'Encounters' With The Aliens

Reading Diana Pasulka's new book about the religious meaning of UFOs

Yesterday was the publication date of Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences, by D.W. Pasulka. It was also the pub date of an interview I did with Pasulka in The European Conservative. Excerpt:

I had not paid the slightest attention to the UFO—or, I guess now, UAP—phenomenon since the first season of “X-Files.” Frankly, I thought it was for weirdos. But then a journalist friend told me I was missing out on a serious religious phenomenon, and advised that I read your book American Cosmic. I did, and then went into a mild version of what you call “epistemological shock.” Now you’re out with a follow-up that’s equally shocking. So let me start by asking you to bring ‘normies’ up to date on what we know about the phenomenon—and what we think we know, but really don’t.

Rod, like you, I had never paid attention to UFOs either. I didn’t watch the “X-Files.” I never saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I actually just saw that film last year and enjoyed it! 

I began to study the topic of UFOs/UAPs somewhat by accident. My field is religious studies and my focus within that is Catholic history and miraculous events. In my field, we study religion academically, which means that we are looking at things like the social effects of religion, etc. As professors of religious studies, our beliefs, whether atheists or members of religious traditions, do not influence what we study. We are historians, archeologists, social scientists. We are not priests or ministers (generally). We don’t advocate for any religious tradition.

This is how I came to the study of UFOs. I had finished a long study of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. I used a lot of archival records to do this study, which means that I went to libraries of old manuscripts (archives) and looked at records from 1300 on up to about 1880. That is a long-time span, but I was just looking for what Europeans from those time periods believed about Purgatory.

I found a lot of information, and a lot of what I would call extra information. I saw a lot of records of reported aerial sightings. People saw orbs, discs, and basically things that surprised them, flying around in the skies. I took note of these. I found that when they saw them, they recorded a process of trying to identify these objects. Often, they would think that these were souls from Purgatory that needed to be prayed back into Purgatory. I thought that the sightings were interesting, so I kept notes.

When my book about Purgatory was finished, I showed a friend some of these records. He looked at them and immediately thought of UFOs! I thought he was crazy. This was in 2012. Then, there was a UFO conference near me, and based on my friend’s suggestion, I attended it. There, I heard people talking about aerial phenomena and describing the same experiences described by European Catholics of the past. I then began to study modern reports of UFOs.

At first, I wasn’t shocked at all by this research because I thought that people were utilizing different cultural frameworks for looking at unidentified aerial phenomena. That is, it is rational to approach the topic like this: in the 1400s people were using religious frameworks to describe what they saw in the sky. Today, people do the same thing, but now we live in an ostensibly ‘secular’ society and have achieved flight, so when people see unidentified aerial phenomena, they think of drones or something like stealth aircraft, and maybe UFOs. This is how I approached the study.

I became shocked when I was approached by government agents and scientists who said that they worked, in their ‘spare time,’ on UFOs, and collected UFO materials. They were and are credible people. I was shocked, again, when I started to revisit the stories from Catholic history that I had remembered and just took for granted, like the experience of the 16th century nun Teresa of Avila, who describes an experience with an angel. If you read her own account of that experience, she is not quite sure about this angel, as she describes it as real, and not imagined, and this shocks her. She also doesn’t know what type of angel it is, as it doesn’t conform to the one’s she was aware of, given that it is short and not tall with wings.

I had read the works of Dr. John Mack, and Teresa’s report, in light of that reading, became something entirely different for me. I used to think of these events as only historically situated events, but I began to see them as real in ways I had never considered, as transhistorical, that is, occurring through time. So, this, coupled with the government’s interest in the topic, put me into a shock for about a year. 

I conducted this research before the United States government’s recent report on UAPs—the Pentagon Report of 2021—and acknowledgement that they have been studying them for decades. That event, in 2021, took my research to a completely different level.

One of the most surprising things I learned from your work is that most of the sophisticated researchers into these phenomena do not think these are creatures from faraway planets. Why not? And if not that, then what are they? 

The most sophisticated people who study UFOs/UAPs, from what I can surmise, do not make conclusions about the nature of the phenomena. There are patterns to these events, and distinct characteristics. I’ve heard different theories. Dr. Hal Puthoff, who is a physicist, proposed that they are ‘ultraterresterials,’ which, as you state, are not necessarily from other planets. They might be here on Earth. Some speculate that the phenomena is interdimensional. Former longtime NASA historian Dr. Steven Dick has written about speculations that they are AI or technological, or that if we meet them eventually, we would meet their technology.

Her book is about people within the UFO subculture. It knocked me flat.