← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
When U.F.O.s Become Religion
00:59:41
U.F.O.s, fairies and abductions! This week, Ross talks to Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor of religious studies, about how a deep dive into Catholic archives led her down a path to unravel the connections between religion, extraterrestrial encounters and government secrecy.
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- [00:01]
Robert Vinlowen
Hey, I'm Robert Vinlowen. I'm from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to people about wordle and the wordle Archive. You all play wordle?
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Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yes.
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Robert Vinlowen
I have something exciting to show you.
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Ross Douthat
Okay.
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Robert Vinlowen
It's the wordle Archive.
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Ross Douthat
Oh, oh.
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Robert Vinlowen
And you can see if I missed it, I can, like, go back 100%. Oh, that's sick. So now you can play every wordle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles. Oh, my God, I love it. Amazing. New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com Games.
- [00:32]
Ross Douthat
From New York Times Opinion. I'm Ross Douthit, and this is interesting Times. There have been a bunch of flying saucer crazes in American history. But the one we're living through right now started back in 2017 when this very newspaper, the New York Times, reported on weird encounters experienced by US Military pilots. And since then, it's given US Congressional hearings would be UFO whistleblowers. And we've had a brief panic over mysterious objects in the sky over the state of New Jersey. I'm not persuaded that we're actually being visited by ET however, this whole era has left me with a lot of weird, unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistleblowers actually know or think they know about unidentified aerial phenomena? And does at least part of the US government really, really want Americans to believe in UFOs? And if so, why? To help me search for answers, I asked Diana Walsh Pasulka to join me. She's a religious studies professor who writes about UFO experiences as a very American kind of religion. But she's also been pulled into this weird world of apparent government believers, and she's become something of a believer herself. So, Diana Walsh Pasulka, welcome to Interesting Times.
- [02:20]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
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Ross Douthat
So we're gonna start by talking about what the UFO phenomenon is, especially as it relates to your own academic work. And we're gonna get into strange lights in the sky and government conspiracies probably as we go. But I wanna start where your work starts, at a more personal level, with individual experiences, encounters, abduction narratives, conversations, and so on. So you're a professor of religious studies. Why don't you talk about how religious studies led you into the UFO experience or the UFO debate?
- [03:07]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, so I've been studying religion for many years. I study at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. I've been a practicing Catholic for my Almost my entire life. And I study Catholic history, so I've done a lot of looking into popular culture and how this forms belief, about Catholic ideas like afterlife, other worlds, things like that. And I didn't believe in UFOs, had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wasn't a person who was interested in that topic, but I was interested in the ways in which people thought of transformation, spiritual transformation, but also transformation that happens on Earth through these narratives of going into another place, another, you know, an other world journey.
- [03:51]
Ross Douthat
And how did that pull you into studying people who claimed to have had a UFO style encounter?
- [03:58]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay, so when I was doing my work for the book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, that brought me to a lot of archives. And so I'd go into the archives. And archives are places where things aren't digitized. Right. And so I started to look into how Catholics viewed how souls ascended into heaven or purgatory. And what I found was a lot of documents from a thousand years ago, 800, 500 years ago, about recorded sightings of aerial phenomena that Catholics had from Europe.
- [04:33]
Ross Douthat
And these are things flying in the air?
- [04:35]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, aerial phenomena. So, you know, they interpreted these in different ways. Here's a good example. So in the 1800s, there's this young nun, and she's living in a convent. And every night this ball of light comes through her cell. And she's pretty upset about this. So she tells the Mother Superior and she says, you know, this is happening. And the Mother Superior says, you're having a bad dream. And so the nun is pretty certain this is happening. It happens nightly. And so at one point the Mother Superior says, okay, I'm going to be with you at night to see what's going on. And they determine that this is a soul from purgatory that needs to be prayed back into purgatory. So the whole convent gets together and they go through a process of prayers to, you know, kick this, this orb or this flame of light out of her cell. So these kinds of things I, I saw and I started to keep track of them. Sometimes they were interpreted as flying houses. Sometimes they were interpreted as little beings, you know, about 3ft tall and shiny. And I shared this with a couple friends of mine and I said, what do you all think of this? And one of them said, it looks like modern day reports of UFOs. And that shocked me. And I thought, oh, I didn't accept it, to tell you the truth. I thought it was, you know, hogwash. I was like, no, that it can't be that there was in town. There was a UFO conference called mufon, the Mutual UFO Network. And so I decided to check that out. And when I was there, I heard people talking about their experiences encountering UFOs. And it sounded very similar to the log I had of reports of Catholics in Europe talking about this. And so I started to do a lot more intensive work. I met academics who were studying this, and before I knew it, people who were a part of aerospace companies and the military began to want to correspond with me and see the data and the research that I had been doing. So that's what got me into this topic.
- [06:44]
Ross Douthat
All right, so we're going to save the aerospace communications for a little further on in the conversation. I want to talk about the details of UFO experience. Right? So when you say you went to a conference, you started talking to people who had these experiences. Are we talking about sort of the classic X Files abduction narratives where people report being taken up into spacecrafts? Are we talking about things that are sort of more. More sort of intimate and personal? Give me a couple examples of what we talk about when we talk about UFO encounters in the 21st century.
- [07:18]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay, so the people who were at the conference had had UFO encounters. And often what this entails is a person will see something in the sky, aerial phenomena. If it's an intense encounter, they will call themselves an experiencer, where they have an experience of a being or some kind of telepathic communication with the aerial phenomena itself. And this will shift their world. Right. This will change them. And some of the people believe that they're getting special information or they've had this experience, and none of their neighbors have had this experience. So they feel kind of special about it. But the experience is a pattern match to the experiences that I saw from 500 years ago, 200 years ago.
- [08:06]
Ross Douthat
What, so what when you. When people report having a telepathic connection, you said they get information from, or they feel like they've gotten information from these kind of experiences. What kind of information do they get? What does that mean? Okay, so people report this.
- [08:21]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
So a lot of the people would report the information as something that had to do with the future. So they would have ideas of basically like an apocalypse, a bad scenario for the future. So the people who I talked to at this conference were pretty convinced that we were going to face some type of a cataclysm. So I talked to them a little bit about how people have thought that for about 2,000 years. And so it hasn't actually happened. Yeah, so it hasn't really happened like they thought it would. So when they have these experiences and they get this information, it a lot of times makes them upset because they're thinking that the end of the world is gonna happen.
- [09:09]
Ross Douthat
Are a lot of these people who you've talked to having what we think of as sort of the classic abduction story, where they feel like they've been taken to a different place, taken onto a ship, these kind of things, or is it more sort of just interpersonal communication with some kind of light or being?
- [09:29]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
It's both. So the classic image of the alien abduction, you see a farmer, generally, right, Being abducted into a spaceship. So that's like the meme that we see. We also see a cow, right, going up into the spaceship. These are, you know, they're ascending into a spaceship. If you were to see how souls in purgatory are shown in paintings from the 1400s, the 1500s, you'll also see them ascending into aerial spaces. So the ascent is there. So are people experiencing journeys into other spaces? Spacecraft. Are they seeing things that are not of our reality? Yes, that's what they're having. They're having those kinds of visions, definitely.
- [10:15]
Ross Douthat
So one of the books that I read when I think it was around the time that UFOs kind of came back into the news, which would have been when my own newspaper, the Times, reported on weird sightings of aerial phenomena by us pilots, Right. And I had not, you know, I watched the X files in the 1990s. I had not been a UFO person in any meaningful sense of the term, but I got sort of sucked into reading a little bit of the literature. And one of the most persuasive books that I read was by a sort of famous UFO researcher shrouded in mystery, a guy named Jacques Vallee. And he wrote books pretty early, I think, in the sort of modern UFO phenomena, where he connected this not just to sort of past religious experiences, but also to a whole realm of folklore around, let's say, fairy abductions. And I thought Vallee's argument was quite persuasive, that there is this kind of persistent phenomena in human history that suddenly gets reinterpreted as the space age dawns in terms of creatures from other planets. But in fact, it's this kind of folklore substrate that just sort of takes different forms depending on the cultural context. And that seems to be a version of the argument you're making in linking modern UFO sightings to the experience of Catholic nuns or religious mystics in the past. Right. So you so you think. You think that whatever we call the UFO phenomena is something that has a. It doesn't start in 1947 with Roswell or anything like that. There's some sort of consistent historical phenomenon that's part of. Part of human religious sociology.
- [12:01]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah. So one of the first books I read when I made the turn to study UFO beliefs and practices was Jacques's Passport to Magonia, which is a great.
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Ross Douthat
Book, one of the many great titles of this.
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Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, yeah, it's a really good book.
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Ross Douthat
In the UFO literature. Yes.
- [12:14]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
And to me, it really looked like a religious studies book. You know, like the. Here is this. By the way, he's a really interesting person who's an information scientist, so he's able to do this work on archival materials, just like I did. So Jacques links it to fairy folklore, but he also. He goes back and he looks at the phenomena until 1860, something like that, the Industrial Revolution. He stops because he knows that by that time, we have things in the sky that are ours. So 1947 marks a specific time period where the idea of the UFO becomes. It basically hijacks this kind of perennial idea of angels and things like that, you know, aerial phenomena in the sky. That's not when it begins, but that's when it gets hijacked, in my opinion.
- [13:07]
Ross Douthat
Right. That's when it becomes a narrative that is connected to ideas about space, alien life, visitors from literal other worlds, not from supernatural dimensions and so on.
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Diana Walsh Pasulka
That's right.
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Ross Douthat
But one thing that's been really striking to me is that there are ways in which UFO experiences look like kind of this raw material of religion that hasn't yet been forged into any kind of fully coherent belief system. And I'm curious where you're writing about this as a religious studies professor and sort of framing it in part as kind of almost the development of a very American 20th and 21st century form of religion. But it seems to be a form of religion that is completely agnostic and uncertain about what it's actually describing. Right. Like there's people with every theory under the sun to explain what they're experiencing. So I'm curious, what are the actual beliefs of the UFO community to the extent that you can describe them? And do you think that there's a coherent religious vision, or is it just this kind of raw material where every person has a different interpretation?
- [14:25]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, that's a great question. So what I'm suggesting, and I say this in my book, American Cosmic, is that this is a new form of. Of religion. Actually, coherence is not going to be a feature of this religion. This is a religious development and it's decentralized. And the reason it's decentralized, it doesn't have a pope. You know, it doesn't have the one experience or. Although there are UFO religions and, you know, like realism. And these come. These are. They come about in the 1940s to the 1960s. But then what you see when we get the Internet.
- [15:01]
Ross Douthat
Give. Just. Just to pause. Railism was the cult. Right.
- [15:05]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
It's still. Yeah.
- [15:06]
Ross Douthat
Remind everyone what realism was or is.
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Diana Walsh Pasulka
It is a UFO religion that originates with Rael. I can't remember his actual name, but he's a French man in the 1970s. He has a UFO experience and, you know, he's abducted or I don't think he'd call it that because it's a pleasant experience for him.
- [15:27]
Ross Douthat
He's enlightened.
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Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah. And so he spreads the message. And this is now religion. It's called a new religious movement. That's how we would describe it in religious studies. One of them also is the Nation of Islam. Okay. So I can talk about both of those. These are both apocalyptic religions in that they believe that the end is soon. Okay. And that the end will come with the arrival of a spaceship.
- [15:51]
Ross Douthat
Okay, but the spaceships are the good guys.
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Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah. When both of those religious. Yeah, the spaceships are the good guys. That's correct.
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Ross Douthat
So they're bringing peace. They're bringing peace, enlightenment and so on. But when we say it's a religion, do we mean that there is a kind of supernatural component, a spiritual. Are people praying to the aliens? Like, what makes this different from traditional religion? Is the line just totally blurry that it's like they're acting like the spaceships are angels, but they're calling them spaceships?
- [16:26]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Well, you have an advanced being here who's going to bring a wondrous world to these people. So it may not conform to what you consider to be a traditional religion, like Catholicism, but Buddhism doesn't conform to Catholicism either. So each of those, Nation of Islam and the Rails Railism, these are traditional religions. Like, they conform to what people in my field would call a religion. Do they pray? Do they have practices? Yeah, they do have practices. They're different. So Nation of Islam has a completely different type of practice than the realism.
- [17:06]
Ross Douthat
Nation of Islam just declare. Nation of Islam basically folds a kind of extraterrestrial narrative into a sort of Islamic style of monotheism. Right. So it's sort of effectively integrating ideas about other worlds into an Islamic framework.
- [17:23]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yes, it does. Yes. Yeah. And it's specifically an American religion, so Islam doesn't recognize them.
- [17:31]
Ross Douthat
Right. Okay, so those are examples where UFO experience gets basically sort of takes a traditional religious shape. There's someone who has an experience, they have a prophetic narrative. Right. And there's a set of rituals and beliefs and people subscribe to it. That's true. But then go on, then go on and talk about, talk about the decentralized form.
- [17:52]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, so that's the religion of the past, that we're not going to see that anymore. So the Internet comes along.
- [17:58]
Ross Douthat
Why not? Wait, why not? Why are we not.
- [17:59]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I'm just about to tell you.
- [18:00]
Ross Douthat
Okay, tell me. Sorry, go ahead.
- [18:02]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, no, that's okay. So the Internet comes along and what it does is it creates a decentralized space. When people now see aerial objects, what do they do? They take their phones out and they record their experiences and they upload them to social media platforms. And so this gets connected, then folded into different narratives. So we're not going to see like a coherent traditional religious framework right now because we're in a different infrastructure. Things aren't going back. But no, we're not going to see this kind of coherent UFO narrative unless it comes from the government itself, which I think is happening.
- [18:44]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so it's the Internet that is fundamentally decentralizing.
- [18:49]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Oh, absolutely, yes.
- [18:50]
Ross Douthat
Because people who have these experiences can go online and see, for instance, that they're not unique. Right. That there's other people who've had these kind of experiences. So that means they're less likely to think, ah, there must be one special prophet of the UFO message.
- [19:07]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
And there are more because there's so many prophets now. Right. So many people.
- [19:10]
Ross Douthat
So everyone, so everyone is entering into this kind of ongoing conversation in which each new experience is just something to talk about and argue about.
- [19:21]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Right. And there is, at least here in the United States there's a give and take with the narrative that comes from D.C. congress about the topic of UAP. And so that's an ongoing feature of this, what I call religiosity. So it's a new form of religion. It is a religiosity. So it's different than traditional religions.
- [20:18]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so let's. All right, let's. I've been resisting it, but let's, let's go towards Washington D.C. right, because someone, I think could, could take up the argument you're making and say, ah, yes, there are these experiences throughout human history and they reflect some kind of Jungian unconscious manifesting itself in dreams. And hallucinations or they reflect persistent patterns in mental illness. Right. That are sort of material causes that are understandable. But I think what makes this different, as you keep suggesting. Right. Is that it interacts with the government, with the national security state, with people inside the government who have beliefs about UFOs and, you know, may try and leak or make claims about UFOs and so on. But I want to stick with your biography for a minute. Right. You mentioned earlier that once you started researching this subject, you started getting communications from people inside the government or inside the aerospace industry. What. What form did those communications take?
- [21:29]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Correct. Okay. So when I started the research for American Cosmic, I thought it would be pretty easy because we have the Internet here and we have all of this data and it's pretty obvious what's happening. And about a year after I started to do this, I would get emails and oftentimes people that I knew would reach out to me and say so. And so got ahold of me. This is a person who works at this company. There's space related, and they would like to talk with you. Are you comfortable talking with them? People who emailed me, again were from legitimate aerospace companies and were interested in the research that I did about angel contact events and things like that. So then I began to share information with these people. And I had read Jacques Fillet's books and so forth and other people's books, and I recognized that I might be identified as a person who could spread disinformation. So that was always on my mind as well as I was, you know, working with these people at this point. These people didn't care if I was going to ever publish anything again. They were just interested in what I had done and they wanted to look at it. And they. They had actual jobs doing this work. So that was eye opening for me.
- [22:46]
Ross Douthat
What? Without obviously betraying confidences, when you say they had jobs doing this kind of work, what does that mean? They were employed by NASA or Northrop Grumman or someone like that to research aerial phenomena. Like their job was Director of Aerial Phenomena research. What do we mean?
- [23:08]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, they wouldn't have a title like that. So at this point, this is pre2017 when Leslie Kane and Blumenthal. Okay, the New York Times article, pre2017.
- [23:19]
Ross Douthat
Again for the audience, is when the New York Times published stories about military pilots encountering aerial phenomena. And it sort of opened an era of new debate about these things, but. Sorry, go on.
- [23:31]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yes, that's right. So this is pre2017. This is around 2013 to about that time period. And they have various titles, they have day jobs as, say a mission controller at Cape Canaveral, things like that. And they would say this, and almost all of them called it this. They said my, my hobby job, they would call it their hobby. And so some of them would go to places that they called crash retrieval places and they would look for debris from UFO crashes and then they would find scientists who would be able to look into the debris and find out if it was anomalous. So this is the type of research that they were doing. Some of them worked with astronauts, trained them and so forth. So it was various types of people and jobs.
- [24:30]
Ross Douthat
But their hobby jobs, as you call them, this is off the books work. The US government is not paying them to do the research you're describing. They're doing it on their own.
- [24:42]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I don't actually know that, but that's what they, you know, implied.
- [24:46]
Ross Douthat
That's what they mostly said. They mostly said this is something I'm.
- [24:49]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Interested in because they made a differentiation.
- [24:51]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Okay, so go on. So you had this kind of contact with them. This is all before the Times reported on these things. So how did that develop to the point where you took the idea that there's an objective reality here seriously?
- [25:08]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Even after writing American Cosmic, I, I still was not a non believer. And I wouldn't say I, I wasn't a disbeliever, but I was open to being convinced. Okay? I was open to being convinced. And there were a lot of scientists around me, okay. So I, I was part of their community and, and still am actually. And so, you know, this afforded me an insight into their lives and their lives were basically dictated by this type of study. So some of them had constrained lives. And what I mean by that is that, you know, they had security clearances and things like that. If I went with them to a conference, they had to know all of the people who would be at the conference. So in a sense it was. They were most likely part of intelligence communities too.
- [26:07]
Ross Douthat
And when they would reach out to you, they would send you an email.
- [26:11]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Like how sometimes it was an introduction. So after the first few emails with certain of them, I got an introduction from an experiencer to a person who I met at a conference, which was an American Academy of Religion conference. So I met this person publicly, like in a public space because, you know, I wasn't used to talking to people like this for most of my life. And anyway it was, I got an insight into the lives that they Led. And I became convinced that the government was definitely doing something related to this. Whether or not it was actual UFOs, I honestly don't know, but I know that it's something that is definitely. These people are involved in doing, and it's part of a secret program. And that was something that was. That came out in the 2017 New.
- [27:04]
Ross Douthat
York Times article that there was.
- [27:07]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
There's this secret. These programs are. Yeah, there are. There's a government program studying this UFOs, UAP.
- [27:15]
Ross Douthat
Right. But the official line of all these entities has been the US Government doesn't have, you know, a secret program that, for instance, has a lot of material that we think is from other planets or anything like that. Right. There's no. So what you're talking about is, in effect, private information. You have private reasons to think that the US Government effort goes beyond just collecting data and videos and trying to resolve anomalies.
- [27:50]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I mean, this has been stated by people who are affiliated with the military. So it's not necessarily private information to me or to people who have been watching the news.
- [28:04]
Ross Douthat
My understanding is that there's a set of people, including former Defense Department officials, various people who have said one consistently. There's a bunch of aerial phenomena that we don't understand that our pilots see, that we have video of. Some of the video has been released. Some of it, as far as I can tell from my own private conversations, is classified. But that sort of publicly stated that. There's some things we see in the sky that we don't understand. Then we have also publicly stated that, look, the U.S. government, we research this stuff. We've set up sort of dedicated groups that are researching it, but their public statements are limited to. We're trying to resolve anomalies. We don't know anything about secret programs. Then you have, starting after 2017, a set of whistleblowers, or would be whistleblowers who have come forward, who have testified before Congress, who have written books saying, actually, people in the US Government know more about this than the public statements are letting on. There are secret programs. There are, you know, materials held by defense contractors that people think come from other worlds. These kind of things. Right. So I'm just trying to distinguish between those two. Those two layers.
- [29:24]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
They're sort of. Okay, so I have a question.
- [29:25]
Ross Douthat
Public information is.
- [29:26]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, I have a question for you. So the people who are the whistleblowers, are these not also people who are part of our government and employed by our.
- [29:35]
Ross Douthat
No, they are.
- [29:36]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah. Okay, so what's the difference Then. So we have.
- [29:38]
Ross Douthat
Okay, no, that's fair.
- [29:39]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, we have. I agree. Well, wait, wait, wait. So we have. This is what's confusing. And I think we are. Should be rightly confused here, because I. I believe that this confusion keeps people from wanting to do the research. Because you have the government, right? You have the whistleblowers who are working for the government, and people who have written the books, like Lou Elizondo, had been working for the government in one of these programs, says this, this is still happening. We also have people like Tim Gallaudet, who's an ad, you know, rear admiral. You have Colonel Carl Nell stating that, you know, there's no doubt that this is happening, that aliens exist, or, you know, that this phenomena exists, and we're studying it. So you have those people coming out, and then you have another part of the government who's coming out and basically denying this. So it's very confusing to a person who wants clarity. And as for me, I try to stay out of it. So I'm not on any side. I'm watching this happen just like you are and just like other people are. And, you know, I might have more insight into what's going on because I know several of these people on both sides, you know, both on the part where people are basically saying it's all, you know, not real. I know those people and I know the people who are saying that it's real. And it's definitely something that's not transparent.
- [31:13]
Ross Douthat
It's definitely not transparent. And I think that what you just described is a good description of my own perception that there is people who work within the government who some of themselves believe that there is a real phenomena or related to or overlapping with that want Americans to think there's a real phenomena. And then there is a official government narrative that there's some weird stuff out there, but the government doesn't know any more than you or I do. But I'm trying to push through that a little bit. So I want to go back to your own story, because, yes, you said you're an observer. So at a certain point in the mid 2010s, then you're talking to people connected with the government who, let's say, overlap with the kind of people in terms of their perspectives who came forward as whistleblowers, saying, look, there's real stuff here and the government knows it. What convinced you? Because you just said you weren't a believer, implying that you became a believer. What about those conversations convinced you that you aren't just doing Sort of sociology of religion here, that there is sort of actual things in the sky or wherever else that people are in touch with.
- [32:30]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay. So part of it was that. And by the way, I don't advocate believing this for anyone. They have to do their own research. So I'm not advocating belief in UFOs or UAP, but definitely, I became convinced that there was definitely something to this when I met so many people who interfaced with the phenomena through their jobs. And their jobs happen to take them high into the stratosphere, launching rockets into space so that they had a view of what was happening in space. They've witnessed aerial phenomena that are not ours and there are not Russia's or China's. And when you meet 10 of these people and they all have similar reports, it's interesting, it changes one's view. These people are not public. Okay. Some of them are, but most of them are not. They don't want to be associated with this work that they do. They don't want people to know about it. And they're kind of everyday Americans.
- [33:41]
Ross Douthat
So basically what we have in terms of videos of fast moving objects is if not the tip of an iceberg, at least a piece of a larger hidden phenomena that many people have encountered who go into the sky or into space.
- [33:58]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
That's correct, yes.
- [34:00]
Ross Douthat
Okay. Is there anything else that has convinced you?
- [34:05]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yes, I've also had insight into the counter intelligence that's against the outing of this information. And it's a rough situation here because you have people that are out there talking about it and saying, we need to be transparent about this. This is real. Like Ryan Graves. Right.
- [34:30]
Ross Douthat
And then you see who is one of the Navy pilots.
- [34:34]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, one of the fighter pilots for this. Exactly. And then you see pushback against him, public pushback. You see even On Wikipedia, like Dr. Gary Nolan, he's at Stanford University, he studies this and he has a foundation called the Soul Foundation. And their Wikipedia page was taken down. My own Wikipedia page was changed a bit. So this is why I'd like to stay out of this space for the most part. Because when people are talking about it in a way in which they're advocating for transparency, I see that they do get pushback.
- [35:13]
Ross Douthat
Okay, I want to talk more about the pushback, but just on the experiences themselves. What do these. The 25 inner circle people who communicate with you, what do they think they're studying?
- [35:27]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
So there are. There are inner circles and inner circles. So they're like. Right. So I would say that always. Yeah. So the people who I Think have most interface with this. They don't know what it is. That's my opinion. But they think that it's very important to study because it seems to be taking an interest in us. I. There is another inner circle that again, doesn't know what it is, but is able to do some, you know, physics work and recognizes how advanced the propulsion mechanisms are. But also these people have interfaced with it enough to know that it is. It has some trickster elements. So this is called. They have a name for it, by the way. It's called the hitchhiker effect. The idea that when a person has an experience, it often sticks to them. It's like a hitchhiker. It goes home with them and say they have an experience, and then they have sometimes poltergeist activity in their home. They might move and it moves with them. And this is something that is, to me, seems to be straight out of religious traditions because it looks like, you know, the tricksters of religious traditions and some of these people are able to extract themselves from this through their own religious tradition. So this is how religion then comes back in an unexpected way to me.
- [37:13]
Ross Douthat
So this is, for example, this would be a case of someone has one of these bizarre experiences and then they go home. Right. And they suddenly have what looks like poltergeist activity or something around their house, and they call their Catholic priest to say some prayers of exorcism. Is that what you're describing? Yes, yes, that kind of thing.
- [37:31]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Things like that happen. Yeah.
- [37:32]
Ross Douthat
So they bring a kind of religious attempt, a kind of religious resolution of what starts out seeming like a science fiction issue.
- [37:41]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [37:42]
Ross Douthat
Okay. And are there people who have essentially, again, we were talking earlier about the concrete religions that have formed around UFOs. Are there people inside the government who you think have those kind of concrete beliefs who are like, okay, these are angels or demons. Right. If they're Christian, maybe they think they're demons. Right. Or these are literal aliens from another planet who we are speaking to. Are there people who get that concrete in the inner circles you're describing?
- [38:17]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay, so the people that I know are not being that concrete. However, they still experience the hitchhiker effect. And some of them know that if they, you know, utilize the tools of their own religion, whatever that religion is, Anglicanism or Catholicism, that it seems to help the hitchhiker effect. But they also think that there's a real phenomena that they would like to back engineer and utilize. So, you know.
- [38:49]
Ross Douthat
But real technology.
- [38:50]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [38:51]
Ross Douthat
Machines.
- [38:52]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yes, yes. They believe that they Believe that I have not seen these. Yeah, I have not seen machines or anything like that, but I have.
- [38:59]
Ross Douthat
You have not seen.
- [39:00]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
No, no.
- [39:01]
Ross Douthat
Have you talked to people who claim they have seen machines?
- [39:03]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yes.
- [39:05]
Ross Douthat
Okay. And those people are. Where do those people say they've seen the machines inside?
- [39:11]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Well, I can't say that, but I can say that I've talked to them about the machines and they have not told me where they've seen the machines.
- [39:17]
Ross Douthat
Okay. Okay. So this. All right.
- [39:19]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
So I don't know if they've seen the machines or not or if it's an elaborate setup where they're seeing something. So that's why I like to stay away from most of the government information about the topic. And these are people that are working for the government, with the government.
- [40:11]
Ross Douthat
Okay. So I have. I want to pursue a kind of frustrated line of inquiry.
- [40:16]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay.
- [40:16]
Ross Douthat
Here. Right. So just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a couple of stories. But the first one was the most important one that was drawing on a different set of government reports, basically and leaks about the UFO phenomenon that emphasized the degree to which a lot of UFO material is based on deliberate disinformation. That the. And the. The sort of running claim in the story was that repeatedly and consistently the US government has welcomed stories about UFOs and mysterious aerial phenomena as a cover for various high tech national security experiments. And so one example in the story was there's famous case cases, really, but one famous case of a UFO encounter involving a nuclear facility where nuclear weapons were shut down mysteriously in association with an aerial phenomena. And the claim in the Journal story was that the US Government was testing the effects of an electromagnetic pulse in fear that the Soviet Union would use this pulse against our facilities. And the pulse created a sort of weird, you know, a weird experience for the people in the facility. And the government was happy to have them believe it was aliens rather than come clean about how we were testing our own defenses. So that would be. That would be one example. Right. And then related to that, the piece also suggests that there's kind of like hazing and initiation rituals inside the military where people will be told, hey, we're studying ufo. No, I can't show it to you. You can never tell anyone about it. Goodbye. And this is like a prank or it's a test and so on. Right? That this is part of military culture. Right. So that story, right. You could take that story and say, okay, this kind of layering of deliberate disinformation, pranks, rumor and so on helps explain why so Many people in the US government believe there are UFOs, real UFOs, right. And then you also have this sort of persistent religious, spiritual phenomena that is like other religious and spiritual phenomena. It's not really amenable to study, to scientific study. Right. It's amenable to sociological or religious study. Right. So why shouldn't I, as a curious journalist or listeners of the show, just sort of take the Wall Street Journal narrative as normative and say, look, if somebody really had a piece of a spaceship and you have these whistleblowers willing to talk about it, wouldn't someone actually just show us the spaceship? Right.
- [43:01]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
It could be.
- [43:02]
Ross Douthat
That was a very long question, but this is. Tell me what you make of anything I've just said.
- [43:09]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I mean, the person who wrote the Wall Street Journal article, which of course I read, seems to have a conclusion and I don't. So there's a conclusion that no, there's nothing to see. Right. And I don't think that's true. But the conclusion that there is something to see and it's an alien spacecraft is also. Doesn't feel right to me. So I always propose that we, you know, and also the idea that it's a cover up for tech absolutely could be true. But then you have to take this into context. You know, we had this program, a government program called Project Blue Book, and it was, you know, run by Alan Hynek.
- [43:56]
Ross Douthat
This is in the 1950s.
- [43:57]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah. All the way up through the 1960s. And so, you know, with this program, there was a disinformation campaign by the government to identify people who were believers and spreading belief and basically stigmatizing them. Right. And so this is something that we still have inherited. We've inherited the Project Blue Book and then we have the Wall Street Journal article coming out. No, it's just the opposite. The government wanted you to believe in. I mean, I'm sorry, it's just a very confusing scenario and I choose not to pay attention to that. There's disinformation about this. I think that's the first thing people need to know is that you're not going to get the straight story, like I said earlier from the government. The government is telling us two different contradictory things. The story lies elsewhere or the answer lies elsewhere.
- [44:47]
Ross Douthat
Wait, okay, but I don't agree with that. So first, where does the answer lie if it doesn't lie?
- [44:53]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay, I don't know. But I'm not going to say that the answer is that there's not nothing or that there's specifically this thing. Okay, so I think it's a lot more complicated.
- [45:02]
Ross Douthat
Right. You're saying that there is, you're saying that there is a phenomena that appears to have both spiritual and science fiction elements that is accessible in some way, not just to a crazy person in a field late at night, but to members of the most high tech military the world has ever seen. And it seems to overlap with people's perspectives about visitors from other planets, trickster gods, angels, demons. Right, okay, that's really interesting. But you're also saying that there are different factions within the government that have different agendas about how much people should know about this. One of those factions you're friends with by your own description, and that is the faction that from your point of view, wants us to have a conversation like this one. Right. For the New York Times. And my question is, if that faction, not the whole government, just that faction in the government, the kind of people you're talking to, if they have some evidence that goes beyond powerful personal anecdotes, why can't they just give it to us?
- [46:18]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
And that's where I think the Wall Street Journal actually gets it. Right. Because most likely it has to do with something that the government needs to keep secret. And I respect that.
- [46:31]
Ross Douthat
You think that the.
- [46:33]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
So there's going to be. Yeah.
- [46:34]
Ross Douthat
Something that even.
- [46:35]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Wait, wait.
- [46:35]
Ross Douthat
But something that even the, even the faction. So there's this term that people in the UFO world use called disclosure. Right. Which capital D. Right. Which is the idea that at some point you're going to have, you know, there are secrets that the government knows that will be disclosed or there are people who want there to be disclosure. But this hasn't happened yet. Right, correct. But you're saying that even the people who are pro modified limited disclosure agree that there are things here that are so secret that they just can't reveal them.
- [47:09]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I mean, I think that if they thought that there were national security issues, they would definitely think that we should not disclose them. Absolutely.
- [47:19]
Ross Douthat
But then why are they coming forward and testifying before Congress? Right. So there's a guy, one of the names we haven't mentioned is David Grush, who is another whistleblower who again had completely legitimate government credentials, both inside and also outside organizations that were doing some of these investigations. Grush came forward as a whistleblower, did the podcast rounds. He was on Joe Rogan. Right. For long. Long conversation on. Joe Rogan, testified before Congress, said a lot of really wild stuff that goes beyond the more limited nuance.
- [47:55]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Right.
- [47:56]
Ross Douthat
Said a lot of really wild stuff and then essentially disappeared as a figure in the public eye. But if you listen to David Grusch, you had the sense that David Grusch and people like him want something to be revealed. If you take them seriously. Yes, if they want something. Okay. No one assassinated David Grusch. He was written about in the New York Times. He testified before Congress. You know, you talked earlier about, like, oh, there's pushback to this stuff and it's harsh edits on Wikipedia pages. Right. Like, this is. I feel like we've demonstrated in the last few years that if you want to be a UFO whistleblower, the cigarette smoking man is not going to bundle you into a car and take you away. You can go be a UFO whistleblower. And if that's true and the whistleblowers say they want to reveal something and then it doesn't get revealed, then I default back toward the Wall Street Journal narrative where it's probably layers of disinformation concealing, you know, top secret drone programs. Which, by the way, one reason we're having this conversation, that is also a really interesting story. Right. Like, if it is the case that you, as, you know, as a serious academic, are being made use of by people in the government who want to cover up crazy drone technology, that would be pretty interesting, too. I think all the answers here are interesting. I just would like to know what they are.
- [49:21]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, so I don't think we can have those answers. So, you know, I'm here to study this. I've studied it. And I think that the transparency that people want from the government is not forthcoming. Sorry that you want that answer. I just don't think.
- [49:41]
Ross Douthat
But I don't want transparency from the government writ large. I want the next whistleblower who's a human being, a representative of the government, to come forward and take the further step of saying, hey, someone showed me an alien spacecraft. And by the way, it was in this base here and congresspeople can go see it, or here is the document that I was given that persuaded me that's what I want. And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to ask. And again, I just think the retreat to sort of unknowability and mystery takes me back towards the disinformation and that there's nothing truly concrete here that should convince me. What do you think is going to happen in the future?
- [50:34]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay, so probably more of the same. I mean, I'm not here to try to advocate for you to believe, frankly. So what do you think's going to happen?
- [50:49]
Ross Douthat
I don't know. That's why I'm interviewing people who have spent a long period of time talking to people who are researching this issue. But you're saying basically we should expect over the next 10 years, every six months to two years, someone with a national security credential comes forward with a somewhat compelling account that can't be verified of some kind of UFO encounter that the government was studying. And this will just go on.
- [51:19]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, so we should.
- [51:21]
Ross Douthat
And the Internet will cycle.
- [51:22]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, yeah, the Internet will cycle.
- [51:24]
Ross Douthat
We should look away.
- [51:25]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, we should look away.
- [51:26]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so this will be. All right, good. So this will be the last public interview ever conducted about this subject, and people will just look away for the foreseeable future.
- [51:33]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
No, it's not the. Okay, so about the government's response to it. That's what I'm suggesting. So my last book was Encounters. And that book basically said, why are we spending so much time paying attention to what the government has been telling us since the 1940s? People are actually having real experiences. Let's turn to them and, you know, and talk about this. So that's what I would suggest. So, yeah, if we're going to focus here on, you know, I can see you're very upset about that, or you're just not happy. But why do we. You know, I mean, I'm not.
- [52:06]
Ross Douthat
I'm never as. As an interviewer, I'm never upset. I have a persistent level of frustration with things that seem to me to be secrets that are within the capacity of human beings, journalists and so on, to uncover. If you just want to tell me that there are weird things in the world, there are more things in heaven and earth, Ross Dowsett, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I obviously believe that. Right. And I'm certainly comfortable with the idea that there are phenomena that people encounter that are not amenable to study by scientific authorities or anything like that. I'm just frustrated by the persistent claims that there's something more here that does seem amenable to revelation that I would just like to know a little bit more about.
- [52:56]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I think you can know more about it, but you're looking in the wrong place. So I've said before, I'm separate from the government. I don't, you know, I'm not advocating for a position, and it could very well be that what the government is doing is purposeful. So this. This, you know, arena of confusion that you're frustrated by, that's actually purposeful. And so they've done a Good job. Right, because, you know, here you are interviewing me. We could have been actually talking about, you know, the phenomena and people's experiences of it, but we're talking about why the government is not being forthcoming. And my position is because that's not what they intend to do. Their intention is to make it confusing. And they've done a very good job of that.
- [53:43]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so let's do two final questions. You've talked about going from being skeptical and agnostic to believing. You've talked about the apparent unknowability of what is actually going on here. You've also mentioned that you're like me, a Roman Catholic of some sort of. Right. Like if I forced you through, you know, some truth serum developed on Alpha Centauri by, you know, by, by aliens to make a bet on what it is. The phenomena. Extraterrestrials, the supernatural, the lost civilization of Atlantis hidden beneath our seas for lo these thousands of years. What would you bet?
- [54:30]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
It's a variety of things.
- [54:33]
Ross Douthat
It's more than one thing.
- [54:34]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
It appears to be.
- [54:36]
Ross Douthat
Okay, give me two examples of what that thing is. It's variety. Just two, two different things.
- [54:43]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
What is appears to be a perennial thing. So there appears to be something that interfaces with humans and has been, has been identified in the various traditional religions. And identified as what? Well, I'm not going to name it because in some traditional religions it's named in different ways. So it could be bodhisattvas, angels, demons, things like that.
- [55:11]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so it, so, so, so it's, it's. No, that's good. So it's. So it is intermediate intelligences between God and human beings, some of whom have our best interests at heart and some of whom don't.
- [55:24]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
And those different religious traditions have protocols for dealing with these. So, you know.
- [55:30]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so there's that, but that was a yes. You agree that's part of what you think it is?
- [55:35]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
I think some of the phenomena is that, not all of it. Yeah. Then there appears to be some type of technology that is either, in my opinion, this is the truth serum, in my opinion, either is ours, or if it's not ours, it's amazing.
- [55:56]
Ross Douthat
Okay, but you think it could be ours. And so in that theory just you would have a kind of loop of on the one hand, authentic experiences that map onto the great religious traditions and at the same time some kind of government cover up or secrecy around remarkable technologies that we aren't aware of. Are those two things linked or is it just a marriage of convenience then that the government is happy that people have these kind of supernatural experiences because it makes it easier to cover up the amazing technology.
- [56:38]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Yeah, that's the question I ask myself. I don't know if they're linked.
- [56:41]
Ross Douthat
All right. Okay. All right, so then last. All right, so last question. Because you have been trying to pull me away from the government and back towards the personal experiences and so on. What can nice secular readers of the New York Times who have been baffled by this conversation, let's say, take away from the personal side of it, the direct encounters that people report having.
- [57:05]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Okay? So I think what's really important is that most of us grew up with and were educated within this worldview. And I call it the Thomas Jefferson worldview. And Thomas Jefferson didn't believe that Jesus was divine. He believed that Jesus was a really good person. And he even went so far as to rewrite the New Testament. And he took out all the references to miracles and all the things that, you know, all the references to angels and demons and exorcisms and healings and things like that. And there was the Jeffersonian Bible. Okay. So I would say that for me, what these experiences did was it. I was a, you know, I had a Jeffersonian worldview. I was a secular Catholic. Okay. What these. These experiences did was they jolted me out of that worldview and into the Shakespearean worldview where, you know, there are things that we don't understand and why don't we, you know, understand that we don't understand them instead of just doing like the Wall Street Journal did and just say, no, nothing to see here. Well, the world and the cosmos is a really beautiful place with a lot of mystery. So that's what I would suggest.
- [58:21]
Ross Douthat
Okay, I endorse that take very strongly. I'm going to give you one more chance to tell me who it was who told you they had seen an alien spacecraft and where, because, you know, it's the New York Times. It's an audience of at least dozens, if not millions. Don't you want to be the person who blew the lid off, you know, the secret government conspiracy? Diana?
- [58:47]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
No, I don't aspire to that.
- [58:51]
Ross Douthat
All right, Diana Walsh Pasulka, thank you for bearing with my frustrations, and thank you for this conversation.
- [58:57]
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Thank you so much.
- [59:24]
Ross Douthat
Interesting Times is produced by Kathryn Sullivan, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Batanzos and Raina Raskin. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Aman Sahota and Pat Mc Kusker. Mixing by Sophia Landman, audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski, and our director of Opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.