Diana Walsh Pasulka on UFOs and Aliens - Classics Remastered

Show Transcript

This remastered interview includes bonus content of additional questions and answers originally made available only to members of Cristina's Patreon members club. Hi Diana, welcome to Shifting the Paradigm. Thank you so much for being here. How's it going? It's going well. Thanks for having me. (00:25) Thank you. For my younger audience, can you tell us a little bit about your background? So I'm a professor of religious studies and religious studies is a discipline that basically studies religion. We don't advocate religion. We don't tell people to practice religion. What we do is we basically just study religions for their cultural effects because most people in the world are religious. (00:51) And religion is a very powerful force in the lives of people who are religious. So religious studies is something that a lot of people should know, especially if they're in college and they're business majors. And they go to another country. It's always good to know about the religion of the people who live there. (01:09) So I do that. I study religion. And I got into the study of the topic that we're going to be talking about today. Because in religious studies, we are studying things that can't be proven. We're studying things that people believe, but there's little evidence for the things that they believe. (01:27) So let's take Christianity, for example. Christianity is a religion that one of the dogmas of that faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin. And that can't be proven. Right? So and most likely we will never be able to prove that that's the case. But a lot of people believe that. So it's very easy to make that that, you know, transition to studying something like people's belief in UFOs because there's little evidence. (01:58) As far as we know, we don't have a UFO. You know, we can't actually study it. And therefore a lot of people believe in them and believe that they've seen them. But there's not a lot of evidence for that. So that fits well into my field of religious studies. And you have done research on Harvard professor John Mac. And he had a hard time bringing the UFO phenomenon to the academic world in the 80s. And that's understandable. (02:26) But it seems like when you had to speak about your findings in front of other professors, the whole room was silent after your speech and like not not the good kind of silence. So take us back to that day. (02:47) What did you say to your colleagues and overall, what were their reactions to the path that you wanted to take with your research? Sure. That's a great question. So what happened to me was that I was, I mean, I was a full professor, which means that you can't actually get higher. That's the highest level of professor you can be. And so I felt comfortable to put it in context. John Mac was doing his work in the 1980s and the 1990s. And so he was at Harvard University. He was already a very, he was a research professor already at the very top of his profession. (03:17) Yet he had a hard time studying the topic of UFOs. And you know, because it was the 80s and the 90s. So by the time I started to study this, it was, you know, in 2012. So I'm in the 2000s. A lot of time has passed between my, you know, me studying this and then John Mac studying what he studied. So I naturally felt that I was perfectly okay to study this. (03:52) And I didn't feel like in any way my first, I wasn't really that open about it because, you know, people, this was in the 2012, 2013 time period. And I don't know if your audience knows, but in 2021, the Pentagon released a report that acknowledged that UFOs were real. And they renamed them UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. So I studied this and I was already a chair of my department. I'd won a lot of research awards and grants. (04:22) So I felt perfectly comfortable doing this. However, when I did actually go to conferences and present my research, I, there were a lot of people who said that I'd been fooled by the people that I had studied because I studied people in the space program in the space shuttle program. I was studying people who were professors at major universities like Stanford. And they were all anonymous at the time because they didn't want to be affiliated with that topic. (04:49) And some of them just had secret jobs, you know, their jobs were secrets. So I couldn't name them. That was at that time. And a lot of my colleagues didn't believe that, well, they, they trusted me, but they thought that I had been fooled. So that's the silence that you referenced. So yes, it was, it was uncomfortable. (05:09) It was uncomfortable for me because I was already a vetted scholar. And I thought, wait a minute, you know, I've done the work here. Everything is fact checked. This is being published by Oxford. They've done the fact checking to so I was a little ticked off. Frankly, I was like, well, they should believe me. And they did actually believe me after the 2017 New York Times stories that came out that said that there were these secret government programs that were studying UFOs. (05:40) So basically all the work that I had done had been corroborated by the New York Times and then finally by the government itself. And right now I have every day I get a request to go on a podcast or to talk about my work from people all over the world, from people from Germany, Denmark, Japan, you name it. (06:04) And so, did you provide specific information? Did you provide to the conference in 2012? Okay, so when I did my research, I was fairly, well, I was a disbeliever. So I was basically just reporting that I was reporting on the belief in UFOs. I wasn't reporting on UFOs. You know, oh, I have this UFO and I have this debris from a UFO. And this is the data I have from it. That's not what I was doing. I was basically just talking to people in my field in religious studies and acknowledging that we're at the point where there's a new religion in place. There's a new form of religion that's that's taking hold. (06:47) So that's the type of stuff that I was presenting the people. I was also talking about the relationships that I had formed with professors and people in the space industry who believed in UFOs and who did definitely believe that they were in contact with UFOs and that they had materials from UFOs. (07:09) And so, at that point, and within the writing of the book that I wrote called American Cosmic, at no point did I say, I believed to this. I was reporting on the their belief. So does that make sense? It does. So what made you want to look at the connection between religion and UFOs? So this is what prompted me to talk about that. And I've already talked about how in religious studies, we basically look at data sets that we can't prove, right? We look at people's beliefs. That's basically our data set, not the actual thing that they believe in. (07:47) Nobody can actually prove God exists. Nobody can say, I saw an angel and here's the video and this is literal proof. But what we can do is we can say that many, many people believe in angels and this belief impacts their behavior. So what, that's what we study. We study cultural effects and we study behaviors. (08:11) Okay, so what does that mean? So how did I get into the study of UFOs? Well, I study Catholic history. And if you're your audience might be familiar with the conjuring franchise, the conjuring is the kind of horror films about Ed and Lorraine Warren and their exorcist. So I was actually a consultant to these movies and what I was doing was I was looking at the beliefs, you know, how do people believe through these movies and media technologies and things like that. (08:47) And so what happened was that I'm a historian of Catholic culture. So I was looking at belief in miraculous things within Catholicism from archives, which are, which are very old libraries. And you know, the kind of manuscripts that if you touch them, they will disintegrate that type of thing. So I found reports going back a thousand years, 500 years, 200 years of aerial phenomena. And I started to log these reports. And that's what made me then take a look at the UFO phenomena because a friend of mine looked at that, the log that I had. (09:29) And basically said, I do think that this at the time was pretty funny because he said, well, yeah, this actually looks like Stephen King's, I mean, not Stephen King, Steven Spielberg's movies, you know, like UFO stuff. And I thought that I thought it was crazy at first, frankly. And after a while, I went to a UFO conference. And I saw that people were still talking about aerial phenomena in the same way that they talked about aerial phenomena a thousand years ago. (09:58) Their language was different, but the patterns were the same. So that is what initiated my study into modern day UFO reports. And that's fascinating that you were able to find accounts from hundreds, if not almost thousands of years ago. And we often hear that if the truth of UFOs came out, or that we were being visited, that the world's religions would implode, there'd be riots. (10:25) People would stop believing in their religions and things like this, but you don't think that's the case. So why do you think that this is such a well accepted theory that the religions would crumble if hearing about that extraterrestrials are real? Okay, so yeah, this is actually quite, I don't, I don't buy this line of thought at all because if you do, if you are educated in the history of religions, you see that people have been believing in extraterrestrials for a very long period of time. (10:59) So it take the religion, the eye study. So in this, in 1750, which is a long time ago, there was a man named Emanuel Swedenborg, and he wrote a book called Life on Other Planets. And he talked about extraterrestrial life on other planets, on Venus, right, on Mars, on the moon. And so people have always been talking about this within religions. And so I think that religious people would actually probably be if tomorrow all governments came together and had, you know, had a press conference has said aliens is this. (11:38) And, you know, we've got to deal with them. I think the people that would be best equipped to deal with that would be people who are religious because, you know, most people just don't think that that's the case. And a lot of people who are atheists, they don't even have a category in their mind for something as as alien literally as extraterrestrials. (12:01) But people in religions do, they already believe in non-human intelligence, they believe in angels, they believe in bodhisattvas, they believe in, if they're Muslim, they believe in Jin. Okay, so we already have these categories within, you know, religions that account for, for intelligences that are non-human. (12:27) So then this leads me to the question of in your opinion, what would be the difference between extraterrestrial and an angel? Okay, yeah. So I think that those are just terms we use to describe these, to describe things that we just don't understand. And the history of Catholicism, angels literally don't look like each other from the different accounts. (12:57) So if you take something like the Bible and you go through all of the accounts of the Bible of angels, the, you know, accounts where angels are described. Sometimes they're described as human like, right? They look like people, they invite you in for tea. Okay. Or they're, you know, you have to invite them in for tea and you have a conversation with them and then they leave and then boom, they're angels, you know. (13:21) They don't have wings, they don't, they don't look like each other, different, different, you know, there's an angel in the old testament for Christians and the Hebrew Bible for Jewish people, same set of books. Where an angel shows up and has, see me like a wrestling match all night long, with Jacob, I think it's Jacob. (13:49) Okay. And that angel is very different than the angel that comes along and, you know, announces to Mary in the New Testament. And it's very, very, very, very, very different than the angel that comes along. And so, you know, it's very different than the angel that comes along. And so, you know, it's very different than the angel that comes along. And so, you know, it's very different than the angel that comes along. (14:33) And so, you know, it's very different than the angel that comes along. So, those angels came about through artistic conventions and that's how angels became portrayed. A good example of this would be the saint, Teresa of Avila, who if you go to Rome, if your audience is interested, they could internet search, Teresa of Avila, Rome statue, right? And you can see her, and there's this famous depiction of her with this angel next to her, and the angel has a sword. (15:13) Okay. And the angel pokes it at her, right? And so, she actually wrote about that. She herself wrote about that experience. And so, she wrote about it. It doesn't look at all, like how it's represented in the statue and in paintings about it. It's one of the most represented angel contact events in history. (15:35) But if you look at what she writes about it, she's confused because she says, this angel was real, which it's not in my mind, which usually if I see angels, they're imaginary and in my mind. And so, it's not a short and it's all on fire, shiny. I think it's an angel. And if it is, it has to be because it's short. (16:00) It's not one of these tall angels with wings, right? And so, that even does it, the most represented angel event in history doesn't even look like, you know, the representations don't even look like her description of them. That's a fascinating story and one that I have not heard of while I am also interested in religious studies. I, at one point in my college career, I wanted, I attempted to get a degree in religious studies, but my university only offered one class. (16:24) So I took that class and I was like, oh my gosh, I just want to learn so much more about this because it truly is fascinating. Regardless on if you believe it or not, all of the stories that all of the ancient scriptures hold are truly remarkable. You've spoken to thousands of people that claim they have had UFO sightings or in our, our in communication with extraterrestrials. And there seems to be a rather interesting dynamic that many people that have a sighting, their worldview changes. (16:57) And some even turn spiritual and I'm using that term lightly. So from the people that you've spoken to, when they state that they've seen a UFO or have had communication, do they say it's alien or have there been some cases where they believe it's an angel or a demon? So I think that it depends on who has the sighting. So what I've noticed is that if a person who say is Christian has a sighting of something that isn't all call it anomalous because I don't like to use the terminology that we already have because we don't know, you know what it is, but people have interpretive frameworks. (17:38) Here's a, here's a good example and it's a whole chapter in my book. It's the experience of a man who's an atheist and he's an attorney and his name is Ray Hernandez and he lives in Florida and his wife Dolce, who is Catholic and a believer. They both have an experience of something anomalous in their house that spins around, comes down, their dog is just about to die by the way and it heals their dog. (18:14) And she literally thinks that it's an angel and she still says this is this was an angel and Ray himself says this was an extraterrestrial, this was some type of plasma being of some sort, right? So they both have the same experience, but complete completely different interpretations. So I'm just going to say Ray Hernandez and him telling his story of being an atheist to what he is now believing in is so much more. And I also had Cheryl Costa that spoke about Ray Hernandez stating that when people have UFO experiences, they're all becoming gurus and spiritualists and things like this, kind of like as a joke, but it is rather amazing that when people have these experiences, their world changes forever and there's no going back for that. (19:12) So there's an interesting theory that alien abduction cases sound pretty similar to demonic encounters, some of which with incubi and suck you by. Do you think there's a connection between alien abductions and demonic encounters, are they the same thing or are they two separate things? So this is a really good question and this is the kind of thing that you have to be very careful with doing any kind of analysis with. So this is what I so I've actually written about this. And by the way, I want to tell your, your viewers and listeners that there's a great website called academia.edu where you can actually download a lot of information for free. (19:59) And why writing is for free up on this site and you can download any of it. And one article is called the supernatural goes galactic. And basically what this is about is it's this question that you have, how do we do this comparison between, you know, person has a terrible event where they have sleep paralysis. (20:23) And so some of your viewers have had this event is somewhat common and it's scary when you have it. So basically this has been reported in every culture and what it is it well, we don't know what it is. But it's scary. So this is when you can't move at night and you almost feel like there's something coming at you and it might even be looking at you in the dark or something and it's terrifying. And you can't actually speak. (20:51) And you can't just talk about yourself up. Okay, so this sleep paralysis is cross cultural. Now what, okay, that's not the only thing that's cross cultural balls of light that come, you know, out of nowhere. And somewhat terrify you. These things are cross cultural. So how do we do this kind of cross cultural analysis without delving into and I don't, I don't want to put ancient aliens down. (21:17) And so the only way to have a simplistic way to look at it is to say that back in the day, these were all UFOs, but we just didn't know that because we didn't have the language. But that's actually probably not the best way to look at it because maybe these things are still happening, but maybe they're not what we think they are too. Maybe they're not like UFOs like we think they are. (21:39) I think that a lot of different communities have different ways of describing these events. These events could all what my position is is these events happen. They happen in almost all cultures that I'm aware of and they've happened through time and we have always come up with our own community interpretations of them. (22:01) So some people, so I'm talking to you and now we have a global society where we can share interpretations and a lot of people I know say, "Well, these are definitely demons, right? How can they not be demons? They are doing evil things. They're coming at you at night and you don't have a say in what they're doing to you and that's not good. (22:21) " Okay, well, yeah. And then some people say, "Well, these are angels and we're just not used to how angels work." So do you see what I'm saying? So there are different ways of interpreting these. And I've come across, I mean most of them I think, I've come across a lot of them and they diverge. So people have divergedy views about what they are. (22:43) But I think it's really interesting now is that we're taking the tools of my field, which is religious studies and the tools of science. And we're bringing these both together and we're doing an analysis now. I don't think this has ever been done. I think this is the first time in that I know of in human history where people like me can meet somebody like my colleague Gary Nolan who is in my book. (23:11) He was anonymous when I wrote it but he's since come out as who he is and he's a scientist at Stanford University. And what we do is work together to get a bigger understanding of what this is without using the language that we know what it is. We just don't know. But what we can do at this point is we can just identify patterns and build knowledge from there. (23:37) I think science and religion work hand in hand. Oh, it absolutely. I'm working with scientists now. So they definitely work hand in hand. A little bit earlier you mentioned sleep paralysis. Have you ever encountered that? Yes, I have encountered that and every time I do it's terrifying. And I actually met David Hufford who wrote a book about it. So he is for he's a medical doctor. He's a researcher. (24:13) And he also is a folklore. He does folklore studies and what he did was I think he was in his 30s and he went around to cultures all over the world. And he gathered sleep paralysis stories. And it's in a book. I think it's called I can't remember the book. Please let your viewers know what it is though it's David Hufford and sleep paralysis. And he did one of the most definitive books on that topic. (24:39) And I was at a conference where he was at and he gave he gave and talk on the sleep paralysis. And it was so terrifying that I think half the people there thought that that night they were going to have sleep paralysis. And so the answer to your question is that. Yeah, I think that I don't know what it is. He doesn't know what it is to it could be purely physiological, but that occurs in every culture and that we also have a lot of interpretive, you know, frame, you know, basically we interpret it in different ways. (25:18) And then the cultures call it the old hag and that she comes at night and it's a foreboding thing. I've had it. I have five kids and when I and when I was doing this research, they're all teenagers now. But when I did this research, they were really young. I was sleeping one night with my door closed and I heard I was in my bed sleeping and then I heard one of my children come in open the door and I heard the feet. (25:49) Right next to my bed and there was a whispering and it was wake up, you know, and I was afraid. I woke up, I, you know, when you're in sleep paralysis, sometimes you wake up in unconventional way. So I screamed myself awake. There was no child near me and my door was closed. Did, did you happen to see any weird anomalies during your times of having sleep paralysis? No, I just had the experiences. I didn't see anything because my eyes were closed, but I heard things and I was of course terrified as most people are when that happens to them. (26:34) And when does happen to you at the time? Did you think it was supernatural or all happening just in your mind? Well, this is when I was doing the research. So I did think that it was incredibly creepy, but I was okay with it because I knew that it was normal that people have this. It's pretty terrifying. I've only had sleep paralysis once and that's enough for me. (27:01) I did not want it to happen again. Thank you very much. Well, you know, one of the good things about the research that I do is that the things that happen that you could throw you off and make you afraid. Once you start to understand how they happen, they happen all the time to other people in other countries and you know, it becomes less scary. (27:24) I've heard that as well, where the more times it occurs, the more in control you feel, but the first time, I think it's always the scariest because you have no idea what's going on. And when it happened to me, I had no idea what sleep paralysis was. (27:44) I'm just like, why can't I move? Why can't I scream? Why can't I do anything? And why am I seeing this weird shadowy creature coming towards me? No, thank you. Yeah, it's terrifying. I agree. Yeah. As someone such as yourself that has a PhD in religious studies, you've looked into all religions, even though Catholic history is your specialty. But what can you tell us about the new age religion? And for those that aren't familiar with this term, could you please explain it as well? Yeah, sure. So I assume you're talking about the new age religion and not new religious movements. So new age religion is a part of new religious movements. (28:24) And so I actually know a lot about this because I was born and raised in California and it seems that that's like the hub for a new age thinking. And so I actually resisted a lot of this because it was my parents who were the new ageers. And I thought, this is crazy. They believe that these things and everything now I'm actually looking into new age thinking. And a lot of it is, I think, pretty interesting. (28:50) But the new age is is a new, it's a way in which, first of all, let me, let me contextualize this a bit. Right now, a lot of young people are not affiliated with religions. But they're still identifying as spiritual and they call themselves spiritual but not religious. Okay. And I think that this is really interesting. And this is an outcrop of the new age movement. So the new age movements happens in a very large way in the 1970s where people that were young decided that they were going to, you know, they didn't feel that their own religion spoke to them. (29:31) But they felt that they're, you know, a lot of it to say the truth is it looks very much like Star Wars like the force, right? They believed in kind of this overarching force of good or a force that they could maybe hook into. They used things like from the environment like crystals. They looked to indigenous spiritualities like Native American spiritualities and they appropriated those and took from those and they developed their own eclectic and eclectic means that you take from, like say there's five different religions that you like, I'll take this one and that one and this part of it and that part of it and create your own idea. (30:11) And so these formed basically shops or online communities for people to talk about all kinds of things like astrology. They talk about astrology. They would maybe have gurus from different sex of Hinduism or something like that. And so they would blend these all together and so in new age spirituality, it's generally focused on positive things like if they're going to look at UFO contacts, they're going to see this as beans that are trying to help us evolve into a better species to help each other. (30:46) And so this is a more a more a more or less put it this way, a less violent and more peaceful species and that's what you see when you look at new age religiosity. This this has a long history in the United States back to the 1800s, but because I teach about this in one of my classes, but if you just go to say a shop that's called like a new age shop or something like that or a crystal shop, you're going to get a lot of different varieties of beliefs within that shop, but most of it's going to be fairly tolerant of other religions. (31:22) You practically touched on the spiritualist movement in the 1800s for those that aren't familiar with that can you go into detail on what you teach in your class. Sure. So I have a class called new religious movements and in that class, we talk about the very beginnings. Now you have to understand for people that are viewing this a long time is 200 years, but that's a short time for people in my field because we look at things like a thousand years older. (31:51) 2000 years old sometimes 5,000 years old that's actually a long time so when we say new religious movements, we're talking about the last 200 years. So we're looking at generally the birth of new religious movements in the 1800s and a lot of this came about basically by people. Well, let's put it this way. There was a lot of what we call the civil rights movement going on in the 1800s because people were against slavery and we had a civil war about that. (32:32) People decided that they didn't want to be part of a hierarchical church and so there were these the formation of non what's called non denominational Christian churches where they didn't adhere to the typical like you know the Pope or a priest or a minister and they they felt the the Holy Spirit in themselves instead of feeling it in church. (33:01) Okay, so there was a decentralization basically a normalization a democracy type of of impetus that happened in that time period. And one of these was that people begin to especially women decided that they were able to contact the dead and channel spirits. And so this was the spiritualist movement so the spiritualist movement was a movement still around today where people feel that they can actually access some some there's an old movie called the six cents and we have an idiom in our country called I see dead people. (33:42) And this literally comes from the six cents and that's a spiritualist movie it's a movie about a little boy who feels like he's in contact with the dead and so this comes this is it becomes a huge movement in the United States in the 1800s and it never goes away. It also helps women speak in public because a lot of the women are going to be you know women couldn't speak in public back then it was was deeply frowned upon. (34:13) But if women decided that they could channel say Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln they could all of a sudden speak in public because people were like well it's not her speaking it's actually Abraham Lincoln speaking through her. So this is kind of like a twist but what it did was it allowed women to be more accepted in a public sphere of speaking. (34:37) And this was the birthing age of medium medium ship and say ounces when you're looking into this back into the 1800s what are your current thoughts on say ounces. My current thoughts on say ounces I don't actually do them but I know that people do do them and believe that they are in contact with beans that they think are passed away or something like that. (35:10) I actually don't have you know in religious studies remember we have a method where we don't weigh in on the truth or falsity of the claims of the people that are doing this. I always ask how do you know these are you know how do you know that this is whatever you contact say it's real if this is something real are you really contacting something that you know what if they just say they're your uncle Joe or something. (35:38) But what if they're actually not but so I have those kinds of questions which are just logical type questions. But in terms of the belief the senses are a huge thing people engage in them it's part of the spiritualist practice and it's not my job to say you know don't do that or it's wrong to do that my job is just to look at the cultural effects of that and whether or not it's on the rise and why it's on the rise you know and that those are the questions that we ask. (36:12) Those are very important and valid questions to ask that for the most part a lot of people don't ask those questions shifting gears just a little bit you had also studied philosophy as well as religious studies in university so how does philosophy play a role in understanding the history and reports of UFOs sure. (36:38) Okay that's a good question and let me think about that for a minute because it doesn't necessarily bear on the reports of UFOs but what it does bear on is that when you look at the history of western philosophy what you see is you see that a lot of people in philosophy have gone on. The philosophy have gone the way of they be very technical and this is called the analytic philosophy where people are really focused on your you know like mathematical problems so a lot of philosophy is like it looks like symbolic logic math word problems okay it's a very difficult major to have. (37:29) Another part of philosophy is looking at the history of asking questions and this is what I'm fascinated with so I'm going to give you an example of a philosopher who is somebody that I don't advocate his life because he was a Nazi but he did do interesting philosophy and this is what happened and by the way a lot of his friends of Jewish people. (37:58) So I mean he's somewhat repress not somewhat the man is reprehensible for continuing to be a Nazi while good friends of him were having to basically going into concentration camps so one of his good friends was Hana are rent who is a Jewish woman philosopher who is in turn in Bergen-Belson a women's concentration camp she subsequently escaped came to the United States and wrote some amazing philosophy all right so I don't know how she maintained her friendship with him I don't think I could do that however he did have some interesting things to say including things about technology and that's where I think he's a he's somewhat of a visionary if a flawed one a lot of listen I want to say this is that in the history of philosophy and the history of science (38:53) a lot of the people that did some very interesting things you and I would not want to be friends with them they were despicable in their views they were anti-Semitic they were racist they were misogynist so what how then you know what is our position vis-a-vis these people when we look back about their philosophy you know we just have to take what's good and and just acknowledge that a lot of what they did was bad that's even with respect to our own space program which some of it was created through concentration camps through the work and suffering of people who basically died in concentration camps to get our rockets into space (39:34) these are this is some of the stuff we actually in my opinion we have never acknowledged in a big way in a public way and I think we need to acknowledge that so there's some of the things about philosophy that I think could bear on to what's happening now with space and and the idea of UFOs and things like that so one of the things that I find interesting oh sorry but interesting philosophy is this this tradition of questioning that was suppressed for a long time but I think is now making a comeback questioning what is it that we're doing here why is it that the earth is in the Goldilocks zone you know these are the questions that inspire people to be philosophers basically wondering (40:22) you know why what are we doing here like what is it all about those are questions that were lost in modern philosophy and I think are being rekindled and I think at the same time also keeping in touch with your inner child as a mother of five year aware that they hit that Y stage they're always asking mommy why this why that and with philosophers they are still asking those Y questions decades later while the majority of adults stop asking why because one they believe that they already know everything or two they have that fear of rejection of oh they might look dumb for asking why because when they were children they were just told to stop talking by their parents and by their teachers (41:08) and just to listen instead of ask so I think it's really cool and I wish they got a little bit more credit philosophers because they really are fascinating people your current research focuses on religions supernatural beliefs and practices and its connection to digital technologies and environments please walk us through that what does that mean and what have you found? of course okay so this is a lot of information that is happening right now has to do with you know I mean we have a revolution in place going on with AI (41:54) and I spent a lot of time talking with people who are at the forefront of doing research in this topic and I also a lot of those people surprisingly enough for others have a huge vocabulary with respect to the history of philosophy and religion so it's very easy for me to speak with them they have to get me up to speed on what they're doing because I don't have a huge vocabulary with respect to AI so I'm around people who are really smart and I also I mean this happened with my book I start I found myself around people who are really smart so I studied how they believed the things that they believed (42:38) and how they created the technologies that they created because a lot of them created technologies that were using today and also that are game changing for you know extension of human life and stuff like that and what I started to realize was it wasn't necessarily what they were thinking it was basically how they were thinking how they came to these ideas and I found that a lot of them had things in common like they they had lifestyles where they weren't on social media a lot they didn't hook into the internet a good portion of the day (43:20) they were engaged in some type of practice like protocols like religious practice meditation you know contemplative prayer eating well you know energy work you know meditation things like that and they made sure that they kind of let lead hermit lifestyles and they're not what you'd call normal people well they're producing things that are also extraordinary and so that's how I really got involved with the technology well I was already looking at technology before that but not in the same way (43:58) so right now I think that when I say media environments the people that are on your show are going to be college kids and high school kids you all you are brought up in media environments you don't understand or you do understand but not in an experiential way that there was a time when there were no media environments so religion took on and everything actually took on a much different feel now we're we live in media environment and so this is changing the way and in fact I think the reason why young people today are disavowing the religions and kind of becoming more spiritual is because of the shift in environment (44:40) whereas before you go to a church and now you can access a community online of like-minded people who help you understand how you believe and what's important in the world and could very well share your values so that's what I'm looking at I'm also looking at this is that what we see when we go to the movies okay here's an example I worked on the conjuring and so let's take the example of the first conjuring which came out in 2013 I believe so this is a movie that's a horror film and we know it's not true it's supposed to be based on a true story but a lot of it is is you know in poetic licenses being used here and so we know that we go to the movie even though we know that this is not truly happening (45:33) we're terrified our bodies are terrified we scream you know we might go home and keep the lights on because we're frightened okay so that's an if that's a belief even though our conscious mind doesn't believe it there are parts of our the conscious mind is not your only mind like your whole you know your mind is extended it's like it's bigger than you think so a lot of parts of your brain are are basically interpreting what's happening to you as actually real and this has some interesting effects and it's a very powerful thing that can be used to (46:12) encourages to buy things you know encourages just to encourage us to think certain ways so you know this is powerful we need to be aware of it we need to be aware and also to understand how it works so that we don't fall into those traps and that's why I stay away from just horror-final movies how can religion play a role in the research of AI? oh yeah okay so I was just teaching a class about this actually my the class wasn't about that but that's actually something that was addressed in the class (46:50) and it was actually a focal point of the class at one point because there was a young student in the class who was a graduate student doing work in creativity and AI and doing basically artwork with AI and so I had just given a class where I had taught about what's called redaction which means this that when a person has an experience let's take Teresa of Avala who I mentioned earlier and she has had this experience that she named an angel experience but looked pretty weird and that gets represented in art and you know it's one of the most represented angel contact events in art (47:33) so you know you have a lot of that out there so this young man took the first of all I do what I do is I do the actual primary source research the primary source is the actual description of the event the first description of the event and then what happens is the secondary source is the representation of it usually by an artist and they don't actually look alike okay so I want to get to what she experienced as best as possible you can't actually get to that but you can get close okay so that's what I'm doing so I did a whole class on the techniques that we use to get to as far as possible non-redacted experience alright (48:23) so what this young man does is he takes a creative AI I forgot exactly which one it was but it was an art AI and he basically fed it the prompts of the of what I gave him and what he got himself which was the undredacted version of the event of this corner quote angel contact and he put it into the AI and he created an incredibly beautiful visual video of her experience and it moved to the whole class what I found interesting about it was that it got a lot of it wrong okay and so that doesn't mean that AI and us we can't work together (49:07) because we're it's inevitable that we do but this is what it shows it shows that the history of the representation of her event which is all misrepresentation of it to tell you the truth is is important because it goes in there and it gets completely you know what we see is not what happened literally not what happened and so what we're working on right now is we're working on not about non-redacted AI like how can we take an AI and feed it as much data as possible that's non-redacted think of the angel encounter events that will get out of those right instead of the kind that we have now that's just taking the the data that's out there that's all actually not accurate (50:04) and putting it into the AI the AI is creating from that it might be beautiful but it sure isn't what happened do you think that in this day and age in the technological era that we are in now where we're dependent so much on our phones or we believe everything that we read do you think that in itself is a type of religion okay no I don't think that that's a type of religion what I do think though is that we need a massive intervention at a very young level children in schools to share with them how (50:48) what they're looking at is biased and we need to we basically need a severe intervention at this point I don't even know if we can actually accomplish this I try to be functionally hopeful that means that I do what I can do to try to do this do I do I believe in my speculative mind that it can be done I don't have a lot of hope for it but I do think I could reach people that understand and those are the people I'll reach if we can reach enough people who understand maybe we could leverage that information but it's not a religion what it is is an unsophisticated understanding of the manipulation (51:37) that we are undergoing on a completely hourly basis this is so true the cell phone the internet is so addictive you can spend hours on social media seeing who liked your comment or who liked your comment who liked your photo who liked your post and then also scrolling such as tick-tock which is this black hole and you keep going and going and going until you get that one dopamine hit and then you continue this really just horrid cycle it's it's scary and at the same time so many of us my generation those younger and those even older we are so dependent on our cell phone but in my opinion (52:21) this is merely my opinion I really think that if not now at some point in some way it's going to turn into some type of religion but then again I don't know the process of how religion is created you know I think that that's brilliant so this is what I think we can do about that when you say it's going to turn into a religion I think what you're saying is that it's going to be used almost like a weapon against us right a weapon to form our opinions and to create our realities and this is a stage in the formation of religion is a religion begins and this is just wide strokes my my colleagues in religious studies will hate me for saying this but this is a wide stroke about how religions are formed (53:14) a person has an event is a contact event with something that they believe is either a UFO in angel or something it completely like you said before changes everything there's no going back okay so this powerful event gets reinterpreted and redacted and changed and then represented into media and then media does its part because maybe a lot of people like that event so much on social media or something that algorithms get you know kind of configured to make sure that it's in our faces a lot and then our own experience of interacting with it then changes the algorithms as well (53:58) so that they then show us what we really just want to see instead of what it what it was and these kinds of mechanisms of training us is a very similar thing that happens in religions right people train children up in religions to believe these types of things so I think what you're basically saying is it it's a similar type of process that happens within religions that is exactly what I meant and I'm so happy you were able to dissect what I said and make it sound so much better what I would like to mention is that in a 2014 Pope Pope Francis mentioned that he would baptize Martians is this making a joke on the subject in your opinion (54:46) or bringing the conversation into the modern day church yeah so I think that Catholics in the Catholic Church they don't have a position at this point an official position or anything like that but you do have I know lots of people in the church and and I've been to the Vatican and studied at the various archives there and this is what my position is on that is that there are very many people with different ideas within the church some do not believe some are art and believers and the that particular book is actually I don't believe it was about the Pope that he was saying it (55:26) it was basically questions that these director the director of the Vatican Observatory which is a space observatory and they do have one he fielded this question once when somebody say hey do you think the Pope would baptize an extraterrestrial and he he quips back and said off the cuff he said only if she wanted to be baptized and so that's then the editors took that and kind of made that the topic and so that that book is a book about this whole not necessarily whether we would baptize it but the question of extraterrestrial life and how it would impact religion and in the introduction he makes the same point a brother guy console menu is the author and Tom father Tom Mueller (56:20) he basically says the same thing that I have said is that within the history of this church at least the Catholic tradition extraterrestrials have been we've been talking about that for about thousand years so it's not a new question that's very interesting so why in your opinion do UFO hoaxes get more attraction than maybe the stuff that would be classified as real online yeah that's a great question so a lot of different reasons which once we understand make perfect sense the fact that when you go out and you see something that I do have videos of people who've seen things that I've put gave them around to friends of mine who are videographers and you know that in so they're able to spot (57:13) fakes and everything at least now at some point they won't be able to distinguish the difference but okay so they're looking at these things that are unknown they have videos of them and I have those and then I have the hoaxed ones the hoaxed ones and I've taken a person who's a very well known figure in the in the UFO community very famous and I said here's here are two videos and I showed this person the two videos and this person basically looked at the one that was hoaxed and said oh that's fascinating and then looked at the one that was actually correct and real and accurate and we don't know what it is (57:57) and said oh that's no that's nothing so basically we're trained by media to identify UFOs as like these craft they're circular mostly summer triangular and you know that's what if we don't see something that looks like that we're not we don't believe that's the UFOs but that's not what they you know if you're looking at things that are actually unknown they're not going to look like that so we're trained to because we're trained to see that if we're happy we happen to be on social media let's take I don't know tick talk or something and somebody says look what I saw and they post their video of something that looks very much like close encounters as a third time kind of you know craft (58:48) it's everybody's going to look at it but if you take the person's video from the backyard and said this is truly I don't know what this is and you can't really decipher it and it looks kind of amorphous and it's kind of like shiny and you know moving around like this that's not going to get as much because we don't have the recognition we were brought up and trained to see UFOs in a certain way is that really how they look no but it doesn't matter because we're trained that way (59:20) it seems that we just really want to be entertained remain in this entertainment malaise we don't want to see something that makes us question or look at objects that are anomalous we want to be spoon fed the item and the information and everything related to that in this world of UFOs and even the paranormal there's a lot of disinformation and sometimes it can be very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff how can people practice discernment from your own experience and practice so what we have to understand and probably your listeners may not be aware of this but there's been active disinformation by our own government about the topic of UFOs it's all fact (1:00:07) so we had something called project blue book and this lasted years from basically the 1950s to 1969 and this was a debunking campaign of people who saw what they consider to be UFOs and so they send somebody out there generally this man named Alan Heineck and he would basically see what they were seeing take their reports and then his official job from the Air Force was to debunk it was to say this was swamp gas or that was the planet Venus right well people knew that that's not the case okay so it be it generated a suspicion of how the government was handling UFOs (1:00:52) so first the first thing in order to answer a question is that there's absolutely disinformation okay literally the next thing we have to understand is how can we train ourselves to know what's disinformation and what's not and when you say that people just want to be entertained sadly I think that's probably just the truth so sadly I think that a lot of people don't even care and they just want to be entertained I don't know why that they would want that I mean if they do want to know about UFOs being entertained is you're not going to get the information about it (1:01:35) so you're going to have to do a little work on your own you're going to have to figure out who in the community is acknowledging the disinformation and who is actually trying to identify the actual stuff and I have someone whose books you should read about that if you're interested Jacques Ballet has a huge corpus which is a huge body of work about just this question of how to identify you know what's happening against the misinformation at this point in time with just instantaneous media and things like that it's really difficult to identify the disinformation (1:02:21) so it's only for people who are truly interested to be able to kind of identify who does disinformation and we know what's actually accurate when you've written your books and the people that you've spoken to how do you specifically discern truth from fallacy okay so Jacques Ballet again I mentioned him I worked with him for a lot of my time doing this and read everything is written and also you know basically listen to him and one of the things that he said was now he comes he's not Catholic now but he does come from a Catholic culture (1:03:08) he uses the word discernment which does is a Catholic word for identifying what the heck is going on so you know I think one way to describe it is your BS meter so you got to hone your BS meter and so how do I do that you basically have to it takes time you have to be around a lot of people some people are automatically say I don't believe that person and some people you're not sure and it takes time so I would say that the ways in which I did it I was already being a person who studied religion (1:03:50) I already had a decent ability of discernment but sometimes it failed me so it's an ongoing process of trying to figure that out another thing is that you have to have really good friends who also are in the process of you know honing their discernment and then you talk to each other and you say what do you think you know is this legit or not it is very good to have a supportive community around you to where you're able to ask questions very openly but also to share notes as well sometimes when you do it by yourself it makes it more difficult (1:04:29) do you think there's a convergence between the UFO phenomenon and the paranormal yes actually this is what's so strange is that a lot of people so there are two different factions within the UFO community to try to figure out what this is and some people consider themselves what are called nuts and bolts people like these are just extraterrestrials they have craft like we have craft they might have more advanced propulsion systems but they're just straight up nuts and bolts you know machinery okay and then you have people on the other side that say you can communicate with the UFO (1:05:13) inhabitants through ESP or through you know this type of thing is conscious in space right and so there's are obviously very different ways of looking at it and generally these people don't get along okay but Jacques Vellet comes along and says it looks like it's both and so it looks to me that if you do go to say you talk to a person who's had an experience of ongoing experience of having UFO you know sightings and contacts and things like that and within the historical record to it looks pretty much like it's both so there are these so it's not only a physical thing that shows up and sometimes you can see it on radar (1:05:55) but people also have experiences where they feel like they are in contact with something or you know something says to them out of the blue look right up you know and then you look right and you look up and there you see something I mean what kind of strange thing is that that's that's what you'd call a paranormal experience so I would have to say that this is data you can't throw away the data so you have to you have to take all the data even if you don't understand how it fits together because in the future we most likely will understand how it fits together (1:06:29) I completely agree with that so then what are your thoughts on skin walker ranch in Utah where you get where you're getting all of this paranormal and UFO activity just in that one location. Yeah so I'm not one of the people who was who was part of the research team that that was out there and frankly I would never want to be because the things that were happening out there I talked to some people that that were researchers and oftentimes they would say I'm not going out there again because there's a lot of paranormal things that were pretty terrifying. (1:07:03) I also think there's a lot of urban legend about it you know that not only did that it became super public and when things become very public they do exactly what the trees of Avila stuff does they get changed they get redacted so that they don't even appear to be like what you think you know what originally probably happened. (1:07:24) So I think there I actually don't know a lot about that place so I can't authoritatively comment on it I just do know from second hand knowledge of people who have been researchers out there that it was the paranormal experiences that were happening out there were terrifying. When it comes to the stories they are rather bizarre they are very scary but also they can sound almost a little bit too hard to believe but hey when you want to be entertained these are fantastic stories and a place that I would definitely want to visit and experience them for myself for sure. (1:08:07) But when it comes to people meditating and praying to have visitation with UFOs such as CE5 which where where has been practiced long before it was patent by Stephen Greer how do you think it's different or the same to people praying to their god and the like for communication or guidance. Yeah so I think this is interesting and this came up in a class that I just taught so the question was the pro there are similar protocols that people have done throughout time of you know making sure that you're not you know that your your body is attuned in a healthy way so that you can communicate with something or you know whether or not we're actually communicating with something that's that's objectively real. (1:08:57) That we just don't know it could be that you just think that you are right okay so those two things said. I guess the question is what's the difference between a Buddhist meditating and experiencing effects like precognition or you know things like that or even seeing things you know which does happen. (1:09:23) The difference is this is that the goal of the Buddhist is to become enlightened and those things are a distraction to him or her and they don't pay attention to them okay because that's not their goal. The goal of perhaps the CE5 movement is to make communication with those things that the Buddhist monk just adorns within within Catholicism there's this thing called contemplative prayer where it's very similar in the sense that you want to communicate with God during that process of communion with God things might show up like an angel's might show up or maybe even demons show up or something. (1:10:11) You're told not to pay attention to those things those are distraction the goal is to communicate with God so I hope that makes sense so these things have been around for a very long period of time. The CE5 movement you know I think is I just don't know why a person would patented that when it has been you know these protocols have been around for a very long period of time. (1:10:38) And I also think that if the why would you want the goal to be to contact something that you know why you couldn't the goal be what's the old wrong with the old fashioned goal of enlightenment and communion with you know divinity and things like that they seem like the more important things to help humans today in our world where we're still having fights we're still having wars terrible things happen every day. (1:11:05) You know I just I'm still an advocate of old fashioned way of of doing these kinds of things. And now bonus content of questions and answers previously only available to Patreon club members. Welcome to the after show segment with me today is Diana Pasulka and Diana we're going to play a game we're going to end today on a high note. (1:11:30) So I'm going to ask a question and you're going to answer it as fast as you can so you can't really think can't have to take you just going to think of say the first thing that comes to mind alright OK yeah what was your favorite subject in high school. Religious studies you would give it that in high school yes well I went to a Catholic high school. (1:11:55) That makes a lot more sense I was going to be like I'm actually jealous but I went to public school so I that's too funny OK how do you like your coffee or tea depending on the one that you drink more. OK I generally drink coffee I have a love hate relationship with coffee because it's in my book Tyler told me that it'll mess up my protocols but I drink it anyway. (1:12:21) I basically do drip coffee and I put in a little half and half and that's how I like it. Oh not no sugar no but I have to tell you that I've been to Rome and that coffee is so much better than any I've ever had. I bet you can ever go wrong Italy has everything is better in Italy it is I don't really like their pizza I'm a stickler for dominoes. (1:12:45) Oh wow what was your favorite vacation. OK my dad was he was in the coast card and we had boats and I had my own sailboat so my favorite vacation was going on a giant houseboat in Lake Shasta and we had a big adventure because we almost like it was a big storm and there were some we had coves and there were audors and it was really cool. (1:13:14) You know it's so cute seeing audors when they fall asleep and they hold hands with their family so adorable so adorable. Has there ever been a moment where you felt scared when researching the UFO phenomenon many moments tell us one of them. OK in the very beginning in 2012 I went with an experienced and a crisp lead so and his wife to to a conference and it was in Philadelphia and it was filled with all kinds of people this is where I first realized that that topic had a lot of government like agencies interested like FBI and CIA and things like that. (1:14:03) And it was a very in my opinion it was a very dark conference and I met people who are clearly not legitimate people in terms of they were lying about the UFO you know just to make money and things like that and it was very dark and after that I said I don't want anything to do with this and I told everybody I was going to quit and doing it and then about a month later on the day. (1:14:32) This woman out of nowhere who she believed she was dying she did she wasn't dying but at the time she believed she was and she was a researcher at Duke University who had a bunch of UFO. Archive you know materials and she said she wanted to give it to me and so it was all my birthday so I thought oh I'll take it and I took it and I looked through it and I was hooked back in. (1:15:01) That's a rather fascinating topic for sure it is yeah do you wear socks with sandals Diana never. Sometimes it's just so comfy I do wear socks but but generally not with sandals. Bigfoot or Chupacabra. That's New Mexico. What was your biggest wish as a child? World peace. What do you do right before you sleep like to prepare yourself for sleep or to prepare for the next day? This is embarrassing one okay but I watch and I shouldn't because in order to get to get sleep I've heard that you're not supposed to be on the screen and you know you're not supposed to have the blue screen okay so but I do watch videos of just fashion videos you know I kind of enjoy watching those because they take my I think so hard about things all day fashion videos are just you know handbag videos fashion videos I'm like okay. (1:16:13) This is really relaxing and then I just fall asleep. Describe your style in one word. I'm a hermit. If you could retire right now would you? So I wouldn't stop doing what I'm doing in terms of my research but if I could retire right now I would change how it's done so I would be able to travel more to the places where I know people are having experiences or doing technologies and things like that and like I've spent a lot of time in New Mexico. (1:16:56) I mean already is a research I'm able to do that but I'm not able to do that with my kids and so if I retired and I was able to I bring them with me. Are they also interested in the phenomenon as well? They try to stay away from it. They don't think it's cool. Yeah but at some point hopefully in our lifetime everyone will be talking about it and then we're going to be the cool kids Diana on the block. (1:17:26) Yeah exactly. Summer or winter? Winter because I live in the South. That makes sense. Well sometimes but yeah it's a different kind of winter down south of North you get like feet of snow. South you just get like if you're lucky like an inch or two. Yeah yeah and I've been I mean almost every Christmas I go out to the ocean it's really nice. (1:17:55) Oh gosh yeah. The winter and going to the beach it's great you just can't get in the water unless you're you know near California right. And then they're in the middle of the winter. What inspires you? I feel inspired every day so I think that just life is to be inspirational. I get inspired by I go down I live right next to I have a dock down the street. (1:18:28) Not near the ocean at all in the ocean. I just go down there and I look up and I see the moon and the stars and you know I see dolphins in the water. I mean that's fairly inspiring to me. Oh my gosh. What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? The weirdest thing I've ever eaten was a fruit and I can't remember the name of the fruit but it's a Vietnamese fruit. (1:19:00) And it's this big it's giant and it looks it has kind of thorns on it and you open it up. Like a back fruit. I don't think it's jack fruit. It's it's a fruit I've never encountered before but it's a Vietnamese is a Vietnamese specialty. I think my favorite Vietnamese fruit are leeches that are like really spike. (1:19:23) Oh yeah. Kind of small. Those are good. Yeah. Do you have any tattoos? No. But when I lived in California I was that one I guess the first group of people you know during the grunge era. When everybody got pierced or a tattoo we had tattooed in piercing parties. And I honestly it takes me a long time to figure out if I'm going to do something different with my hair or my clothes or something. (1:19:53) So I wanted to get a tattoo and I also wanted to get a nose ring right. And I never did. So I have no tattoos no piercings but a lot of my friends do. So then when you were thinking about getting a tattoo what design were you thinking about during that era. Okay so I wanted to get maybe like an angel but a really small one and I probably have it in a place where I can hide it. (1:20:19) I got you. What's your favorite dessert? tiramisu. Yeah that one is so good. My last one for you. If you had a time machine and could only go to one time period and destination where would you go and what year? Hmm okay if I could do that what would I do? Okay so I would probably want to go back to. Probably the first the second century. (1:21:13) Alexandria and I would want to experience the building of the library and just the people that were there. You know and see what was going on. Yeah and it's believed that in that library was documentation of Atlantis. I would be there with you Diana and going through the books if I could read. Yes that would be great. (1:21:34) Diana thank you so much for doing this extra segment with me. I really appreciate it. Absolutely it was fun.