At the end of March, when I was busy getting ready to leave for my all-electric Route 66 trip, JD Vance dropped a turd in the UFO punchbowl. During an interview with Benny Johnson, he was asked about UFOs (it’s fashionable to call them UAPs today), and he said, “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion.” In this article, I want to have a little fun and discuss the topic a bit. My main point: UFOs probably aren’t demons, but you can find something very demon-like in the fossil fuel industry. If we want to really banish this kind of demon, we need clean technology and anti-corruption efforts, not exorcisms. Another Way of Looking at Demons In many ways, a fundamentalist Christian’s belief in literal demons is more useful in politics than religion today. If a kid has a fever and is suffering seizures, almost nobody is going to just sit there and pray. If they’re praying at all, they’re doing so on the way to the hospital. In 2026, even most devout fundamentalist Christians don’t think that cancer, epilepsy, or the common cold are caused by demons. There are better explanations now, and more importantly, reliable and safe ways to get relief or at least have a fighting chance. The fundie crowd tends to reserve demons for things like homosexuality, gender dysphoria, and (assuming you’re not a pastor or president) pedophilia now. Just as the Salem witch trials used the supernatural to control the population, they hope to control people today with accusations of possession and mental illness. But, the more weight they put on the people they hate, the less moral authority they have with the population that starts to see through the game. As much as I like to mock fundamentalist beliefs, I do have to admit that like most humans, there is a part of me that wants to believe in something. In my case, a fun outlet for that impulse is UFOs and aliens. While there are grifters and UFO cults to avoid, watching alien videos on YouTube is a way to indulge the “I want to believe.” side without having to shell out money, engage in bigotry, vote for pedophiles, or destroy my children’s future. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that I’ve long been into science fiction. Let’s mix UFOs and sci-fi with religious belief for a bit! In the classic Star Trek original series episode “Day of the Dove,” an invisible alien entity forces the crew of the Enterprise and a group of Klingons into brutal, endless combat. The creature does not eat food or use fuel. Instead, it literally sustains itself on human and Klingon hatred, pain, and anger, whipping up fury and manipulating both sides to grow stronger off the chaos. The being is only stopped when they manage to make peace and deny the being negative energy to feed upon. YouTuber and former Anglican archdeacon Paul Wallis pointed out in a video that this sci-fi script mirrors an early Christian concept: the idea of Archons, or demonic entities that harvest and feed on human suffering, a negative energy often referred to in esoteric circles as “loosh.” You can watch Wallis’ full breakdown on YouTube to see how deep that rabbit hole goes. While the Gnostic traditions that concept comes from are regarded as heresy by most mainstream Christians (who follow traditions set by the emperor of the Roman Empire), it does give us a very different way to look at the concept of demons. Instead of seeing demons the way today’s fundamentalists do (as a stigma you can place on people you disagree with for political and social gain), these early Christians saw negative energy, including things like fear, hatred, suffering, and conflict as the problem, and they saw the reduction of such things as the way to defeat the demons. Whether this type of demon or interdimensional alien literally exists or not, it’s a belief that definitely promotes better human behavior than the fundamentalist view. The Real “Demons” Are In Bed With Fossil Fuels It is a spooky concept for a television script or an ancient text, but we don’t actually need supernatural beliefs to see this same kind of system at play in the real world today. We have created our own very real, very tangible versions of these energy demons, and they run our global fossil fuel economy. Look at the pipeline that connects right-wing politicians and oil executives. It’s a closed-loop system of negative energy generation. Politicians hand out massive subsidies, regulatory rollbacks, and public land leases to fossil fuel companies. In return, oil executives pump millions into campaign coffers and dark money PACs. When the price of oil needs a boost to pad the bottom line, we see insane, manufactured geopolitical conflicts, like the war in Iran, engineered to panic the markets and spike prices at the pump. Meanwhile, the human cost at the bottom of this pyramid is devastating. The industry heavily exploits its own frontline workforce. Recently, I stopped for a night at an RV park in west Texas. Almost everyone staying there was obviously living in an old RV that may or may not have been keeping the rain out. Driving around the region, you can see “hotels” that serve as apartments, and you can see that some workers were living in their pickup trucks. Housing prices in these regions spike so drastically during booms that standard apartments become completely unaffordable, forcing crews into cramped “man camps” or making them sleep on the second row of a crew cab F-150. Hundreds of acres of tiny homes and modular shelters can be found outside of towns like Pecos or Midland. They are then pushed to work grueling, sleep-deprived shifts before driving heavy commercial vehicles on narrow, poorly maintained rural roads. It is a massive safety crisis, to the point where transportation incidents account for roughly 41% of all oilfield fatalities. Workers are routinely forced to wear out their bodies and risk their lives on lethal stretches of asphalt just to keep the oil flowing. When the bust comes, small companies go bankrupt, nearly everyone gets sent home, and the problem of cleaning up abandoned oil wells falls on taxpayers. The health problems from contaminated water, the fracking earthquakes, and road maintenance all fall on the locals who must now figure out what to do with abandoned RV parks and empty “hotels.” The profits from that suffering flow straight up to the same executives and politicians who then turn around and abuse the general population with economic austerity, rollbacks of civil rights, engineered culture wars, and anti-labor policies. It’s not just the oilfield workers, state governments, and local populations that pay for all of this. Most of it falls on anyone driving an ICE vehicle. Every time you pay for gasoline or diesel in the United States, you’re submitting your time and energy into this system. I drive an electric truck most days, but when I occasionally fill up my old Chevy Suburban during these record high prices, I know that there’s no shortage of negative energy that these oil executives and their politician friends can feed upon. Starving These Demons They might not be literal, invisible entities from another dimension, but fossil fuel executives and their political allies in both major parties play the exact same role. They deliberately whip up misery, conflict, and exploitation because their power and wealth depend on it. Every time we pull up to a gas pump and buy into this monopolized system, we are forced to hand over our hard-earned money to keep that negative energy machine turning. We all become cogs in a big murder machine. But, it’s not hopeless. There are ways out, both completely and partially. This is CleanTechnica, so obviously I’m going to suggest buying an EV, getting solar panels, and investing in home energy efficiency. I know that’s not within everyone’s reach, so I’d also suggest smaller things like energy efficient driving, balcony solar where available, riding a bike, or taking clean transit where it’s available. Cutting back on consumerism (the buying of things we don’t need) can also help starve the negative energy economy. In other words, look at every straw these despicable people have poking into your cup and pinch the thing off. Without your energy, they won’t be able to invest in the misery of others that they feed upon. Featured image: Strange celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg on April 14, 1561, as depicted in an illustrated newspaper later that month (public domain). Many UFO researchers and believers think this may have been a battle between alien spacecraft, but contemporary writing suggested it was some sort of spiritual battle or sign from their god.