UFOs & Religion: Vatican Reveals Hidden Link (Ft. Diana Pasulka)

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the author of three books: Heaven Can Wait (on Catholic purgatory), American Cosmic (on UFOs, technology, and belief), and Encounters (on contact experiences across history). She is one of the few academics to have directly engaged with individuals inside secret U.S. government space programs, and her work argues that modern UFO encounters are structurally identical to historical religious experiences of divine or angelic contact—suggesting that what we call “aliens” may be the same phenomenon previously interpreted as angels, demons, or spirits, and that this represents a new, emergent form of religion.

Pasulka’s research method is rooted in religious studies, not ufology

• She does not begin by believing or disbelieving; she applies the same analytical framework used to study historical religious phenomena.
• Her early work on Catholic purgatory led her to translate original accounts of nuns, priests, and saints who reported direct contact with divine beings—and she found that the original texts often differ significantly from the official Church versions.
• Example: The standard narrative of St. Francis of Assisi describes him seeing Christ in the form of a seraph on Mount La Verna, but the earliest translations by Thomas of Celano describe Francis encountering a “sound and fury,” atmospheric sparks, a flaming torch, telepathic communication, and being wounded by rays of light that pierced his hands—symptoms that closely resemble radiation burns reported in modern UFO close-encounter cases.

The core argument: UFO experiences and religious experiences are the same phenomenon, interpreted through different cultural lenses

• Pasulka argues that people across history have been encountering the same underlying reality, but the cultural “overlay” determines how it is described: medieval people saw angels or demons; 19th-century nuns saw souls from purgatory; modern people see aliens.
• This aligns with the work of French philosopher Jean-Pierre Changeux (referenced via the idea that “the eyes can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend”) and with Jacques Vallée, who has long argued that UFOs function as a “control system” that adapts its appearance to the cultural moment.
• The “Tic Tac” UAP of today is the “flying butane tank” of the 1950s is the “flaming chariot” of antiquity—the meme library of the era provides the closest available template for an experience that transcends ordinary categories.

Historical cases that mirror modern UFO encounters

• Sister Maria, a 19th-century nun, reported a shining flame-like object emerging from her convent wall and hovering above her—interpreted by her Mother Superior as a soul in purgatory. This is structurally identical to modern orb and light-ball UFO reports.
• Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th-century Franciscan friar, was witnessed by many to levitate during Mass. He followed strict ascetic protocols (eating solid food only twice a week, adding bitter powders to meals), suggesting a disciplined preparatory practice. The Church eventually imprisoned him because his public holiness was seen as subversive.
• Pasulka notes that those reported to levitate or receive miraculous interventions tend to be people following strict protocols, or children, or those with a “childlike goodness”—a pattern she finds significant.

American Cosmic: the book that changed everything

• The book begins as a skeptical, media-studies-influenced analysis of how entertainment shapes UFO reports (e.g., Betty and Barney Hill’s aliens resembled creatures from The Outer Limits, which aired just weeks before their 1961 abduction account).
• Pasulka initially treats the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey as a metaphor for the screen itself—a device that manipulates the viewer’s reality, not an alien artifact. She notes that Stanley Kubrick himself said interpreting it as an alien artifact was the most superficial reading, and that he originally experimented with it as a literal screen flashing targets for the apes.
• The book’s thesis appears to be heading toward “it’s all a scam”—media, cults (like Dorothy Martin’s 1954 UFO doomsday group), and psychological manipulation—until Pasulka meets Tyler D., a pseudonym for a man she describes as a mission controller who has worked in secret space programs since the 1980s Challenger era.

Tyler D.: the secret space program insider

• Tyler is described as extraordinarily lucky in his career despite not being the top student or coming from the best school. He claims to access a state of consciousness—through protocols involving sleep, hydration, and meditation—where he receives ideas for biomedical technologies that he then turns into successful companies.
• He told Pasulka he goes to a room with a machine whose function he doesn’t fully understand, where he receives information. Pasulka recognized his protocols as structurally identical to religious practices across traditions.
• Tyler took Pasulka and Dr. Gary Nolan (a Stanford microbiologist) to a UFO crash retrieval site in New Mexico on government land. They found materials with anomalous isotope ratios not commonly found on Earth, buried under rocks that appeared to have been in place for roughly a century.
• Nolan later attempted materials analysis on what he believes may be UFO crash parts using his Stanford lab.

The Vatican Observatory visit: Tyler’s conversion

• Pasulka accompanied Tyler to the Vatican Observatory, run by a Jesuit astronomer trained at MIT. There, Tyler met young international space scientists who recognized him (though he is unknown in the U.S. due to the secrecy of his work).
• A priest (“Father K”) took Tyler under his wing, blessed the American Cosmic project, and brought them on hospital rounds to administer healing rites to terminally ill patients. Tyler was deeply moved by encountering people who had dedicated their lives to serving others.
• At the observatory, viewing first-edition works by Copernicus (who had a mystical, spiritual relationship with the sun), Tyler broke down in tears and said all he wanted to do was help people—he no longer cared about returning to the space program.
• Tyler subsequently converted to Catholicism and reinterpreted the signals he had been receiving as consistent with the experiences of the saints Pasulka had been studying.

The space program’s hidden religious and esoteric dimensions

• Pasulka found that rocket launches are accompanied by iconography from Greek mythology and ancient Roman (not medieval Catholic) Latin—a “parallel religion” embedded in the space program that even participants don’t fully understand.
• The Russian space program was influenced by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who constructed a cosmic religion around space colonization, immortality, time travel, and the transformation of Earth’s biosphere into a mental network (a “noosphere”).
• The American counterpart, Jack Parsons (founder of JPL), performed sex magic rituals with L. Ron Hubbard and believed he was in contact with non-human entities. After reading Frazer’s The Golden Bough, he said: “I read that book and realized science is a form of magic, and not vice versa.”
• Ilya Whitley, a researcher Pasulka interviews in Encounters, studies the psychology of aerospace engineers and fighter pilots, finding that at the extreme edge of technological complexity, mind-matter interaction becomes a real factor—internal psychological and spiritual states affect outcomes.

The relationship between UFOs, consciousness, and AI

• Pasulka has engaged with AI and quantum computing researchers who suggest that UFO phenomena may be temporal rather than extraterrestrial—that is, they may originate from the future or from a domain beyond spacetime, consistent with quantum superposition.
• Stephen Dick, a retired NASA historian and Galileo Project researcher, proposed over 20 years ago that if we encounter non-human intelligence, it will likely be artificial intelligence.
• Jacques Vallée has similarly argued that UFOs are technological control systems—akin to how Pavlovian conditioning can make rats run a prime number maze without understanding prime numbers. Society may be being “nudged” by an intelligence whose goals we don’t comprehend.
• Pasulka sees AI and UFOs as parallel phenomena: both are “Golem-like” creations that can be used for liberation or totalitarian control, and both function as forcing functions that break people out of their programmed lives and demand self-examination.

The “fourth tradition” of UFO research

• Pasulka identifies three existing traditions: (1) the invisible college (intelligence community researchers like Allen Hynek, operating in secret), (2) public-facing ufology (hobbyist researchers), and (3) academic scholarship (like Harvard psychiatrist John Mack’s work with experiencers).
• She proposes a fourth tradition that has emerged in the last decade: a collaboration between academics (like herself) and insiders from the secret programs (like Tyler), producing a new kind of transparency and knowledge that is emergent—greater than the sum of its parts.
• She compares this to the original Invisible College of the Enlightenment (Rosicrucian, alchemical roots), which sought to marry science and spirit—suggesting we may be on the verge of a similar epistemological paradigm shift.

Science as religion, and the re-enchantment of the world

• Pasulka argues that science has become the dominant mythology of our time: it has a founding myth (the Big Bang), a teleology (evolution from primitive to advanced), rituals (lab coats, peer review, conferences), and an irreducible moment of divine-like inspiration (Einstein at the patent office, Heisenberg on Heligoland, Dirac staring at a fire).
• The UFO phenomenon, by transgressing the boundary between the “spirit world” and the “physical world”—the one unforgivable sin of the Western materialist mind—has the power to shatter the prevailing paradigm and force a re-enchantment of reality.
• She is critical of the current “disclosure” narrative as a colonial concept that assumes the U.S. government is the sole authority on the phenomenon, ignoring indigenous traditions (Native American, Aboriginal Australian) that have long had frameworks for understanding contact with non-human intelligences.

The moral dimension: evil, forcing functions, and personal salvation

• Pasulka takes the reality of supernatural evil seriously, distinguishing it from human evil (like trafficking). She reports smelling sulfur at Skinwalker Ranch and subsequently experiencing what she describes as the worst month of her life, followed by a sense of divine rescue.
• She uses a hydrogen sulfide gas monitor to distinguish between actual gas and perceptual/spiritual experiences of sulfur smell.
• Drawing on René Girard’s theory of scapegoating, she argues that religion functions as a defense mechanism against humanity’s structural violence—but that the UFO phenomenon breaks through this defense, forcing individuals into self-examination.
• Her conclusion differs from techno-optimists: she does not believe the future of AI or UFOs is “up to us” in a collective sense. The only thing up to us is personal salvation—understood not strictly in Christian terms but as the universal human task of self-examination, virtue, and paying attention to one’s own inner state and the needs of others.
• She warns against actively seeking contact (“don’t stare at the sun”), noting that those who study the phenomenon often become “non-specific amplifiers”—more sensitive to both positive and negative influences—and must be hypervigilant, akin to the spiritual warfare described in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.

Synchronicities, creativity, and the nature of reality

• Pasulka discusses synchronicities (drawing on Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk) as “extra-cognitive events” that provide dopamine and signal alignment with a creative or productive path—suggesting that meaningful coincidence is a natural feature of reality, not a glitch.
• She sees the UFO phenomenon as pulling people out of their programmed lives and into direct encounter with a reality that is far stranger and more meaningful than the secular materialist worldview allows.