Main Article / Jul 15, 2026

JD Vance, Lue Elizondo, and the 2010 book behind Washington's demon-UFO theory

By Jan for UAP Logbook / Published

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Vice President JD Vance told Benny Johnson on 27 March 2026 that UAPs are "demons, not aliens." Three months later, on the Ask the Squares podcast, former AATIP head Luis Elizondo invoked the same frame under a different name: the "Collins Elite," a term that traces to Nick Redfern's 2010 book *Final Events*.

Mid-Century-Modern editorial illustration, painted, soft brush strokes. A man in a dark suit, viewed from behind and in profile so his face is not visible, sits at a heavy wooden table in a dimly lit Gothic-style government briefing room. An antique brass desk lamp casts warm gold light across a stack of files marked UAP/TOP SECRET. Through a large Gothic arched window, the U.S. Capitol dome is visible under a cloudy twilight sky, with a single metallic tic-tac shaped UAP hovering above it. Behind the man, in shadow, a large chalkboard reads DEMONS? and COLLINS ELITE alongside ancient religious symbols and modern radar schematics. No microphones, no identifiable portrait. The figure is anonymous.
Editorial illustration by UAP Logbook. The anonymous man at the briefing-room table stands in for the senior U.S. official whose public remark drew a national headline. The Capitol dome through the Gothic window and the chalkboard behind are editorial staging — the chalk text "DEMONS?" and "COLLINS ELITE" is drawn directly from the on-record language of the article's primary sources. The illustration is not a photograph, not source imagery, and not evidence of any specific U.S. government chamber, hearing, or named official.

A sitting U.S. Vice President, a former head of the Pentagon's UAP programme, and a Roman Catholic monsignor removed from Washington's chief-exorcist post have all, separately, in the last four months, landed on the same line. That line traces, on paper, to a single 2010 book the author flagged as hearsay.

On 27 March 2026, JD Vance told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson: "I don't think they're aliens. I think they're demons." The Vice President was talking about the cache of government UAP files the Trump administration had ordered released the previous month — files he admitted, in the same exchange, that he hadn't read yet. His full sentence: "I have not been able to spend enough time on this to really understand it, but I am obsessed with it." (USA Today, 28 March 2026; Mediaite.)

Three months later, on 13 July 2026, former AATIP head Luis "Lue" Elizondo used a version of the same frame on a small consciousness-and-experiencer podcast called Ask the Squares. He didn't name Vance. He named a different actor: the "Collins Elite," which he described as "a section of the government that are perhaps fundamentalist and fear this to be demonic and are one of the forces that don't want this information to get out." (YouTube, JiV2RqElPJY, 1:35:36 runtime, 9,959 views at audit.)

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. The Collins Elite, in its only documented origin, is described as an evangelical faction inside the U.S. intelligence and military community. These are different traditions, arriving at the same conclusion by different routes. That overlap, however coincidental, is now the clearest political-theological thread running through the American UAP disclosure story.

Where the "demonic" frame actually comes from

The term "Collins Elite" has one documented source: the 2010 book Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife, by British author Nick Redfern. Wikipedia's summary of the book is blunt about its status: "the author is explicit that the contents are not demonstrably factual." Redfern says he was contacted by a man calling himself "Richard Duke," who claimed to be a former CIA officer and the last surviving member of the group. Duke narrated the rest of the book. Redfern opens it with a line from Walter Scott: "I say the tale as 'twas said to me."

The story Duke told Redfern describes a secret government group formed in the late 1940s or early 1950s, after the Kenneth Arnold sightings, the 1947 Roswell incident, and the 1952 Washington flyover. Its origin, in this telling, traces back to Jack Parsons — the Caltech rocket researcher, one-time U.S. head of the Thelemic order O.T.O., and the man who performed the "Babalon Working" ritual in the Mojave Desert in March 1946 with L. Ron Hubbard as scribe. Duke's claim was that the ritual opened a doorway, that the UFO phenomenon came through it, and that the entities behind it are "deceptive demons and fallen angels" preparing for "Armageddon and Judgment Day."

Historian Aaron John Gulyas examined the book in a 2014 academic chapter called "Space Demons," treating it as an artifact of modern UFO religion rather than a record of an actual intelligence faction. Redfern never identifies who "Collins" was. No public record places anyone named Collins in a senior 1950s intelligence role connected to this story.

What has actually been documented since

Redfern coined the term in 2010, based on one uncorroborated source. Since then, the paper trail has grown, but not by much.

In 2023, British filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee released a documentary called God versus Aliens, featuring two interviewees — UFO author Brian Allan and self-described experiencer Tony Topping — who described the Collins Elite as an informal group inside the Pentagon that regards aliens as demonic. Topping told the Daily Mail the group operates through private contractors specifically to avoid FOIA requests. Neither interviewee offered documentary evidence; both were already active in UFO media before the film. (Mark Christopher Lee is a small-format commercial documentary maker, not an investigative outlet.)

Wikipedia's summary, as of 2024: "no verified documentary proof of the Collins Elite's existence has been publicly released."

Elizondo's 2024 book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs added a named encounter rather than a named organization. He describes a mentor figure he calls "Devon Woods" — a former CIA officer who held senior roles at ODNI and, later, at the Defense Intelligence Agency — telling him in person that UAP phenomena were "demonic" and that "there is no reason we should be looking into this." In the book, Woods is also reported as saying: "It's demonic… we already know what they are and where they come from. They are deceivers. Demons." Elizondo does not call Woods part of the Collins Elite in the book. He describes one person, in one office, saying one thing. The "Devon Woods" identity has not been independently verified, and Metabunk's analysis of Imminent has flagged that the only senior intelligence officials with the right career shape to fit the description are David Shedd (DIA deputy director 2010–2014) and Douglas Wise (DIA deputy director 2014–2016). Either is plausible; neither is confirmed.

Chapter 8 of Imminent is titled "Angels or Demons." Elizondo there calls the group "Christian fundamentalists" who "reportedly shaped policy within the Department of Defense based on their religious beliefs." (Skeptical Inquirer, Mick West, October 2024: "Psychics and Demons at the Pentagon".) West's review of the book calls the chapter "an inflection point in UFOlogy" because it puts the religious-faction frame on the public record from inside the Pentagon, while flagging that the same chapter stops short of any documentary evidence.

Elizondo has used the Collins Elite term publicly several times since Imminent. On NewsNation's Reality Check in August 2024, he told Ross Coulthart the group was "alive and well" and that he'd encountered "elements of that group firsthand" during his AATIP tenure. On Coast to Coast AM later that month, he called them "religious extremists who have historically blocked UAP research, seeing it as heretical to their faith." In a widely shared clip, asked directly to define the term, he pulled back: "I'm not going to assign labels. They were absolutely a core group of individuals that were adamantly against what we were doing… one of these individuals was actually a very close colleague and mentor of mine."

That last quote is probably the most honest version of the claim available. What started as a hearsay narrative in a pseudohistory paperback has migrated into the on-record language of a former senior U.S. intelligence official — without ever picking up an actual document, a named organisation chart, or a second independent witness along the way.

Vance's version is its own thing

Vance didn't invoke the Collins Elite by name. He offered a Catholic convert's theological take, on a friendly podcast, two months into his vice-presidency, while promising to eventually read the files he was being asked about. Whether that reflects genuine belief, political instinct, or both is impossible to settle from one podcast answer.

What is notable is the double standard that followed. On 3 June 2026, Cardinal Robert McElroy removed Monsignor Stephen Rossetti as the Archdiocese of Washington's exorcist and cut the archdiocese's ties to Rossetti's St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal. McElroy's statement said Rossetti's comments on UFOs and demons "gravely undermine the Church's very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism." Rossetti's original video, posted on 29 May 2026 to his ministry's social channels, said "it is my personal belief that probably many, if not most, of these UFO sightings are in fact demons." (Washington Times, 4 June 2026; New York Times, 4 June 2026; Washington Post, 3 and 4 June 2026.)

Vance made a similar claim on a bigger platform and faced no consequence at all. The asymmetry is the story.

Elizondo's 2026 addition, and the credibility problem

The 13 July 2026 Ask the Squares interview is the most detailed public setting in which Elizondo has connected the Collins Elite, the Galileo affair, and the current administration in a single argument. The show itself is small — under 10,000 YouTube views at last check, hosted by two self-described contactees and sponsored by shamanic-tools brands — but the interview runs an hour and thirty-five minutes.

Elizondo's argument, in his own framing, is that institutions default to risk-aversion when new information threatens their worldview, and that the U.S. national-security apparatus is repeating what the Roman Catholic Church did to Galileo in 1633: refusing to look through the telescope because of what it might show. The analogy belongs to Elizondo, not to this outlet. He is arguing that a religious-institutional block on disclosure is not a side issue, and that its modern form is a faction inside the Pentagon and the intelligence community. In that framing, Vance's comment is the visible surface of something Elizondo has been describing since at least 2024.

The credibility of the on-record source is itself part of the story. On 1 July 2026, on NewsNation's Reality Check, Ross Coulthart said he was "surprised" by the public blowback over how Elizondo has described his own past role in the government's UAP programme, and that Elizondo had "very deftly avoid[ed] any breach of his National Security Act oath obligations and basically refus[ed] to confirm or deny whether or not he was a part of the legacy program." Coulthart added: "Lou has never made any public admission that he was in the legacy program." That is the same journalist who, on 28 June 2026, told Elizondo on air, "I know you can't speak about the role that you've held within the legacy program." (Coulthart–Elizondo exchange, NewsNation, 28 June 2026; see UAP Logbook's "I cannot discuss this" sentence.)

The Collins Elite's modern existence, in other words, rests on the word of a single former U.S. official whose own past role is now publicly contested by the journalist who has done more than anyone else to amplify it. Neither AARO nor the Pentagon has issued any public statement confirming or denying the Collins Elite's existence — a silence that cuts both ways, depending on how much weight you put on it.

What isn't there

The Collins Elite doesn't appear in any declassified U.S. government file, congressional hearing transcript, or official ODNI, AARO, or DoD record.

Vance hasn't tied his "demons" comment to any specific case, radar track, pilot report, Navy video, or AARO file. It was a theological aside, not a technical claim, and he said so himself by admitting he hadn't read the files being discussed.

The Jack Parsons thread, repeated in both the 2024 Coulthart interview and the 2026 Ask the Squares appearance, still traces back to the 2010 Redfern book, which still traces back to one uncorroborated source. Nothing about that chain has changed. The "Devon Woods" identity in Elizondo's book also remains unverified.

Why this matters anyway

Vance's remark is now the most senior on-record statement by a sitting U.S. official that UAPs might be supernatural rather than extraterrestrial. It doesn't need to be true to shape what happens next — it tells AARO, the Pentagon, and whoever eventually runs point on file releases that the theological interpretation has real political standing. Rossetti was disciplined for saying something close to the same thing from a religious pulpit. Vance said it from a bigger one and kept his job.

The question that actually matters isn't whether the Collins Elite is a real organisation, a persistent rumour, or a piece of 2010 pseudohistory that outgrew its own source. It is whether the promised file release — the one Vance said he'd eventually "get to the bottom of" — ends up shaped by that theological frame, or slowed down by it.

Related UAP Logbook notes

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