UFOs, God, and the edge of understanding

If you’re into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.

There’s been a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien life, thanks in large part to a 2019 story published in the New York Times about reports of UFOs — also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — off the East Coast a decade ago. Since then, the whole topic of UFOs feels considerably less fringe than it once did.

We still don’t have anything like evidence of actual aliens, but it is, at least, a live question in a way it wasn’t before. I’m still inclined to believe that there are far more plausible explanations for UAPs that don’t involve extraterrestrial creatures. The possibility, however, that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions.

How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding of our place in it? And what if aliens are real but so unlike anything we can imagine that we can’t even begin to understand the implications?

Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the author of two books on this topic. Her first book, American Cosmic, was focused on the religious dimensions of UFO mythology. The new one is called Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, and it dives into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien life.

I recently invited Pasulka to The Gray Area to talk about her research, the stories she’s heard from people who claim to have experienced UFOs, and how her views have evolved in surprising directions. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on 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

When you write in this book that UFO events are a “spiritual reality” for people, what does that mean?

Diana Pasulka

UFO events are transformative realities for the people who experience them. They’re not necessarily good — religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good. I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs and sometimes with what they called “beings associated with UFOs” and it sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.

I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record. There were no planes, there were no rockets back then. People were seeing things in the sky and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could be souls from purgatory or they could be houses of saints and things like that. I think we’re dealing with something here that isn’t necessarily a new religion so much as a new form of spirituality.

Sean Illing

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

Diana Pasulka

I believe that they believe it, but that doesn’t commit me to the belief that it happened. I’ll give you an example. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician in the early 20th century from India, and he was a genius. And he believed these math calculations were whispered in his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region. I think she was a version of Lakshmi. So that’s a story that takes hold and gets repeated.

Now, am I committed to the belief that Lakshmi gave Ramanujan that? No, I’m not. But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse, and I can leave aside the question of the objective existence of these entities.

Sean Illing

What’s the most “holy shit” thing you’ve seen or heard after 14 years of researching this?

Diana Pasulka

I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face. And then he started to see this person in crowds. He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldn’t tell anybody because he noticed that other people didn’t see them.

And he also had burns. His eyes started to hurt. I asked a scientist about that and said, “What’s this effect?” And he said, “It was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.” So that was pretty weird!

Sean Illing

I just don’t know what to do with some of these stories and characters you profile in the book. The vividness of the accounts, the consistencies, the depth — it is puzzling, to say the least. It’s hard to believe there’s nothing to see here.

Diana Pasulka

Well, I agree with you. I mean, I started out as a complete nonbeliever. But when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford, and there were so many of them, I was absolutely shocked. And that shock lasted for a couple of years.

I’ve been studying this now for about 14 years, so that’s a long time. I actually believe these people. It’s definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as what people are talking about today. We can only say that these people are having these experiences. Most of them will not come out and say that because of their jobs. There’s still a stigma and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly. I’m just not going to disbelieve them because I’ve met thousands of people who are credible witnesses, and the patterns are so similar.

Sean Illing

The skeptic in me says the will to believe is so strong in the human mind and we can sincerely convince ourselves of almost anything. I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they’re telling you to be true.

But as you were saying, that doesn’t mean they’re true or it doesn’t mean that they’re reliably true. So to take one random example, there’s that guy you talked to who moved his family out of Los Angeles to live in some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so. That just sounds like the hallucinations of a confused person.

Diana Pasulka

I mean, what did the pilgrims do? Or what did people who had visions and thought that they needed to leave Egypt or go someplace because a god told them to? Or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this? This is how I see that type of thing. I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years. It’s a fundamental religious impulse. That’s how I see it.

Sean Illing

A religious impulse, sure, but that’s separate from the question of truthfulness. And again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my own ambivalence. Despite what I just said about the will to believe being strong, I also think the will to hold on to our current worldview is strong because letting go of that means letting go of almost everything we take 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’m open to the evidence, but there’s not enough yet.

Diana Pasulka

Yeah, I do think that. I also want to push back a little on what you said about the will to believe. It seems like most people don’t want to experience these things. That pilot didn’t want to experience that. He didn’t want to believe it. He was just going about his life, doing fine, and then everything gets turned upside down. He sees this face in the clouds and it’s almost mocking him. Who would want to experience that?

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

I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory, and it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent and she was terrified. And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept to her story and finally Mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough she saw the same thing. And so, they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent prayed for weeks to get rid of it, and it finally disappeared.

Sean Illing

To get back to this broader question about the possibility of alien life, I’m not even going to ask if this discovery would be the most significant event in human history, because it obviously would be. But I do wonder what you think the most significant implication of that discovery would be for us as a species?

Diana Pasulka

For a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in the world believe in nonhuman intelligence because most people are religious. And so within various different religions, you have different forms of nonhuman intelligences that display themselves in different ways to people. It’s mostly people in the post-Enlightenment West who are disbelievers in that narrative. So it would absolutely be the most shocking event for us, and the implication would be something like a post-secular society.

Sean Illing

I’m not sure we’re nearly as secular as we think, but that’s another conversation. I guess I’d say this: What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity. The claim to being a special animal with some unique significance fell apart. It turns out we’re part of the same historical process as everything else.

But the discovery of alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible to deny, that would be the final step in the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin. It would, in a terminal way, upend our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful thing in some ways. But if the price of that discovery ends up being aliens showing up and destroying us, it’s totally not worth it.

Diana Pasulka

Yeah, that would be bad!

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.