Prof. Diana Walsh Pasulka
Diana Walsh Pasulka never imagined that her scholarly work in the field of religion would lead her to skulking around in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, with one of the world's top scientists and a former high NASA official. She tells the story in her riveting 2019 book
American Cosmic, in which
Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, surveyed the then-current state of knowledge of UFOs and related phenomena.
Then came the shocking 2021 revelations by the U.S. government that it had been investigating UFOs โ then renamed 'unidentified aerial phenomena,' or UAPs. In a series of strokes, the research that Pasulka and many others had been working on for years, even decades, received powerful vindication. Something
really is out there โ and top national security and intelligence officials have been for a very long time taking it more seriously than they wanted the public to know.
Whatever the 'aliens' really are, it is startling to discover that many of the most informed people in the UFO world doubt that they are creatures from other planets. What are they, then? On November 7th, Pasulka's latest volume hits bookstores, offering answers, but also raising new and important questions about that very issue.
Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences (Macmillan), profiles a wide range of people who for various reasons have been drawn into the shadowy and mysterious world of UFOs, and whose testimonies move the phenomenon out of narrowly-drawn scientific categories, and well into the world of the religious and the paranormal.
Pasulka recently agreed to an interview about her work, her new book, and the emergence of a new form of religion tied to aliens, artificial intelligence, and high technology.
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