Vice President JD Vance revealed in a new interview that he is "obsessed" with unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, vowing to get to the bottom of the mystery before leaving office.
"Trust me, anybody who's curious about this, I'm more curious than anybody, and I've got three years of the very tippy top of the classification. I'm gonna get to the bottom of it," he said on an episode of conservative commentator Benny Johnson's podcast.
Johnson asked Vance during the interview released Friday whether the Trump administration would release all the UFO files and whether he had "peeked" at any of them.
"I actually haven't," Vance replied. "I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I'm obsessed with this."
The vice president told Johnson that he had previously planned trips to Area 51 -- a highly classified military facility in the Nevada desert at the epicenter of alien conspiracies -- and New Mexico, but the timing never worked out.
He then suggested that the concept of aliens was a human attempt to explain the unexplainable, saying that he believes it's a different force behind the phenomena.
"I don't think they're aliens; I think they're demons anyway, but that's a longer discussion," Vance said, prompting Johnson to seek clarification.
"I mean every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain," the vice president continued. "And I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra natural phenomenon, that's where I go, is the Christian understanding that, you know, there's a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there."
His comments come after former President Barack Obama piqued the interest of many Americans when he said on a separate podcast last month that aliens were "real," but he had not seen them, and they were not being held at Area 51.
Obama attempted to walk back his affirmation the next day, saying that he "saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us."
"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention, let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there," Obama said in a post on Instagram.
President Trump pledged a few days later to direct the Department of Defense and other agencies to release their files about UFOs and "alien and extraterrestrial life" to the public, citing the "tremendous" interest.
He previously told reporters he did not know if aliens were real and "may get him out of trouble" by declassifying records, referring to Obama.
The White House registered the domain names 'Alien.gov' and 'Aliens.gov' earlier this month, drawing speculation that information could be released soon.