Pasulka, Diana Walsh

professor of philosophy and religion, UNC Wilmington; author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology

Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion & the Nature of Belief

Lex Fridman Podcast · Dec 28, 2020

• Diana Walsh Pasulka
• American Cosmic
• UFO religiosity
• contact experience and hierophany
• Jacques Vallée and technogenesis
• Roswell as pilgrimage site
• invisible college and UFO Fight Club
• Teilhard de Chardin and noosphere
• singularity as religious revelation
• Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt
• love as intrinsic meaning

Core ideas

Pasulka opens by framing belief and objective reality through a Kantian lens: we can never access the "thing in itself" (the noumenal), only approximate reality through our senses and, increasingly, technological extensions of them (telescopes, microscopes), which continually refine but never perfect our beliefs. She illustrates the real-world power of false beliefs with historical examples — the medieval Catholic doctrine that women lacked souls, and the doctrine of Limbo (abolished by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007) for unbaptized infants and virtuous pagans — arguing that even though these places or claims were not "real," the suffering they caused grieving families was entirely real, illustrating that beliefs generate genuine social and psychological effects independent of their metaphysical truth.

Central to Pasulka's academic framework (drawn from religion scholar Ann Taves) is a "building block" theory of religion: there are no inherently religious or mythic experiences, only experiences that get interpreted as such after the fact. She describes a recurring pattern — an individual has an intense, transformative "contact experience" (with a being, vision, or entity), tells others who believe them due to their credibility, the account spreads, and eventually an institution intervenes to control or suppress the resulting movement — illustrating this with early Christianity's consolidation under Constantine at the Council of Nicaea (which selected one "universal" form from what were likely hundreds of competing early Christian sects) and with the case of Saint Faustina, a Polish nun whose visions of Jesus's "Divine Mercy" were initially suppressed by the Church before being canonized decades later by Pope John Paul II. She argues this same pattern is now occurring with UFO/UAP belief, which she frames as an emerging new form of "religiosity" — not a dogmatic, institutionalized religion but an open-ended, evidence-seeking faith structure resembling "I want to believe" from The X-Files — filling the same psychological and cultural role religions have historically played, including as tools sometimes used propagandistically by governments to construct in-group/out-group hostility (citing anti-Catholic and antisemitic propaganda in American and European history, including her own family's experience fleeing the Irish Famine and the Holocaust).

Discussing UFOs and technology, Pasulka credits Jacques Vallée — a French computer scientist who worked on ARPANET and is also a lifelong UFO researcher — as a central intellectual influence for treating technology and non-human intelligence as fundamentally intertwined phenomena rather than separate interests. She argues that if humanity is in contact with non-human intelligence, we are most likely encountering its technology rather than the intelligence directly (just as humans send rovers rather than people to Mars), and that the historical record of both the American and Soviet space programs contains documented instances of key figures (Jack Parsons on the American side, associated with occultist rituals in the Mojave Desert; unnamed figures on the Soviet side with unorthodox religious beliefs about angels) who believed they were receiving communications or "downloads" from non-human intelligences that directly enabled real, working rocket technology — a belief structure she also attributes to a present-day informant she calls "Tyler D" (echoing Fight Club's Tyler Durden), part of a loosely connected, deliberately non-public network of researchers and technologists she calls "the invisibles" or the "UFO Fight Club." She recounts being blindfolded and taken by Tyler D to an alleged 1940s New Mexico crash site, where metal-detector-located material samples were later examined by scientists and found not to be anomalous compared to naturally occurring earth materials — while stressing she cannot personally verify the broader claims of alien crash technology.

Pasulka discusses Roswell as functioning like a modern religious pilgrimage site (a "hierophany," or place of contact between humans and non-human/divine intelligence, analogous to Mecca), separate from the specific, disputed crash-site visit described above, and is cautious about the 2017 New York Times "Tic Tac" UFO video, noting that her contacts in the "invisible" research community believed the underlying sighting was real but the released footage itself may have been deliberately degraded or "spun" for reasons possibly tied to funding, since UFO/UAP research often lacks conventional government funding and researchers may need alternative ways to sustain their work. On Bob Lazar's claims of reverse-engineering alien propulsion technology, she declines to adjudicate their truth but notes she finds it notable that acquaintances in the UFO research community specifically wanted her to know Lazar had voiced regret about going public — which she found "somewhat creepy" — and frames the enduring value of the Lazar myth (regardless of its factual status) as its capacity to inspire genuine curiosity and openness to unknown future technology.

She extends her analysis to psychedelics and altered states, describing documented U.S. military experimentation (MK-Ultra-era) with psychedelics to try to access unconventional information, and situates religious "visionary experiences" (with or without drugs) as a long-studied category within religious studies, illustrated by the mass 1917 Fátima "Miracle of the Sun" apparition where thousands of witnesses reported differing but simultaneous unusual phenomena. She recounts visiting the Vatican Observatory's archives with Tyler D (at a billionaire patron's request to study historical claims of Catholic saints' levitation and bilocation) and researching 17th-century nun María de Ágreda, who claimed to have mentally "bilocated" to the New World and taught Catholicism to Indigenous peoples who later reportedly recognized her from a portrait despite never having physically met her — framing this as a historical case that, whether or not literally true, blurs conventional boundaries of space, time, and consciousness in ways she finds relevant to UFO phenomenology.

On the "singularity" and human-technology co-evolution, Pasulka argues against framing technology as a mere tool humans "use," proposing instead the concept of "technogenesis" (a term with roots in Heidegger): humans and technology co-evolve and mutually shape each other, illustrated by her own consulting work on the horror film The Conjuring, where UC Irvine researchers used EKG-monitored test audiences to physiologically optimize scene editing for maximum arousal — evidence, she argues, that humans are already deeply, physiologically interfaced with technology. She connects this to early Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's early-20th-century concept of a coming "noosphere" (a shared mental/technological layer of humanity), which she says reads remarkably like Ray Kurzweil's singularity writings — leading her to treat Kurzweil's work as essentially a new religious "revelation" genre — while personally doubting a literal singularity is possible, since she believes information/consciousness necessarily requires some material substrate and cannot become fully "abstract" or disembodied. Regarding alien contact more broadly, she expresses ambivalence: she doesn't believe humanity is currently equipped to handle contact with a more advanced civilization well, drawing a pessimistic analogy to the historical record of contact between more and less technologically aggressive human cultures, in contrast to Lex's more optimistic view that sufficiently advanced, spacefaring civilizations would likely have evolved past aggression toward cooperation.

The conversation closes with philosophical and literary recommendations — Pasulka describes an unusually personal, quasi-mystical experience reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science for the first time on a New Year's Eve (opening randomly to a passage specifically about New Year's resolutions and coincidence), recommends Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (on the "banality of evil" and Eichmann's use of clichés/proto-memes) and The Life of the Mind (on evil as a failure of internal conscience/self-dialogue, allowing "bad people" to sleep soundly), and Jeffrey Kripal's Authors of the Impossible and Mutants and Mystics — and with reflections on mortality (she chairs an academic "death panel" in religious studies, professes not to fear death, and credits an adventurous, fearless older brother with shaping her own risk tolerance) and meaning, which she locates not in hedonistic pleasure but in something she calls "intrinsic" and gravity-like — using love (including for her cat and dog, humorously named Trump and Putin) as her central example of an intrinsic, charismatic force she speculates could take different forms across different possible life forms in the universe.

Excerpts