UFOs, angels, and new spirituality

The last five years have been great for anyone interested in UFOs and aliens.

The public debate over UFOs and extraterrestrial life has been going on for a decade, thanks to an article published in the New York Times in 2019 about reports of UFOs, also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), off the East Coast. There was a big change in my appearance. Before. Since then, the whole topic of UFOs has felt much more tenuous than it once was.

We don’t have anything like actual alien evidence yet, but at least this is a live question in a way it wasn’t before. I still want to believe that there are far more plausible explanations for UAPs that don’t involve extraterrestrials. But the possibility that aliens exist raises all sorts of interesting questions.

How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our understanding of the world and our place in it? And while aliens are real, what can we imagine? What if it’s so different that you can’t even begin to make sense of it?

Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the author of two books on the subject. her first book, american cosmic, which focused on the religious aspects of UFO mythology.The new one is called Encounters: Experiences with non-human intelligenceand it dives into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered extraterrestrial life.

I recently invited Pasulka. gray zone She talks about her research, the stories she hears from people who claim to have experienced UFOs, and how her views have evolved in surprising ways.As always, there’s more throughout the podcast, so listen and follow gray zone Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

In your book, you write that UFO incidents are a “spiritual reality” for people. What does that mean?

Diana Pasulka

UFO incidents are reality-altering for those who experience them. They aren’t necessarily good. Religious events can be bad or good. I’ve heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs, and what are sometimes referred to as “UFO-related entities,” and it sounds very similar to what I’ve been reading about in Catholic historical records. Ta.

I was finishing a book on the Catholic doctrine of purgatory when I realized that the Catholic tradition, the historical record, is full of airborne events. There were no airplanes or rockets at that time. People saw something in the sky and interpreted it in different ways. One of them is that this could be a soul from Purgatory, or it could be the house of a saint, etc. I think what we’re dealing with here is not necessarily a new religion, but a new form of spirituality.

Sean Illing

So when people say they’ve encountered aliens or been visited by angels, do you really believe them?

Diana Pasulka

I think they believe it, but that doesn’t give me belief that it happened. Let’s take an example. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician and genius from India in the early 20th century. And he believed that these mathematical calculations were whispered into his ear by his local goddess, the Goddess. I think she was a version of Lakshmi. In other words, this story sticks and repeats itself.

Now, am I true to the belief that Lakshmi gave it to Ramanujan? No, it’s not. But I can definitely study that process and also study people today who say they are experiencing aliens that are giving them this kind of creative impulse, and these beings. The question of the objective existence of can be set aside.

Sean Illing

In the 14 years you’ve been studying this issue, what’s the most “terrible” thing you’ve seen or heard?

Diana Pasulka

I think that’s the experience of the pilot who witnessed it while flying and saw what looked like a human face. Then he started seeing this person in the crowd. He sometimes saw UFOs even during the day, but he realized that no one else could see them, so he didn’t tell anyone.

He also suffered burn injuries. His eyes began to hurt. I asked a scientist about it. “What is this effect?” And he said, “It was some kind of radiation effect on his retina.” That was pretty weird!

Sean Illing

I don’t know what to make of some of the stories and characters introduced in this book. The vividness, consistency, and depth of the testimonies are puzzling to say the least.I can’t believe it exists there is nothing You can see it here.

Diana Pasulka

Well, I agree with you. So, I started out as a complete non-believer. But at Stanford University, when I met people involved in the space program and leading researchers, I was completely shocked because there were so many of them. And the shock lasted for several years.

I’ve been researching this for about 14 years, so that’s a long time. I actually believe in these people. It has definitely changed the way we look at religion throughout history and what people talk about today. All I can say is that these people have had this kind of experience. Most of them don’t come out and say such things because of their jobs. The stigma still exists and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly. I’ve met thousands of people who are reliable witnesses, and the patterns are very similar, so I’m not going to disbelieve them.

Sean Illing

The skeptic in me says that the will to believe is so strong in the human heart that we can be convinced of almost anything with our hearts. I think the people you write about in your book believe that what they’re telling you is the truth.

But like you said, that doesn’t mean they’re true, nor does it mean they’re definitely true. To take a random example, the man you talked to moved his family from Los Angeles to live in a remote town because he received a message from Jupiter telling him to do so. It sounds like a deranged person’s hallucinations.

Diana Pasulka

I mean, what did the pilgrims do? Or what did the people do who had a vision and thought they needed to leave Egypt or go somewhere else because God had told them? Or was it because he had a vision from an angel telling him to do this? I look at things like this. I see this as a continuation of a process that humans have been experiencing for thousands of years. It is a fundamental religious impulse. I think so.

Sean Illing

It’s certainly a religious impulse, but it’s separate from the question of veracity. Again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my own ambivalence. Despite what I said earlier about having a strong will to believe, I think there is also a strong will to cling to the current worldview. Because letting it go means letting go of almost everything we believe to be true. And that’s scary.

So there are forces pushing in both directions here. For me, the only sensible position at this point is agnosticism. I accept the evidence, but it’s still not enough.

Diana Pasulka

Yes, I think so. I would also like to refute a little bit what you said about the will to believe. Most people don’t seem to want to go through these things. That pilot didn’t want to go through that. he didn’t want to believe it. He was just living his life well and then everything is turned upside down. He sees this face in the clouds that almost seems to be mocking him. Who would want to go through that?

This also applies to people who claim to have seen angels or souls from purgatory in the 1600s or 1700s. They weren’t really looking for that.

I wrote about one of those experiences in my book about Purgatory. It was this nun. She was horrified when she saw the orb enter her convent cell. And she told the people at the convent that no one believed her, but she kept telling her story and eventually Mother Teresa sat with her and said that indeed she had seen the same thing. I did. And they interpreted that orb to be a soul from Purgatory, and the whole monastery prayed for weeks to get rid of it, and it finally disappeared.

Sean Illing

To return to this broader question about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, we are not even going to ask whether this discovery is the most important event in human history. Because obviously it is. But what do you think the most important implications of that discovery are for us as a species?

Diana Pasulka

As someone who has studied historical religions, I can tell you that most people in the world believe in non-human intelligences because most people are religious. Therefore, in different religions, non-human intelligence exists in different forms and manifests itself to people in different ways. Those who don’t believe that story are mostly people in the post-Enlightenment West. So it’s definitely the most shocking event for us, and it would mean something like a post-secular society.

Sean Illing

I’m not sure we’re as worldly as we think we are, but that’s another story. I think I would say this. What made the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions so important, not only scientifically but also culturally, was that they dispersed the center of humanity. The claim that it was a special animal with some unique meaning fell apart. It turns out that we are part of the same historical process as everything else.

But if the discovery of extraterrestrial life were to occur in an undeniable way, it would be the final step in the revolution started by Copernicus and Darwin. In a terminal sense, that would upend our sense of our own biological significance, and I think that’s beautiful in a way. But if the price of that discovery is that aliens show up and destroy us, then it’s not worth it at all.

Diana Pasulka

Yes, that’s no good!

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