From The Catholic Stand:
On March 27, 2026, during a lighthearted interview with Catholic Vice President J.D. Vance, conservative podcaster Benny Johnson asked his guest, “You gonna release all the UFO files?” The Vice President, acknowledging his obsession with the topic at hand, declared his eagerness to “get to the bottom of it.” The two of them bantered for a bit about Area 51, but then Vance uttered an unexpected remark: “You know me—you know me. I don’t think they’re aliens…I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a long discussion.”
In a news release on the third of June, the Cardinal of Washington, DC suddenly announced the dismissal of his Archdiocesan Exorcist, Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, for statements that “undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons, and exorcism.” Rossetti’s crime? Echoing a very similar position to the one that Vance had articulated a few months previously: “This is not de fide,” he had said in an online video, “But it’s my personal belief that probably many, if not most of these ‘UFO sightings’ are demons.” In the wake of Rossetti’s dismissal, online commentators have questioned the prudence of what they term “celebrity exorcists,” priests like Rossetti who have garnered thousands of followers on X, Instagram, and Facebook. To begin with, these detractors condemn the appearances of exorcists on popular podcasts as cheap self-promotion, exploiting the intense sufferings of those afflicted by demonic possession for entertainment. Others accuse these priests of fanaticism born of an unhealthy fixation on the demonic. In actuality, at least in the case of Msgr. Rossetti, both of these claims are deeply flawed.