Diana Walsh Pasulka Interview : Part II

LS: In the recent Debrief article, [UAP whistleblower] David Grusch referred to [UAPs] as “craft.” But then you look at some of the more mainstream newspapers that are starting to publicize this, and these news sources talk about “spaceships.” This makes it, for me, sort of sci-fi - like a parody of the thing. And I wonder to what extent this terminology is sensationalizing the issue or maybe even trying to debunk it - by referring to the phenomena in these kinds of cheesy sci-fi terms.

DP: Good question. I think that's an excellent way to look at it, and this is what happens. We have to just understand it as a process. [. . .] These events are seemingly traumatic for people. Even if it's a good event, it's still traumatic. I went through a traumatic event with meeting these people that believe in this. It was traumatizing to my epistemology, basically. And it shattered it, so what we do when we have these traumatic events is we go through a process. And part of that process is, we tell ourselves stories about it. And I think what we're seeing right now is that people are shocked and now they're going to create these stories. And it's okay. I think it's okay. But it is a process. Does it reduce it? Absolutely, this process reduces it. But does that have a function? Yes, it does.

LS: I heard this term - “metabolize” - and I kind of like it. You can’t release something too quickly. Otherwise it makes it difficult to metabolize, and I like that way of putting it. I like that term “metabolize" because it could be too much, as you say, of an epistemological shock to absorb the information all at once. 

I’m interested to know. You mentioned that you had this epistemological shock. If you don't mind my asking, at what point did that happen? Was it just being around these people and saying, “okay, these are people who've been working in the field - there's enough evidence,” or was there a particular moment when you were kind of flipped into this other way of seeing things. 

DP: Yes, and you use the word flip. Did you read Jeff Kripal's book “The Flip?” 

LS: I did! It was unintentional, my use of the term. But yeah, I did.

DP: So that's an actual thing - “the Flip.” So yes, I do exactly remember the weekend it happened. As I said, I was a scoffer at anything that had to do with UFOs, but then I had this discussion with my friend. This is in 2012. I showed him all these things that I found by doing research in archives, and I said, “Isn't this weird - look at all this stuff?” And he looked at it all, and then he was really emphatic. “These are UFOs, Diana.” And I thought he was crazy so I said, “Get out! Get out!” Then he came back to me later, and he said “Oh, look what I found! We need to go to this UFO conference.” I went. 

When we were there I heard very similar stories, almost exactly what nuns were saying in the 1800s, when they were seeing these orbs that they thought were souls from purgatory and things like that - they really seemed to me to be the same, almost like a transhistorical phenomena. . 

[Throughout] the whole process of writing the book on purgatory, in every single archive that I’d go to, I'd write down the weird stuff. I'd say, “Okay, here's the stuff I need for purgatory and here's the really weird stuff that I don't understand.” You know, for example, the flying houses. What the heck are those? And I kept that list, so that was all in my head. And then listening to these people was all in my head, and then we went back to my house. My husband wanted to rent this documentary about John Mack - about his work. And that's when there was a sense of the uncanny. It's not a comfortable feeling. I was in uncanny valley. I lived in it. And then that's when I decided to go back and look at the primary source material for Teresa of Avila and also for Saint Francis of Assisi.  If you go back and you look at the representations of both of those saints' experiences you recognize that they are nothing like what we see when we go to churches and see these beautiful paintings. 

The beautiful paintings look pretty beautiful, right? They look like angels, or what we assume are beatific beings. The primary source data for many of these look very different. Saint Francis appears to have been injured by what was referred to as a flaming torch. Teresa of Avila was not used to seeing anything like this tiny, shiny being that had - almost like an arrow with a dart at the end that basically put it into her body. And then I really, honestly, I was changed after rereading these reports. It was like, “Okay, wow, I feel like I've studied this my whole life, and I didn't even know what I was studying.” 

Part of the shock was that it appeared that what was going on back then is actually happening now. And maybe there's a direct lineage of this progression. I have friends who study Islam, friends who study Hinduism, friends who study Buddhism, and they all had similar historical references to things like these. So I went to each of them and I said, “Pull up the weirdest stuff you could find that has  these qualities to it.” And they did. And they thought it was weird, too.

So then I became clued in that the intelligence communities were really hot on this topic, which then, still legitimated to me that something really weird was happening. Could I, in terms of my research, have been being used? But there were too many things, especially the historical lineage that I had traced.

So anyway - that happened. So that's my ontological shock moment - that lasted for a year!.

LS: Switching gears a bit, I understand that you have an artistic background so I’m interested to hear about the trajectory from that art background to where you are now. Do you find that you're able to bring some of that artistic discipline into your current discipline and explorations?

DP: Yeah, so first of all, when I did art, I did it as an undergraduate. I started as a kid, and I followed up on it as an undergraduate, and I had some really amazing teachers. I was using [art] as a means.

When I did math, I was good at math. But I wasn't good at math when I began, but what happened was I used math as a means to be in the present - almost like a tool. I wouldn't understand it unless I did that. I really wouldn't get good grades unless I did that.

So I recognize that when I did art, I was using art in the same way - to be in the present moment. And so it was almost like a protocol for me. And it just so happened that the art that I did, people did like. And I liked it too. One of the first big drawings that I did, that I really liked, and other people really liked, too, was a drawing of Jimi Hendrix. And there was something about him. Obviously he's an artist, as you know, and he also believed that his art was spiritual.

After American Cosmic was published, I got a lot of mail and correspondence, and I even got physical objects from artists and from mathematicians - like two distinct groups that you would think were separate, right? But I began to understand that they actually had a lot of correlation. And this was it:  It was that they were each accessing (and this is my interpretation) - they were accessing another dimension. The artists were accessing something outside of space-time that they could then channel into this physical 3D thing, right? Or it could be a book or something like that, or poetry. And there are idealist mathematicians (and when I say idealist, I mean philosophical idealism) where they literally believe that math is outside of human cognition. And so they believe that they were accessing the realm of these, almost like Platonic forms.

Some mathematicians don't believe that, but there's many of them who do, and I tend to be of that sort. I believe that there are these objects, hyperobjects, that are outside of space-time.  And you can actually access them through mathematics, through certain languages. Art is one, language. Mathematics is another language. So I began to see it like that.

So then, when I looked back at my own endeavors into art, I recognized that I was actually training myself through art.

LS: Yeah, that's not kind of discontinuous with what I believe at all. I would say I have a similar bent.