It’s time for one of the funniest ledes of the week: “JD Vance, the vice-president of the United States, said this weekend that he considers aliens to be ‘demons’.” What’s kind of horrible is that JD Vance is a demon possessing a Cabbage Patch doll, and yet I actually sort of followed his train of thought. You know why? Because Vance has clearly been watching all of those alien shows – Ancient Aliens and Bible Aliens and What If Every Mystery Could Be Solved By Saying ‘It Must Be Aliens’. Please enjoy:

JD Vance, the vice-president of the United States, said this weekend that he considers aliens to be “demons”.

As the war in Iran continues, petrol and grocery prices soar and chaos continues at US airports as a partial government shutdown endures, Vance appeared on the conservative Benny Show podcast, released Saturday, to promise that he would spend time looking into what he called his “obsession” with UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors.

Johnson, who bills his show as the place for “cutting, behind-the-scenes insight into the global conflict for freedom”, wondered if Vance, who has been noticeably quiet about Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East that he is said to oppose, had yet looked at any of the files about unidentified flying objects – known these days as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – which the president has promised to release.

“I actually haven’t,” Vance replied, mustering significantly more enthusiasm than for any previous question about the US-Israel military strikes on Iran. “I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.”

The God-fearing vice-president’s fixation, it was further revealed, extended to the question of the existence of extraplanetary beings, and where they might fit into a wider conversation about religion.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said. Johnson asked him to expand. “Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people. I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens. 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. I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”

[From The Guardian]

As a longtime viewer of both Ancient Aliens and Bible Aliens (or whatever that show is called), Vance is sort of correct that there’s an overlap between attributing paranormal activity in religious/celestial terms AND extraterrestrial terms, depending on your worldview. If you’re religious and you see or experience something weird, you might think God is speaking to you or showing you a sign. If you’re more agnostic, you think that weird thing might be explained by aliens or UFOs. So either demons or aliens are doing crop circles and flying mysterious UFOs around military bases. You decide! You can also pick and choose – perhaps the most likely scenario is that demons exist (Vance) and aliens exist too (Tilda Swinton).

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.