- This panel at Hereticon 2024, hosted by Jesse of Pirate Wires, brings together religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka and Colonel Karl Nell to argue that UFOs/UAPs are real, observable phenomena and that they are best understood as the same entities historically described as angels and demons—suggesting that modernity’s materialist worldview is an aberration from a deeper, older epistemology in which non-human intelligence has always played a central role.
The Case That UFOs Are Real
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First principles argument (Karl Nell):
- Life evolved on Earth almost as soon as the planet’s crust cooled (stromatolite fossils at 3.5 billion years, possibly 4.1 billion), suggesting life arises easily and is likely common in the universe.
- The sun is a relatively young Population I star; billions of similar stars are billions of years older, giving other civilizations vast time to evolve.
- Faster-than-light travel is not ruled out: Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 solution to Einstein’s equations is mathematically valid and requires negative energy, which is confirmed by the Casimir effect and the accelerating expansion of the universe (dark energy).
- The common claims that “life is rare” and “FTL is impossible” have no evidentiary support.
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Testimonial evidence from people in positions to know:
- Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Admiral Lord Hill-Norton (UK), Haim Eshed (father of Israeli space program), Paul Hellyer (former Canadian defense minister), Chris Mellon, David Grush, and Luis Elizondo have all stated publicly that UFOs/UAPs represent real phenomena involving non-human intelligence.
- Congressional legislation introduced by Senators Schumer, Rounds, and others asserts that the government is withholding information on the topic.
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Physical and documentary evidence:
- Pentagon-released videos (FLIR, GIMBAL, GOFAST) from 2004 and 2015 show unidentified craft the Pentagon says are neither US nor adversary technology.
- Gordon Cooper (Mercury 7 astronaut) chased a UFO over West Germany in 1951 and testified to the UN in 1979.
- Incursions over US ballistic missile warning systems in the 1970s; missiles taken offline at Malmstrom AFB in the 1960s; analogous Soviet incidents.
- A still-active US-Soviet agreement requires mutual notification if either side’s missile early warning systems are disrupted by UFOs.
- 1952 radar-visual sightings over Washington, DC, including air-to-air intercepts, triggered the largest press conference since WWII.
- 1994 Ruwa, Zimbabwe incident: craft landed and beings presented themselves to elementary school children in broad daylight; a nearly identical event occurred in 1966 in West Hall, Australia.
- Strong correlation between UAP activity and nuclear sites (Pantex, Hanford, Fukushima).
Diana Pasulka’s Research: Historical “Angel Contact Events”
- Pasulka is a religious studies professor and classicist, not a theologian or advocate; she studies religion as a social and historical phenomenon using archaeology, archives, and material culture.
- While researching Catholic “ascent narratives” (tours of the afterlife) for her book Heaven Can Wait, she found extensive reports of aerial phenomena in Catholic archives from 1200–1800: discs, light orbs, flying houses, and beings—often interpreted as souls from purgatory.
- Aerospace industry contacts began reaching out to her specifically for this data, asking about descriptions of light, object shapes, and injuries—treating the historical reports as potentially real encounters.
- She was introduced (circa 2016) to a pseudonymous figure she calls “Tyler,” a NASA mission controller and government liaison to Elon Musk’s space program, who told her his group had acquired UFO crash debris and was reverse-engineering it.
- This led her to re-examine iconic religious events, most notably the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi:
- Francis’s encounter with a seraphim involved a light-emitting object with an eye; primary source accounts (especially Brother Leo’s) describe it dealing “harshly” with Francis, leaving wounds consistent with electromagnetic radiation burns.
- Francis likely died from these injuries; the event was kept secret (a “stigma” in the original sense).
- Gary Nolan, a Stanford microbiologist and Nobel nominee, now studies similar anomalous injuries in modern UFO encounter cases, and the CIA has consulted him on files of such incidents.
Non-Disclosure as a Universal Constant
- Karl Nell identifies six reasons governments withhold UFO information: national security, lack of a plan for handling the implications, potential societal disruption/ontological shock, covert agreements benefiting from secrecy, covering up misdeeds, and simple bureaucratic inertia.
- This is not theoretical: the 1953 Robertson Panel documents show the CIA deliberately chose to debunk UFOs, misdirect the public, and infiltrate civilian UFO organizations.
- The Air Force’s Project Blue Book was ended despite the Condon Report’s own data contradicting its dismissive conclusions—the study’s author wrote his conclusions before the research was complete.
Cosmism and the Esoteric Roots of the Space Program
- Russian cosmism: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, father of Russian rocketry, believed in non-human intelligence (NHI) and wrote about it; the Russian space program has a Christian-framed cosmist tradition.
- American space program: Jack Parsons, the father of American rocketry (co-founder of JPL), practiced occult rituals with Aleister Crowley and believed he was in contact with non-human intelligence—not as demonic, but as part of the “common task” of getting humanity into space.
- Pasulka named her book American Cosmic to highlight that this esoteric dimension of the US space program has been almost entirely unacknowledged.
- Both programs share a belief that consciousness and contact with NHI are integral to space exploration, not incidental.
Angel Hierarchies and Modern Frameworks for NHI
- Religious traditions have long maintained taxonomies of non-human beings: Thomas Aquinas’s angel hierarchies, Pseudo-Dionysius’s classifications, and others describe beings between humans and God with specific effects on observers—including irradiated light consistent with electromagnetic damage.
- The Kardashev scale (Type I–III civilizations by energy usage) is popular but not very useful for understanding UAPs, since total energy consumption is unknowable from available data.
- Karl Nell recommends the Universal Civilization Development Model, which evaluates civilizations along three axes:
- What they have: Energy density (fire → metal smelting → nuclear → spacetime warping → altering physics itself).
- What they know: Information complexity, processing speed, parallel thought—what Jacques Vallée calls a “physics of information.”
- Who they are: Evolutionary stage (perhaps millions or billions of years ahead), chemical basis, ecological relationship to their environment.
- The “distance” in this phase space between civilizations would determine whether relationships are competitive, symbiotic, or incomprehensible.
The Antichrist, Plato’s Cave, and the Apocalypse as Unveiling
- Peter Thiel’s Hereticon talk framed the Antichrist as someone who presents as the solution to apocalyptic fear—using “peace and safety” (citing Thessalonians) as a veneer for totalitarian control, couched in utilitarian, outward-looking rationalism.
- Pasulka connects this to Plato’s Republic, which asks whether a just society is possible after Socrates was executed by the state:
- The Allegory of the Cave describes people mistaking shadows (manipulated by unseen others) for reality; escape requires a dialectical conversation about justice and goodness.
- The Myth of Er (a near-death experience of a soldier) describes the soul’s immortality, reincarnation, and anamnesis—recovery of knowledge of one’s immortal self through mystery rituals or NDEs.
- Pasulka argues these are not mere allegories but describe real metaphysical architecture; early Christians recognized this and were directly influenced by Plato’s Republic.
- The word “apocalypse” (Greek: apokalypsis) means “unveiling”—and Pasulka believes we are living in such an unveiling now, with UAP sightings at record levels.
Mysticism Across Traditions
- The esoteric/mystical strands of major religions—Gnosticism, Sufism, Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta—all describe inward, initiatic experiences that transcend ordinary reality and connect with deeper truths.
- The Pyramid Texts (5th Dynasty Egypt, ~2500 BC) are the world’s oldest large corpus of religious texts; mainstream Egyptology reads them as funerary, but a counter-scholarship reads them as initiatory, connected to the Sed Festival (a kingship ritual), making the pyramid an “initiatic engine” for the living.
- This creates a direct line from Egyptian esotericism → Hermetic tradition → Gnosticism → early Christianity.
- Mystical traditions across cultures share striking similarities: Kabbalists and the Dalai Lama have compared notes on non-human intelligences and associated colors and found broad agreement (Meister Eckhart: “Theologians may quarrel, but mystics all speak the same language”).
- The Merkabah (chariot) tradition in Judaism, the seven palaces of Kabbalism, the seven arit of Egypt, and the seven levels of Rosicrucianism all share a common structure of ascending through levels, encountering beings (some helpful, some hostile), and leaving something behind at each stage.
Technology, Consciousness, and Investable Opportunities
- Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk “There’s Room at the Bottom” predicted molecular-level engineering; today, information science, materials science, genomics, and semiconductor fabrication are converging into a single discipline of programmable matter, self-healing structures, and von Neumann machines.
- The Casimir effect demonstrates that negative energy states can be created between parallel conducting plates—effectively extracting energy from the quantum vacuum. This is proven physics, though no one has yet built a reciprocating (repeatable) machine from it. If solved, it would represent a revolutionary battery technology.
- Karl Nell argues that any sufficiently advanced civilization has likely already developed technologies based on consciousness itself, and that our own technology is approaching the point where a physical basis for consciousness could be established and engineered.
- The panel frames the current moment as one where groupthink causes opportunities to be missed—incorporating consciousness and non-human intelligence into our technological and investment frameworks could open vast new areas.
Religion Is Real: Implications for Individuals and Society
- Most religious practitioners, Pasulka observes, have never interrogated the metaphysical claims of their own traditions—they treat angels and demons as metaphorical or as things that “don’t happen anymore.”
- Karl Nell argues that even devout believers would experience a profound state change if confronted with the literal reality of their tradition’s metaphysical claims—believing and knowing are fundamentally different.
- Historical angel encounters are not gentle: they frequently involve violence, harsh treatment, injury, and forced moral transformation. The cherubic modern image is a distortion.
- Pasulka warns against actively seeking contact with these beings (as some in the aerospace community do); instead, she advises people to go back to their own religious tradition and study it seriously—Judaism, Buddhism, Catholicism, and others all contain rich, deep frameworks for understanding these phenomena.
- The “Invisibles”—people like Tyler and Townsend Brown who worked on classified programs—often cannot be properly recognized or eulogized because their families don’t know what they did. Pasulka helped write a eulogy for one such figure at Tyler’s request.
- Townsend Brown, a mid-century inventor who experimentally unified gravity and electromagnetism (with implications for time travel), died penniless and obscure on Catalina Island; Pasulka believes his work was incorporated into the B-2 stealth bomber and that he was paid a trivial sum by Northrop Grumman. He deliberately created disinformation about his own work to protect it during the Cold War.
The Path Forward: Community and the Dialectic
- Pasulka sees the current moment as the beginning of a new community forming around the recognition that we are not alone—echoing the early Christian ekklesia (community) built on encounters with divine messengers.
- She draws on Buddha’s three jewels as a model: (1) you can do it, (2) the Dharma (teaching, which can come from any source, even life events), and (3) the Sangha (community)—because the path cannot be walked alone.
- The path is narrow and potentially dangerous (the parable of the four rabbis: of those who entered the heavenly palace, one went mad, two died, only one emerged whole), but it does not need to be universal—there is no single fate for all humanity.
- The panel closes on the idea that we live in “interesting times” and that the unveiling now underway, while disorienting, represents an opportunity to recover a deeper relationship with reality that modernity has obscured.