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Video Description
Whether the things people see in the sky are aliens is not the question this video cares about. The question from the Conscious Radical channel is what happens the moment we name a subject, because the name decides which institution gets to own it.
Call something demonic and it belongs to religion; call it a national security threat and it belongs to defence departments; call it a physics problem and it belongs to scientists. Same object, three budgets, three sets of hands. This is a piece about labels and jurisdictions, and the quiet power that moves when a word changes.
Full Video Transcript
In late March 2026, the Vice President of the United States said he doesn’t think unidentified aerial phenomena are aliens, he thinks they’re demons.
And the remark came in an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, published on the 28th of March.
And when asked whether the administration would release its UFO files, Vance said that they were working on it.
and he described himself as obsessed with the subject and then added I don’t think they’re
aliens I think they’re demons anyway. When he was pressed to explain he spoke about celestial beings
who fly around and do strange things to people and about a Christian framework in which there
is good in the world and there is also evil. But it’s worth knowing that Vance grew up as an atheist
and he converted to Catholicism in his 30s. It’s interesting that most of the responses
have been about whether he is right or not but I actually think there is another take. So whether
or not there is anything up there, whether it’s biological or mechanical or something else
entirely, what I find interesting is that he’s labelled it as demonic because as soon as you
label something you have assigned it as belonging somewhere inside a particular ideology and that’s
what I want to explore. I should say that I don’t have a solid opinion about UFOs or extraterrestrials
part of me thinks it would be ego-driven madness to look at the size of the universe and conclude
that we’re the only thing in it but the other part of me wants evidence. I am definitely becoming
more comfortable in my uncertainty. But this piece is less about extraterrestrials and more about
labels and jurisdictions. I also take a similar position when it comes to the Bible, to texts
written by people who died 2,000 years before I was born, or any spiritual teaching for that matter.
I wasn’t there. I can’t verify anything. But what I can do is read into what they were
attempting to explain, to work out what they were arguing against and to notice
which accounts survived and which were buried. I can then carry the useful parts
into my own life and that doesn’t need me to settle the question of what was
literally true. So the naming and labeling interests me the most because
it’s the part that I can examine because when you give something a name or a
a label it’s no longer neutral it assigns a belief system or an ideology which in turn assigns an
authority to it it determines which professionals get to handle it which questions are legitimate
to ask about it and which people are qualified to ask and answer them when you call something
demonic it becomes a matter for religion and for certain politicians who are religion aligned
If we call it a national security threat then it becomes assigned to defence departments and their
contractors. If we call it a problem that relates to physics then it sits in the realm of scientists
with instruments for measuring and data accumulation. So one thing can be named and
then three different groups with different budgets and different ideals get to speak about it with
authority and i wonder whether this is why every faction with an interest in the phenomenon is
currently fighting about the vocabulary rather than the evidence are they arguing about what it
is or are they arguing about who gets to own it vance’s demonic frame is interesting though
because it comes with an unspoken instruction not to investigate because you’re supposed to shun
demons you’re supposed to avert your eyes and pray and leave it to the specialists nick redfern has
reported the existence of an informal faction within the u.s military and intelligence apparatus
referred to in ufology circles as the collins elite and these are officers of deep religious
conviction who believe that uaps are demonic deceptions his account rests on anonymous sources
and it’s never been independently cooperated so i do hold it loosely but the claim he makes
is that out of a desire to protect colleagues from spiritual harm this faction discouraged
official research into the subject creating a prohibition or a lid based on faith rather than
science now where have we seen this before when the early church wanted to close down rival
accounts of what Jesus had been and what the world was for, it named them. They were called heresies
and those that spoke about them were heretics. The texts were reclassified as dangerous or demonic
and were buried in jars in the Egyptian desert. We weren’t able to read them until 1945. The witch
trials ran on a similar logic. A woman who held centralised power, who maybe knew about herbs or
who owned land that a neighbour wanted could be moved out of the category of being human
and into the category of being demonic. As soon as the word witch was applied, all the
evidence flowed backwards to support it. But Claire, I hear you say, we’re in the modern
age now, surely this doesn’t happen anymore? Well, modern society took an age-old supernatural
phenomenon, stripped away its religious connotations and reframed it through the lens of science
and technology, well that was up until Vance decided to take it back a few centuries. We also
use the words conspiracy theorist as a label. Now the term was in use before the CIA took an
interest in it but its deliberate deployment is documented in the CIA dispatch 1035-960 issued in
January 1967 and it was issued to station chiefs worldwide because they were concerned about the
growing public appetite for questioning the Warren Commission. In it, assets were instructed to make
use of friendly contacts in the media and to employ the phrase as a discrediting device.
Note that by doing this they didn’t have to answer the critics, they only had to characterise the
people asking the questions or following the leads as conspiracy theorists with everything
that goes along with that. And that document by the way is declassified so you can read that.
but the genius of the term is that it’s unfalsifiable in the same way that demon is
when you label you don’t have to engage with a single claim because you’ve characterized the
person making it and that argument is no longer assessed on its merits once you’re in that
category every additional piece of evidence you produce is further proof that you’re the kind of
person who produces evidence like that to be clear it works on people who are wrong and it works
equally well on people who are right which is why it took years before we heard the truth about the
gulf of tonkin mk ultra contel pro the tuskegee study and the tobacco industry’s research on
cancer i’m not sure whether vance truly believes in demons or whether he’s making use of a well-worn
and tested governance technology deployed at the precise moment when a genuinely unclassifiable
phenomenon threatens to force open a conversation about what else has been
kept off the table and by whom and with whose money. Billions are spent annually
on programs that no elected representative can talk about in public
but what I do find fascinating that whenever this subject comes up in books
or in films it becomes a conquest story where an empire meets their
technologically superior rival. I picture the people on top of tall buildings with
placard saying take me but before you know it it’s become a battle of good against evil. Historically
those stories are written afterwards by whoever won. We have inherited a parable about civilisation
ruined by believing the wrong thing and the parable itself is a categorisation handed to us
by the people with an interest in how it’s remembered. So perhaps when you come across a
label that arrives with an instruction attached whether that’s consciously or subconsciously
think about what you’re being asked to believe and who the assigned authority is demon conspiracy
theorist terrorist heretic unprofessional hysterical difficult naive radical every one of
them is a label that comes with an unspoken instruction about what stance to take what
action to take or what to believe just ask the question who benefits from that stance
Thanks for watching!
Source: The Conscious Radical