JD Vance tells Joe Rogan he thinks aliens might be demons

(LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Vice President JD Vance sat down Wednesday for a lengthy interview with podcaster Joe Rogan (video, transcript) covering a wide range of topics, from divine theories behind alien encounters, to the Iran War, to the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

During a conversation about how he had “effectively unlimited access to information” but not the time to devote to exploring every single topic he would like, Vance raised “the UFO thing,” promising that “eventually I’ll have like a few weeks where I can just sit down and worry about that problem.”

Rogan asked him about past comments about thinking aliens were actually demons. Vance explained, “So if you look historically at things that are similar to the alien phenomenon where, oh, some like strange being, it kind of looks like a human being but doesn’t look like — but it’s not human. And it shows a particular interest in human beings and then it takes the human beings and, you know, like does weird experiments on them … if we’re talking about an extraterrestrial being that is human-like but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want, but I think there’s a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”

READ: The scandalous chapter of JD Vance’s new book on his faith

“There could be extra-Earth, outside-of-Earth space aliens and there could also be angels and demons. These could be two totally separate things. One could be true and not the other. That’s — I totally concede and agree with that point,” he continued. “I guess what I’m saying is it’s a distinction that is conceptually interesting to me. But if a space alien with like superhuman technology comes to the Earth, and has malicious intent, I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell the difference between that and a demon.”

The Trump administration has seized on the public’s alien fascination by periodically declassifying the federal government’s troves of records on “unidentified aerial phenomena” over the decades. While no smoking-gun bombshells confirming extraterrestrial life have yet been revealed, the material has been fodder for endless speculation, with theories ranging from the mundane (natural phenomena or foreign satellites) to the fantastical (advanced spaceships visiting Earth) to the divine (angels and/or demonic entities mistaken for aliens).

Elsewhere in the interview, Rogan pressed Vance on allegations by the secular activist group Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) that an unspecified military commander supposedly told his soldiers that military action against Iran was “all part of God’s plan” to help fulfill biblical End Times prophecy.

“First of all, as a Christian, you sort of believe that everything is part of God’s plan. Even things that are ultimately very terrible,” the vice president said, while adding it was “nuts” to link the mission to the Book of Revelation. He also went on to note that, “having heard about this for the first time just now, to your point about the media, I do think it’s possible, let’s be honest, that whatever that dude said, maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, has been misreported by the press. So I always have a filter on this stuff.”

“And I think that’s, again, I don’t think anybody should have, look, war is sometimes necessary, but it’s never a good thing,” he went on. “And I think that’s like a fundamental Christian principle is there are just wars, there are necessary wars, but war is always something that you try to avoid.” Vance promised to “look into” the story.

The conversation eventually reached the ongoing Epstein furor, which persists more than six years after he killed himself in his prison cell while being held on charges of trafficking underaged girls to be raped by himself and wealthy associates.

READ: JD Vance doesn’t want to acknowledge Trump’s hostility to the pro-life agenda

During the 2024 election, many of President Donald Trump’s top surrogates, including Vance, campaigned on finally exposing long-hidden bombshells about powerful figures Epstein may have conspired with, but once in office found itself a target of ire for releasing incomplete files consisting largely of old information and Trump dismissing the issue as a “hoax” and distraction. The administration eventually reversed itself, with Trump signing legislation last November giving the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) 30 days to release whatever documents it still had in its possession.

Vance told Rogan, “I say this with all candor, we absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files. But do I think the reason we screwed up the comms is because we were trying to hide something?”

“I know [former U.S. Attorney General] Pam [Bondi]. I like Pam. I don’t think there was anything malicious going on,” he said of her infamous false claim to have an Epstein client list “on my desk.” He said “I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment. I think she overstated what we had and what we didn’t have, and I think that she got roasted for it publicly by a lot of people including me. You and I have talked about this a lot. I’m like one of the OG Epstein conspiracy theorists. I’ve probably gone down every single rabbit hole. We could go down most of them today.”

Vance suggested he thinks “​​anything that existed from the ’80s and ’90s up to 2006, 2007, anything that existed that we didn’t get” prior to Epstein’s 2008 arrest “was disappeared.” 

“What I have seen, and I’ve looked at most of the files, is that there just wasn’t dispositive evidence, and if that dispositive evidence ever existed, it was probably destroyed after 2006, 2007,” the vice president said.

Vance is currently the comfortable frontrunner for the Republican Party’s 2028 presidential nomination. It is widely assumed Trump will back him for the nod, largely preempting a competitive primary. That likelihood is not without controversy, given Vance’s alignment with the “non-interventionist” wing of the GOP, his support for the Trump administration’s lax position on abortion pills, and his deviations from conventional free-market economics. The final outcome of the Trump administration’s war with Iran could be a major factor in changing Vance’s standing, given his lead role in the short-lived ceasefire agreement between the two countries.