Demons that Tucker Carlson claimed attacked him as he slept were also responsible for the invention of nuclear technology, the conservative former Fox News host said on Monday in another bizarre contention.

Carlson made the claim on the War Room podcast hosted by his fellow rightwing extremist Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser in the Trump administration who was released from prison last week after serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.

“Nuclear weapons are demonic, there’s no upside to them at all, and anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant or doing the bidding of the forces that created nuclear technology in the first place, which were not human forces obviously,” Carlson said during a discussion on the perceived “spirituality” involved in the US development of atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in August 1945, hastening the end of the second world war.

“Let me ask you this,” he continued. “What was the moment we can point to that nuclear technology was invented? I’ve never met a person who can isolate the moment where nuclear technology became known to man. German scientists in the 1930s? Really? Name the date? It’s very clear to me that these [nuclear weapons] are demonic.”

Carlson’s talk about demons follows remarks he made last week about how he was allegedly “physically mauled” by one a year and a half ago. The former Fox News host claimed that it was a nighttime attack where he was left bleeding and scarred by “claw marks”.

Those comments came in a preview clip posted to YouTube of an upcoming documentary, Christianities?, which is billed as a “journey to the heart of the faith”.

John Heers, founder of the non-profit First Things Foundation, asked Carlson if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good”.

“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” Carlson replied.

Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

His assailant, Carlson added, was “a demon … or something unseen that left claw marks on my side”.

It was, he said, a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible”.

Barely a week earlier, Carlson gave another extraordinary, sexist speech at a Trump rally in Georgia, likening the Republican presidential nominee to an angry father coming home to give his teenage daughter “a vigorous spanking”.

Carlson, like Bannon, is a fervent supporter of Trump, whose campaign has leaned heavily into Christian evangelicalism in the final weeks before Tuesday’s election.

Scenes of religious leaders gathering around the seated former president and praying with and for him, their hands on his shoulders, have become commonplace at Trump’s rallies and other campaign appearances.

At one such event, a roundtable with Latino leaders at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Florida last month, the Honduran televangelist Guillermo Maldonado, founder of the Miami megachurch the King Jesus International Ministry, predicted supernatural forces would help Trump defeat Kamala Harris.

“There’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation,” he said. “This is a war between good and evil. God sets up kings. He removes kings. We’re going to pray for the will of God to make [Trump] the 47th president.”