VP JD Vance on aliens / mystical experiences — The Diary Of A CEO clip (2026-06-18)
Source: The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett, interview with Vice President JD Vance, recorded for his press tour for the memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. The UAP/mystical exchange below is the ~2.5-minute excerpt circulated by @UAPJames on X.
Full episode: “JUST RECORDED Vice President JD Vance: No One Saw This Coming, The Ceasefire…” — https://youtu.be/5cKDs7bIGPE (1:47:45). Published 2026-06-18.
Clip URL: https://x.com/UAPJames/status/2067593359892394242 — 2:30 excerpt, posted 2026-06-18.
Captured: 2026-06-18, via Whisper (OpenAI) from the clip audio. No speaker diarization — Steven Bartlett asks the opening question (“are aliens real?”) and the closing one (“so you think aliens could be real?”); everything in between is Vance. “Communion” is Vance’s 2026 memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, which he references for the Pope anecdote.
What this is: verbatim Whisper transcription of the UAP/mystical-experience segment. Lightly paragraphed for readability; wording unchanged.
Analysis: vance-uap-demons. Earlier (and more widely covered) statement: vance-benny-johnson-ufos-demons-2026-03-27 (Benny Johnson Show, the “demons” line). Secondary coverage of this episode: Newsweek, “JD Vance Says Trump’s Comments Taken Out of Context, Aliens Could be Real” (2026-06-18).
Okay, are aliens real?
It’s interesting. Answer is, I don’t know. It is — it is something that I have sworn to myself, I’m now a year and a half into this job, that I would go through all of the highly classified information about everything that we know about UFOs. I just haven’t done it yet. It’s like one of these crazy things where you get in the job and the day-to-day just takes over, so I haven’t done that yet.
But I mean, look, I am — I believe in things, and I think that they’re true, and I think that they’re rational. But I recognize that there may be even crazier than the idea that there are extraterrestrials. Like, I believe that a Jewish man about 2,000 years ago was the only begotten Son of God, was literally crucified and then rose from the dead three days later. Like, I recognize that sounds a little out there, but I think that it’s true.
And I a hundred percent believe that people have mystical experiences. And I’ve talked to people who have been involved in exorcisms. And again, I think the rational mind says, well, it’s just schizophrenia or that’s some other mental illness. I’ve talked to people who said, yeah, 99.9% of the people that I’ve looked at to do an exorcism on are schizophrenic or had some other mental illness. But there’s something — there are weird things out there that we cannot explain. There are weird moments.
I mean, I remember not long after my grandmother died — my sister, you know, she’s — really lose her temper, but I got kind of angry with her daughter, and her daughter’s — I was seven or eight years old at the time — and like the light bulb just exploded. And both of us look to each other like, that was — man, I remember. I was talking — I write about this in Communion — I was talking [to] the New York Times writer about the Pope and sort of different perspectives on the Pope, and he was more critical of the Pope, and I was more — my attitude’s like, I, you know, he’s not a politician, you can’t judge him by politician standards. This is the last Pope. And we’re like having this conversation, and it’s like I’m telling you, man, a glass just falls off the bar in a totally crazy way and shatters, and like stops us dead in our tracks. We both just looked at each other, said, what the hell was that?
And I — I’m a believer in mystical experience. I don’t think they happen that often, but I think that people have experiences that are impossible to explain if you have a purely narrow, hyper-rational view of the world. In other words, I think the hyper-rational view of the world is actually not totally accurate. There’s some weird shit out there.
So you think aliens could be real?
I do.