Diana Walsh Pasulka, specialist in religions: ‘Belief in UFOs is very similar to that of the early Christian community’

Diana Walsh Pasulka has written one of the most successful recent books on the UFO phenomenon. Following the publication of American Cosmic in 2019, she was interviewed by The New York Times and appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the most popular in the world. Now, Errata Naturae is publishing the book in Spanish under the title Los creyentes. Un ensayo sobre ovnis, tecnología desconocida y el inesperado origen de una nueva religión (The Believers: An Essay on UFOs, Unknown Technology, and the Unexpected Origin of a New Religion).

Pasulka, speaking to EL PAÍS via video call, begins the interview about the publication of her book in Spain with what seems to be a justification: “First, I want to say that I never wanted or desired to study the subject of UFOs, what is now called UAP [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena]. I have always worked in religious studies as an academic discipline. It is not confessional or testimonial. It is not about defending any religion. Most people in the world, by the way, are religious. So it is important to study religion because it is a motivator of people’s behavior and actions.” It seems necessary to explain that someone can approach the world of flying saucers without having lost their mind, something that does not happen with phenomena such as Mary’s virginity or the resurrection of the body of Christ, which, if we explained it to an extraterrestrial, would probably be considered of a similar nature.

Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and in 2014 published Heaven Can Wait, a study on purgatory, with the prestigious academic publisher Oxford University Press. In it, among many other issues, she analyzes ascent narratives, which recount how a soul ascends to heaven, and ideas of journeys to other worlds or the afterlife. In her search through the archives of old libraries, she found things she wasn’t looking for, such as that many people in different countries saw things in the sky, perhaps shooting stars, but also things they couldn’t explain: “And they tried to interpret it, like a soul in purgatory, an angel, or the Loreto shrine, the Virgin Mary’s house, flying through the sky.”

Then she began receiving correspondence from engineers, people who worked in the aerospace industry, or who were part of the U.S. Space Force, who wanted to see her results. “It didn’t take me long to realize that they were looking at those observations to determine whether they were real or not, while I was studying them as ways in which people believed, interpreted, or practiced, and how that motivated their behavior,” she says.

“Then a friend of mine saw my work and said they looked like modern UFO reports, but from the past. I thought it was ridiculous. But later I went to a kind of UFO conference that took place in my city and met people who recounted experiences that sounded very similar to those of the 15th- and 16th-century people I was studying. One of the experiences they shared — like some pilots who see similar things today — is that they didn’t know what they were seeing and recorded their confusion,” she says.

These and other stories appear in a book that examines the UFO phenomenon as a new religious movement, in which Pasulka, a practicing Catholic, sets aside her own judgment to engage with a diverse, non-hierarchical belief system and practice that spreads its message through online forums.

Question. For a Catholic, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is essential. Isn’t it offensive to those who believe in UFOs to write about their beliefs without seriously considering whether they have a real basis?

Answer. People have these experiences, but I don’t know what their reality is. If someone says they’re in contact with the Pleiades and that this will happen on Earth in 30 years, we can’t prove that it will happen—just like with the religious experiences of people who say, “I had an encounter with Saint Padre Pio; I prayed, and this happened.” I’m not going to say it didn’t happen, but I can’t say it did either. Most people aren’t offended by that.

It’s possible to be both a scientist and a religious person. I’m a practicing Catholic, but that doesn’t diminish my ability to see these things and the connections between modern reports of what people see in the sky and those from the year 1400. Were they seeing the same thing? That’s a question. But we don’t have to conclude yes or no. We can continue gathering data.

That’s why people in the aerospace community asked me to work with them: because I collected data. And data is very interesting. Since writing the book, I’ve seen correlations that have changed my opinions. You have to be careful with opinions and conclusions, because they will change with different data.

Q. I understand that the people in the aerospace industry you spoke to interpret those visions from the medieval period as visits from other kinds of intelligent civilizations.

A. Not necessarily. In the United States government right now, there are many people who believe in UFOs, in UAPs. That’s a fact. They use taxpayer money to study it. But they have different interpretations. There is, incidentally, a high percentage of devout Catholics in the military who study this.

They believe there are probably a variety of phenomena. Some they would categorize as being caused by angels and demons. And then there are some they believe are a threat, from an unknown extraterrestrial civilization. They only know they’re here, and they treat them as a threat because they’re military personnel: if something is in their airspace, they want to know what it is.

Q. There are some psychological traits common to people who have religious beliefs, such as Catholics, and people who believe in UFOs.

A. I live in the southern United States, and there I met a very devout Baptist man who had an extreme experience of seeing UFOs in the river while fishing with his colleagues. He was a businessman, a construction worker, and had decided to take them fishing for a day so they could have some fun. But instead, they believed they were being attacked by these UFOs. It was a very distressing experience that lasted for many hours and impacted everyone. This man was very involved in his church. He recounted what had happened to him, and of course, the story spread and many people wanted to know what happened, which made him question his faith. He re-examined his belief system and saw that many encounters with angels are terrifying. He reinterpreted his religious tradition, reaffirmed his beliefs, and became much more religious. Meanwhile, his church thought they were demons. So they rejected him. He had to move to another type of church that would accept his experience.

Q. There are things witnessed in the sky that cannot be proven and that, perhaps, allow the UFO phenomenon to function like a religion, because it cannot be disproved or confirmed...

A. Yes, but it’s a bit more complicated. There’s an agnosticism that some people have regarding UFOs, like me. They could exist, but I don’t have any data about them. Or if you talk to astronomers: we have an incredibly large and ancient universe; there could be extraterrestrial life. But people who have these experiences sometimes receive messages from UFOs or perceive them as sentient technology in the sky that is communicating with people.

Eighty percent of people who have these experiences don’t want to have them, or don’t talk about them because they don’t want to seem odd, but they have them anyway and interact with these things in heaven. This is also seen in the Catholic historical record. Saint Francis of Assisi, according to primary sources, had an encounter with a seraph who descended and wasn’t very friendly to him; they had something like a struggle. And then he received the stigmata, those wounds from which he eventually died.

In my early years doing this work, I really didn’t want to know anything about it. I thought it was absurd. Scientists and academics often don’t share their data because of peer pressure. But I didn’t give in to that pressure because at that time I already had a tenured position and was the head of my department.

One of those stories was my trip to New Mexico. One of the people featured in the book took me there and showed me what he said was a debris field from a crash recovery operation in the 1940s. It wasn’t New Mexico sand; it was something that had been placed there. It looked rusty. I put it in the book, and my editor said I had to take it out. And I asked her, “Why? I saw it!” And she asked, “Why would the U.S. government put a pile of rusty debris in the middle of nowhere?” And I said, “I don’t know, but I promise you it was there. I walked on it; we were there.”

Q. [The authorities] see unknown technology and conclude that it is extraterrestrial, that it can’t be Chinese or Russian. How do they know?

A. That’s what I asked too. I was talking to two of the world’s top scientists, and they assured me that the isotopic ratios couldn’t be produced, and even if they could, it would be prohibitively expensive and that the age of the things we were looking at indicated that it would be impossible. That’s what they said. They were absolutely convinced it was extraterrestrial. So I reported it.

That’s why I call it an emerging religiosity, a new kind of religion, because in religions people report impossible things. Jesus walking on water, for example. Did he walk on water? We don’t know, but people believe he did. These two scientists absolutely believe these artifacts are real. That’s what struck me. Many top-level scientists believe this.

Q. No matter how highly skilled a scientist you are, if you need answers to existential questions, you won’t find them in science. But at the same time, these scientists find a way to satisfy two needs in the UFO phenomenon.

A. I think that’s exactly right. I think what makes this completely unprecedented right now is that if what the scientists in the book say is true, we would have something that is religious in nature — mysterious, with the content of religion — but with scientific evidence. And if we had that, it would be incredible. That’s an incredible combination that’s going to become a new kind of religion. That’s what I was trying to say: something new is happening. It’s not that we need faith. It’s that we don’t need faith anymore because we have science, and science is telling us these things. That’s very powerful.

Q. That’s an old myth. The Bolshevik adaptation of the ideas of the Russian cosmists, for example, didn’t want religion, but they wanted the comfort it provides. But in Catholicism, you are required to believe without seeing. The apostle Thomas is criticized for rubbing salt in the wound, for asking to see in order to believe.

A. That’s right. In this case, faith is not part of the equation.

Q. I have one last question about the relevance of the events. The story about the Spanish nun who bilocated to New Mexico.

A. María de Ágreda (1602-1665).

Q. Coincidentally, she did so to a region that is a sanctuary for believers in the UFO religion. Is this something that tries to reinforce the idea that the religion has a real basis, or is it simply a coincidence and we shouldn’t overthink it — we should just enjoy the story?

A. It was a strange coincidence, very rare. We had gone to New Mexico and apparently we had been near where María had been bilocating. And then, at the Vatican, I saw that she had been bilocating to New Mexico, to the epicenter of UFO culture, where Roswell is. One of her first books was a cosmological work she wrote about her out-of-body experiences. She talked about going to places and seeing things and wrote about them as if she were a scientist. She talked about the Earth rotating, about the vegetation, she described in detail what she saw in that area of ​​New Mexico and the Indigenous tribes she encountered.

And this is really interesting, because I don’t understand it. There was a missionary who came from Spain and arrived in the southwest of what is now the United States, and he wanted to convert the Indigenous populations. But some of them had already been converted. And he asked, “Who converted you?” And they said it was a woman. He showed them a picture of a nun, and they said, “No, she wore the same habit, but she was young.” They went back to Spain and heard that María claimed to have bilocated. And I thought that was a story. That tribe contacted me. They wanted to tell me what they knew about María; they call her the Lady in Blue. For me, that was fascinating. They have this oral tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Before the United States was the United States, they were Catholic. How did that happen? They believe it was because of this woman they met.

Q. One problem non-believers have with believers is that, around these intense but entirely subjective experiences, they construct a morality that they impose on those who don’t share that faith. Is there a morality associated with this new American religion of UFOs?

A. It’s a decentralized religion, so there’s no hierarchy dictating how you have to be. But what many people say — and quite a few of them have what I call apocalyptic visions transmitted to them by these beings — is that they become activists for the planet, like Greta Thunberg. They believe an apocalyptic event is going to happen, triggered by nuclear war, climate change, some kind of human-caused extinction event. And they really transform their lives and become missionaries on a level of religious conversion. It’s very similar to the early Christian community: they believed Jesus was coming back the following day, not in 10 years — it was urgent. So this changes their behavior.

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