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This remastered interview includes bonus content of additional questions and answers originally made available only to members of Cristina's Patreon members club.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 flaw