Vance is not just any other human being. He is the vice president of what is still the most militarily powerful nation on Earth, and he helps shape both intelligence priorities and public expectations regarding potential contact. The United States formally enshrines a separation of church and state, but when a sitting vice president publicly frames ambiguous aerial phenomena as demonic, the line between personal theology and potential policy framing begins to blur.
This rhetoric sits inside a wider MAGA subculture that is fascinated by the Devil, apocalyptic imagery, and end‑times scenarios. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, speaking from a very different social location, has given lectures warning of a coming Antichrist, presenting the twenty‑first century as a choice between a deceptive, peace‑promising “one‑world state” and an Armageddon‑style collapse. We do not know how literally Thiel himself takes such eschatology, but Vance’s comments sound far more literal: he appears genuinely inclined to parse anomalous aerial phenomena as the activity of evil spirits masquerading as aliens.
If extraterrestrial civilisations exist – a very large ‘if’ – we would need a cautious, level‑headed approach. The rational starting point would be diplomacy and information‑gathering, especially if the technological asymmetry many people fear actually exists. Framing hypothetical visitors as embodiments of absolute evil is a poor basis for first contact; at best, it distorts risk assessment, and at worst, it primes a self‑destructive crusade against entities we barely understand. The history of human conflict offers endless examples of how demonising the Other leads to catastrophic miscalculation long before any literal demon appears on the scene.
One might also ask: why must Vance assume such beings, if they exist, are demons? Why not angels, or something morally mixed or neutral? Erich von Däniken and the “ancient astronauts” crowd are guilty of spectacularly bad (and possibly racist) history and archaeology, but at least they entertain the idea that advanced nonhuman intelligences could be benevolent or civilising forces.
Contemporary disclosure‑style documentaries such as The Age of Disclosure – however dubious in their evidentiary standards – also float the possibility that UFOs might be engaged in non‑hostile nuclear ‘safeguarding’, allegedly interfering with weapons systems to prevent human self‑annihilation. These scenarios are wildly speculative, and skeptics would be wise to treat them with a very large pinch of salt, yet they still underscore how underdetermined the data are: demonology is hardly the only symbolic toolkit available.
The pattern in Vance’s choice of frame points back to something deeper in the MAGA imagination. Within that movement, the Other is rarely just different; the Other is frequently coded as evil, a node in a cosmic war of good vs evil, rather than a fellow citizen or interlocutor. Historian Elaine Pagels shows in her seminal 1995 book The Origin of Satan that the figure of the Devil in Jewish and Christian traditions gradually crystallised as a way to name, structure, and morally charge human enemies, turning social opponents into representatives of a cosmic adversary. Read in this light, Vance’s demon talk is less a literal ufological theory than a cue about who, in his worldview, belongs on the wrong side of a cosmic struggle: not only hypothetical little green men, but anyone who falls outside the white Christian demographic template that anchors his base.
For skeptics, the task is not to swap Vance’s demonology for some rival mythology about benevolent “space brothers,” but to keep track of how all such stories arise from very human needs to tame ambiguity and threat. A critical outlook asks first about evidence, psychology, and cultural script before promoting any grand narrative – supernatural or extraterrestrial – as fact. That same outlook should also insist that public policy, especially on matters as consequential and uncertain as UFOs and possible contact, be grounded in shared reasons and empirical warrants, not in the private metaphysics of leaders who see every unknown as one more front in a cosmic war.
