Diana Walsh Pasulka Interview : Part I
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka to discuss some fascinating developments around the topic of UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) within the cultural sphere. The concept of UAPs might be more familiar to most under a previous term, UFOs (though the UFO term doesn’t capture the full spectrum of the phenomena).
Dr. Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work focuses on Catholic history and new religious movements. She has written for Oxford University Press, Routledge Press, Macmillan Press, and her work has been featured in mainstream publications such as Vice, Vox, Fox News, Tank, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Publisher’s Weekly. Her work has also been featured in various media venues and podcasts including Vox Media’s Ezra Klein, Mysterious Universe, NPR, and Lex Fridman.
She is the author of three monographs, American Cosmic, Encounters, and Heaven Can Wait (Oxford University and St. Martin’s Essentials). She is the co-editor for numerous anthologies and peer reviewed essays about digital technology and religious practices and beliefs. In cooperation with the Vatican Secret Archive, she heads the translation project of the canonization records of the saint, Joseph of Copertino. Additionally, Dr. Pasulka consults about religion and history for movies and television.
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LS: What I find especially interesting about the development of your book, American Cosmic is that you conceived of the idea of this book well before that pivotal December 2017 New York Times article “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money,” (correct me if I’m wrong) that brought the UFO/UAP topic more into the mainstream. You would have started this book then, at a time when the subject of UFOs/UAPs was considered much more taboo and fringe than it is today, right? Can you talk about what it has been like, exploring the topic as its reception in the media has evolved from the fringes and, in particular, what it has been like exploring this topic as someone in academia. Were there barriers that you faced - especially in the beginning of your exploration into this topic? How has that changed?
DP: Sure. I look at miraculous phenomena in Catholic history, and, as you know, in Religious Studies. These are academic disciplines, so we're multi-disciplinary, archaeologists and historians. We do ethnography, too. I started my project, American Cosmic, in 2012 and I had finished a book on Purgatory. I just became a full professor. Then in 2015, I was nominated by my department to be chair of my department, so I didn't in any way feel that my work was weird. I’ve had the support of my colleagues all throughout my career.
Of course, most people look at it as strange, but the way in which Religious Studies academics study it - it's not really that weird. It's like looking at something historical. There are many UFO religions, like the Nation of Islam which is based on UFO events and things like that. You've got a bunch of UFO religions, and religiosities. So it wasn't weird for my field and I didn't in any way feel like I was compromising my academic integrity to do it. And I had already won our college’s research award and was already recognized in my field and had been doing a lot of things that were succeeding. I had just finished working on a grant I had won, it was 1.6 million dollars.
LS: Oh, wow!
DP: In the humanities! It was a history grant to teach religious history to teachers here in Pender County, Brunswick County and New Hanover County. So I was pretty okay with making that shift to study UFOs. Anyway, this is how it happened. I was doing archival research into reports of miraculous phenomena, especially souls of purgatory in the Catholic religion. What I found was that purgatory was actually a place in Ireland, and so I traced the dogma of purgatory from this material culture - from this place, where people practiced purgatorial rights that included going into this cave and experiencing the supernatural in this cave, and if they survived for 24 hours, their sins were cleansed. During my time of figuring this out though, I came across a lot of these - basically - aerial phenomena. Now you have to understand, I actually was one of these people (and I look back and I feel bad about this) who scoffed at people who believed in UFOs. I basically thought that they were crazy. Right? I thought, “Oh, yeah, right. Belief in UFOs,” even though my brother had seen one when he was 11.
I didn't want to study it. But what happened was I had so many of these reports throughout European history that the Catholics had identified and written down. They kept meticulous records. I had these reports, and I showed it to my friend and he looked at it, and he said, “Oh, these look like reports of UFOs, and I said, “That's crazy!” Soon after that, there was a UFO conference here, and I attended it, and I saw and heard the same reports - literally. They sounded so similar that I thought it would be easy to do this. This became my new project although it wasn't the one I had thought I would do. Frankly, I was going to do something completely different. But I started to study UFO reports - contemporary ones, because I wanted to do a cross-cultural analysis, which is not done in my field. “Don't do that,” people say. You can't really assume that this is the same phenomena, but you can show that the patterns are almost exactly the same. It was weird enough for me to realize that something was happening that appears to be perennial.
So I started the project. At the time I started to do that, people showed up from the CIA and from the FBI and they were interested in my research, and this kind of frightened me. I would say that it was shocking, because I recognized that there was something happening, but I wasn't quite sure what it was. Then, a person invited me to go to New Mexico to an alleged crash site, which I did not believe in. It was under a no-fly zone. The person who was taking me had some very legitimate credentials and was a scientist - had been in the space shuttle program his entire life. So he was absolutely credible and legitimate. Yet I still didn't believe it. And I wouldn't go unless I had a friend of mine go with me.
I asked Jeff Kripal to go. He's a professor of religious studies at Rice [University]. And he said, “this is out of my comfort zone,” and I said, “I understand.” I did, of course. But I'm going, and I took Gary Nolan, who's a professor at Stanford. He's “James” in [American Cosmic], because at the time he didn't want to be known. So we started this in 2013 and I finished the book in late 2017. It went to press, and then I was off to the Vatican, to do research. When I went to the Vatican, I recognized that this had to be the actual last chapter of the book which had already been turned in. So in a sense the book actually wrote itself on this journey. I just was keeping up with what was going on, and trying to theorize it on the way, because I felt like I was in a Promethean mythology [where] the Prometheus kind of becomes literal.
The scientists were calling this stuff in the desert, “the donation” [and] they called it “the donation site,” instead of a crash site, as if these were super-aliens that were giving us things to back engineer, so we could have this technology. That's what their idea was. So I felt like I was living what seemed to be something that had been mythological, become real - not necessarily actually real, you have to understand - but real in the minds of almost everybody - real in the minds of these scientists. Now look how real it is. Everyone, almost, believes it. And certainly a lot of the people that I interact with who are scientists believe it. I’m in daily contact with people in the Invisible College. Some of these are physicists. All of them have affiliations with the programs. I talk to Leslie Kean often, about the developments. I'm still just trying to do the most responsible academic research I can do on a topic that is fast changing, like every day.
LS: Right, absolutely. So, I grew up in the eighties, and the idea of UFOs - I mean even the term, UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) has this very sort of materialist bent to it. But then of course the term evolved into “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” and then, finally, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon” which means that it could kind of be anything. I think this idea is entering more into the public discourse - the idea that, “Well, maybe they're extraterrestrials, but maybe not. Maybe it's extra tempestrials, or it’s extra dimensionals,” - or and to use Jeremy Corbell’s term, maybe it’s “techno terrestrials.” So I wonder if the fact that it's more open-ended as to what this thing could be is making it easier for people to accept that there might be some credibility to this phenomenon. What do you think?
DP: Oh, for sure. Very long ago, Jacques Vallée was one of the first people (and John Keel) to basically say, “these aren't extraterrestrials. These might be multi dimensional, or something like that.” So that’s been around for a while. You have to understand that a good portion of our understanding of it is based on entertainment media. We've all been brought up with Star Wars and before that Star Trek. And the X-files, right? So every generation has had their programming about how to view - how to interpret - what framework through which to see whatever it is that's happening in the sky. So I think that we can't discount the impact that makes on our [imagination], but then that becomes how we interpret it. So that if you look at these things, most people are going to think of them as extraterrestrials. That's like probably the easiest way to see it - the most fundamentalist way to see it.
