News / Jul 16, 2026

JD Vance tells Joe Rogan he has not reviewed UAP and UFO files

By Jan for UAP Logbook / Published Jul 16, 2026

publisher: UAP Logbook
editor: Jan
status: public note

On Joe Rogan, Vance says access is not the obstacle. His July appearance adds a third public promise to examine UAP and UFO material, but no account of a completed review.

Editorial illustration of an anonymous senior U.S. official seated at a briefing table beside a closed folder, with the U.S. Capitol visible through a window and a small white object in the night sky. — Editorial illustration by UAP Logbook. It represents the unresolved UAP-file question discussed by the vice president; it does not depict a real briefing, a real person, or a confirmed object.

Vice President JD Vance says the review of classified UFO material he promised in March still has not happened. His July 15 Joe Rogan interview was the third time in four months that he had publicly described the task as unfinished.

Vance first said in March that he was “obsessed” with UFO files and would get to the bottom of them. He returned to the subject in June on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO, saying he had sworn to review highly classified information about UFOs but had not done so. On Rogan’s show, he said the same: access was available, but the day-to-day demands of the vice presidency had kept him from focusing on it.

His latest promise was specific enough to be newsworthy and still too open-ended to count as an investigation. Vance said he would eventually set aside a few weeks to work through the question and press the relevant gatekeepers for access. He did not name an office, a file set, a timetable, or anyone assigned to the task.

What Vance says is holding up the review

Rogan asked what it is like to have access to classified government information. Vance answered that he had “effectively unlimited access,” then described the limitation: senior officials can request material without having time to read, compare, and challenge it.

In March, Vance said that planned trips to Area 51 and New Mexico had fallen through because the timing did not work. In July, he said other people in the current political leadership were interested in the subject and had access to relevant information. Because nothing major appeared to have changed after the Biden administration, he said, his own urgency had cooled somewhat.

That is Vance’s reading of the situation. It does not establish that those officials reviewed every relevant program, or that such a review found nothing.

What he says he has not seen

Rogan moved to the largest claim in the modern disclosure debate: alleged crash-retrieval programs and biological remains. Vance said he had spoken with David Grusch and found him interesting, but had not seen evidence that the United States holds extraterrestrial bodies.

His skepticism rested on secrecy. If the government possessed literal alien remains, Vance said, he doubted that convincing photographs or other evidence could have stayed contained in an era of phones, small cameras, and large security bureaucracies.

That leaves Grusch’s allegation untested. Grusch has publicly alleged that the U.S. government operates a crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program; he has not produced physical evidence of non-human bodies for public examination. AARO’s 2024 historical report said it found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry had access to extraterrestrial technology.

Where Vance draws the line

Vance did not dismiss every UAP case. He said some declassified videos show flight patterns that appear strange to him, and referred to former Navy pilot David Fravor’s account of the 2004 Nimitz encounter. A camera artefact could be plausible in some cases, he said, but pilot observations posed a different question.

The interview added no new sensor data, documents, or testimony to those cases. It did show where Vance currently draws a line: some military observations are worth closer attention; recovered alien bodies have not been established to his satisfaction.

The demon comment, revisited

Rogan returned to Vance’s earlier comments about demons and UFOs. Vance framed the subject as a personal theological and philosophical question: a powerful non-human being behaving maliciously toward people might have been described with a religious word centuries ago and an extraterrestrial word today.

He again said he did not know what the phenomenon is and had no reliable method for sorting true claims from false ones. The exchange did not make his earlier speculation an official government conclusion. UAP Logbook covered the religious dimension of Vance’s March remarks in a separate report.

Four public releases, no personal account

Vance’s unfinished review sits alongside a wider government release process. In February, President Donald Trump said he was directing the Pentagon and other agencies to identify and release government files related to UAP, UFOs, and extraterrestrial life. The Department of War’s PURSUE portal has since posted four tranches of declassified material, most recently on July 10.

Those releases are not the same as the personal review Vance has described. He has not publicly identified the classified material he intends to examine, or said that he has completed such a review. The interest is consistent across the March, June, and July interviews. The review remains pending.