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0:01:52 If you’re into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.
0:01:59 Congress is investigating what they call unidentified anomalous phenomena.
0:02:04 The rest of us call them UFOs.
0:02:06 After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there’s something out there.
0:02:11 Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are pressing the Pentagon and other government
0:02:16 agencies for more answers about UFOs.
0:02:19 A Pentagon report is detailing a dramatic increase in UFO sightings.
0:02:24 Back in 2019, The New York Times published an article about reports of UFOs off the
0:02:30 East Coast.
0:02:32 It included several Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded mysterious flying objects.
0:02:44 If you haven’t seen the videos, it’s worth checking out.
0:02:48 They are strange.
0:02:57 I still haven’t seen any evidence that actual aliens were involved, and that remains the
0:03:02 least plausible explanation, in my opinion.
0:03:07 But the story itself, that was a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien
0:03:15 life.
0:03:17 The mere acknowledgement by the government that these objects were real was unprecedented.
0:03:28 And the possibility that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions.
0:03:36 How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding
0:03:42 of our place in it?
0:03:44 And what if aliens are real, but so unlike anything we can imagine, that we can’t even
0:03:50 begin to understand the implications?
0:03:55 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:04:07 Today’s guest is Diana Posuka.
0:04:10 She’s a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and
0:04:14 the author of two books on this topic.
0:04:17 Her latest is called Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligency.
0:04:24 Posuka has been studying UFO culture for roughly a decade now, and I think she’s done the
0:04:29 most compelling work in this space.
0:04:32 And that’s because it isn’t really about UFOs and aliens, at least not directly.
0:04:39 This new book dives more deeply into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien
0:04:44 life.
0:04:46 And those experiences, I assure you, are so much weirder than you think.
0:04:51 They’re also, as we discuss here, profoundly religious in their own way.
0:04:58 Reading it, I kept coming back to that famous Werner Heisenberg quote.
0:05:03 Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
0:05:15 Diana Posuka, welcome to the show.
0:05:18 Well thanks for having me on the show.
0:05:20 Well Diana, it’s a hell of a time to be on the UFO beat.
0:05:26 Do you think we’ve reached escape velocity on this topic, and this is just going to be
0:05:31 part of the public conversation?
0:05:33 Moving forward?
0:05:34 Absolutely.
0:05:35 Well, so when you write in this book that UFO events are a spiritual reality, what does
0:05:43 that really mean?
0:05:45 UFO events are transformative realities, not necessarily good.
0:05:51 Religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good.
0:05:55 So I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs, sometimes with what they called
0:06:01 beings associated with UFOs, and they were having transformative experiences, and it
0:06:07 sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.
0:06:13 I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that
0:06:17 there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record.
0:06:22 There were no planes, there were no rockets back then, so people were seeing things in
0:06:25 the sky, and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could
0:06:31 be souls from purgatory, or they could be houses of saints and things like that that
0:06:36 are up in the sky.
0:06:37 And so when I say that we’re dealing with something that I would call not necessarily
0:06:42 a new religion, I would call it a new form of religion, a new form of spirituality, because
0:06:49 a lot of people, when they have these events, and say they happen to be religious, say
0:06:54 they’re Christian, they look at this and at first it challenges their religious framework.
0:06:59 But then what they do, I noticed within a few months, sometimes a year, they reinterpret
0:07:05 their own religion.
0:07:06 They start to read the event back into their religion.
0:07:11 So then you get the idea of like Ezekiel’s wheel was a UFO or what happened to Mary when
0:07:16 Gabriel came and announced that she was pregnant, you know, that was a UFO type event and things
0:07:22 like that.
0:07:24 Muslims were doing this, Catholics were doing this, Baptists were doing this, atheists were
0:07:29 doing this, right?
0:07:30 So I begin to see this as a non-regional form of religion.
0:07:35 I may end up repeating some version of this refrain several times in this conversation,
0:07:42 but I just don’t know what I believe with so much of this.
0:07:48 One thing that’s pretty consistent with so many people who report these experiences is
0:07:54 that there’s this psychic dimension, you know, people report having intuitions, experiencing
0:08:00 bizarre synchronicities, visions before and after the encounter, and they seem to believe
0:08:07 that these beings or these intelligences are able to communicate with them telepathically,
0:08:15 you know, that these things, whatever they are, are interdimensional, you know, they’re
0:08:20 here and not here, or they’ve always been here, just outside of space-time.
0:08:24 And I sound like I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs just describing all of that.
0:08:29 I don’t even know what half those words mean, but that’s accurate, right?
0:08:33 Yes.
0:08:34 So you have to understand that that’s not actually very new.
0:08:38 Maybe the framework of science and kind of outside space-time is new.
0:08:43 But what struck me when I began this study is, first of all, every religious tradition
0:08:47 that I study, practitioners talk to me about synchronicities, meaningful synchronicities.
0:08:53 So they could be Catholic, and they say, “I was converted because something happened,
0:08:58 and it was obviously meant to be because it was so coincidental, it was improbable.”
0:09:03 So when I talk to people who are experiencers, people who experience UFO events, they have
0:09:08 the same language.
0:09:09 So I suggest that synchronicity or these meaningful coincidences, this is the engine of spiritual
0:09:16 belief.
0:09:17 It’s not just within the UFO community that people are experiencing their religiosity as
0:09:23 this moment.
0:09:25 About these beings that seem to have telepathic abilities and people experiencing telepathy
0:09:32 with them.
0:09:33 You see this in the history of religions.
0:09:37 When a person meets an angel, an angel usually doesn’t move their mouth when they’re talking
0:09:40 to a person.
0:09:41 They just beam thoughts that these people understand.
0:09:44 You do have very, very similar patterns within the historical religions.
0:09:50 You say that the UFO event is like a door that opens a person to a non-ordinary world.
0:10:00 What does that mean exactly?
0:10:02 It sounds like something you’d say about psychedelics.
0:10:05 Yes, it does.
0:10:07 I think that when a person experiences the UFO, this is just from the data that I’ve
0:10:13 seen, something shifts in them.
0:10:17 This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen to many people.
0:10:20 I think they don’t take life for granted.
0:10:24 They don’t see it in the same way as they saw it.
0:10:26 They don’t make the same assumptions.
0:10:28 And because of that, they see it differently.
0:10:32 So when people tell you that they’ve encountered aliens or had been visited by angels in their
0:10:40 dreams or any of these sorts of accounts, do you believe them?
0:10:45 Or do they put that differently?
0:10:46 Maybe that’s the wrong question.
0:10:48 Do you believe that they believe what they’re saying?
0:10:51 I definitely do.
0:10:53 So I believe that they believe it, but that doesn’t commit me to believe that it happened.
0:10:58 And I’ll give you an example.
0:10:59 Ashuna Vasan Ramanujan is that very famous mathematician in the early 20th centuries
0:11:04 from India, and he was a genius, and he believed these math calculations were whispered in
0:11:11 his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region.
0:11:15 I think she was a version of Lakshmi.
0:11:17 So okay, when I start to look at that, there’s this story that gets repeated.
0:11:22 And so am I committed to believe that it was Lakshmi that gave Ramanujan that?
0:11:28 No, I’m not.
0:11:29 But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that
0:11:34 they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse.
0:11:41 Some people say it was an angel that gave it to them.
0:11:43 Let’s study the process of it, and we leave aside that question of does it actually objectively
0:11:49 exist?
0:11:50 Because there are a lot of things that you’ll see that appear to be unbelievable.
0:11:53 And you’ll say, “That’s unbelievable.”
0:11:56 Because if I was a scientist, my mind would be shattered, I think, if I started to get
0:12:00 into this data.
0:12:01 But as a person who studies religion, we’re already studying things that people believe,
0:12:06 but for which we have no evidence of.
0:12:08 Of all the interviews you’ve done with people in this world, all the stories you’ve read
0:12:14 about, all the stories you’ve heard, what is the most mind-blowing thing you’ve encountered?
0:12:22 What is the most holy shit revelation or anecdote you’ve seen or heard?
0:12:28 I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying
0:12:34 and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face.
0:12:39 And then he started to see this person in crowds.
0:12:42 He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldn’t tell anybody because he noticed that
0:12:50 other people didn’t see that.
0:12:52 And he also had burns, like his eyes started to hurt.
0:12:57 I asked a scientist about that and said, “What’s this effect?”
0:13:01 And he said it was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.
0:13:06 So that was pretty weird.
0:13:09 I wouldn’t want that to happen to me.
0:13:12 I don’t think I’d sign him for that either.
0:13:15 Some of these stories or these characters you profile in the book, I mean, it is just
0:13:20 extraordinary that the vividness and some of the consistencies across these accounts,
0:13:26 you know, like there’s some part of me that cannot dismiss the thousands of testimonies
0:13:31 of serious people and it’s hard to believe there’s nothing to see here.
0:13:35 I just don’t know how much there is to actually see, but I don’t think it’s nothing.
0:13:40 Well, I agree with you.
0:13:41 I mean, I started out as a complete non-believer and even though I’m not supposed to be, I
0:13:48 actually was.
0:13:49 Then when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford,
0:13:56 and there were so many of them, and I was shocked.
0:14:00 I was absolutely shocked.
0:14:02 And that shock lasted for a couple of years.
0:14:04 You know, I’ve been studying this now for about 14 years, so that’s a long time.
0:14:08 I actually believe these people.
0:14:11 I also believe that there’s a there there, but I don’t know what it is.
0:14:16 And so it’s definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as the,
0:14:22 you know, what people are talking about today.
0:14:25 So what’s the there there?
0:14:26 No, I don’t know that.
0:14:27 Oh, come on.
0:14:28 So we’re not there.
0:14:30 We can only say that these people are having these experiences.
0:14:33 Most of these people will not come out and say that they are because of their jobs.
0:14:38 And you know, there’s still a stigma regardless of what happened with the New York Times, you
0:14:42 know, coming out and talking about it.
0:14:44 There’s still a stigma, and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly.
0:14:49 And I’m not going to disbelieve them because I’ve met so many now, thousands of people
0:14:54 who are credible witnesses.
0:14:57 And the patterns are so similar, too, that it leads me to then say, OK, you know, I am
0:15:02 no longer that disbeliever.
0:15:04 But then I’m I don’t know what it is either.
0:15:07 And that’s where we have to keep being credulous, you know, like, OK, we know that these people
0:15:11 are having these experiences, we’re not going to stigmatize them like, you know, what happened,
0:15:17 you know, 10 years ago.
0:15:19 But we don’t I don’t honestly can’t say that we know where we’re at.
0:15:22 Yeah.
0:15:23 You know, and again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my
0:15:28 own ambivalence, you know, the will to believe the extraordinary is strong for sure.
0:15:34 But so is the will to hold on to our current worldview, because letting go of that means
0:15:40 letting go of almost everything we take to be true.
0:15:43 And that’s scary.
0:15:44 So there are forces pulling in both directions here in the direction of belief and in the
0:15:48 direction of disbelief.
0:15:51 And I think, I don’t know, maybe the only sensible position, at least at this moment
0:15:56 is agnosticism on this, just openness to the evidence, but, you know, remaining inconclusive.
0:16:03 Yeah, I do think that I want to also push back on a little bit of what you say about,
0:16:09 you know, the will to believe.
0:16:11 It seems like most people don’t want to see like that pilot didn’t want that experience.
0:16:17 He didn’t want to believe it.
0:16:19 You know, if you’re just going about your daily life and you have a pretty okay life,
0:16:24 you know, it’s not like you’re looking for a UFO and you want to see it.
0:16:29 And then all of a sudden it plagues you by appearing, you know, daily in the clouds almost
0:16:35 like mocking you like who would want that experience.
0:16:38 This is also the case with people who say see angels or see souls from purgatory in
0:16:43 the 1600s or 1700s.
0:16:46 They weren’t actually looking for that.
0:16:47 So, you know, I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory and, you know,
0:16:52 it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent.
0:16:58 And she was terrified.
0:16:59 And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept her story.
0:17:04 And finally the mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough, she saw the same thing.
0:17:09 And so they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent
0:17:13 prayed for weeks to get rid of it and it finally disappeared.
0:17:18 I think the skeptic in me will think the will to believe is so strong in the human mind
0:17:24 and we can convince ourselves of almost anything.
0:17:27 And I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they’re telling
0:17:32 you to be true.
0:17:33 Because you were saying that doesn’t mean they’re true or it doesn’t mean that they’re
0:17:36 reliably true.
0:17:37 You know, so there’s that guy you talked to who moved his family out of LA to live in
0:17:41 some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so, right?
0:17:47 Like that could just be the hallucinations of a confused person.
0:17:50 In fact, I’m pretty confident that it is, you know, so when you hear stories like that,
0:17:56 what’s your reaction?
0:17:59 I mean, what did the pilgrims do, you know, or what did people who had visions and thought
0:18:05 that they needed to leave Egypt or, you know, go someplace, you know, because a God told
0:18:10 them to or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this.
0:18:15 This is how I see that type of thing.
0:18:16 I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years
0:18:23 really.
0:18:24 So it’s a religious impulse.
0:18:26 That’s how I see it.
0:18:27 Well, for all the utility of science, it has gradually destroyed a lot of the spaces for
0:18:36 mystery in human life.
0:18:38 And to be clear, I think that’s a more than fair price to pay for the benefits of science,
0:18:43 you know.
0:18:44 I don’t want to live in the Bronze Age.
0:18:45 I don’t think anybody does.
0:18:47 But there does remain this yearning for the unknown, for genuine awe.
0:18:53 I mean, I think I’m probably like a lot of people in that the closest thing I’ve had
0:18:58 to a religious experience is an extremely heavy dose of psychedelics.
0:19:04 And I’ll just say that on the other side of that, I was much less certain of what I thought
0:19:09 I knew and all that stuff I had heard about, you know, some kind of higher consciousness,
0:19:15 which always sounded like pure New Age dribble to me suddenly felt like a real possibility.
0:19:21 I mean, that’s the only way I can relate to the stories you described in this book, because
0:19:24 I can’t quite go full alien yet.
0:19:28 I’m going to need more evidence.
0:19:30 I would push back on the idea that science has gotten rid of the mystery of life.
0:19:37 The more I learn about science and the more scientists I meet, I mean, quantum theory
0:19:42 is pretty weird.
0:19:43 So once we start to study the universe, I’ve met a lot of astrophysicists.
0:19:49 And what they’re doing is mind blowing the kinds of things like black holes that they’re
0:19:54 studying, the event horizon, I mean, that’s a very strange thing right there, right?
0:20:00 So it’s not necessarily that the more scientific we are, the less of a mystery life is.
0:20:08 I think the more scientific we are and the more we delve into the science, I think it’s
0:20:13 much more mind blowing to us.
0:20:15 That’s a very good point.
0:20:18 The destruction of mystery as such is not really what I’m thinking about.
0:20:23 And if it was, I was just wrong.
0:20:26 I mean, if the images from the Hubble telescope don’t invoke mystery and awe, nothing does.
0:20:33 I think what I mean is that religion and mythology were really our first attempts as a species
0:20:39 to make sense of the world.
0:20:41 And science has undermined them in various ways, which has created a lot of tension to
0:20:47 say the least.
0:20:48 But the mystery is still there.
0:20:50 The awe is still there.
0:20:53 Maybe we just need new language, new myths, new stories.
0:20:57 Yeah, I think that the instruments have changed.
0:21:00 So we’ve developed instruments to allow us to go to Mars and see what’s there and to
0:21:07 look at the strange ways that space, time bends and works and works in different places.
0:21:14 And I think that this is awe-inspiring, frankly.
0:21:17 I think it’s really amazing.
0:21:19 And it’s just think about people a thousand years ago and the ways in which they talked
0:21:25 about the mystery, they try to explain it.
0:21:28 So I think that it’s always the case that we’re going to try to explain the mystery
0:21:33 to ourselves.
0:21:34 But I think that the more instruments we have in order to study the mystery, the weirder
0:21:39 it becomes, frankly.
0:21:41 When we get back from the break, we’ll talk about what extraterrestrial life would even
0:21:55 look like.
0:21:57 Stay with us.
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0:25:45 What is the best evidence you’ve encountered?
0:26:02 It doesn’t even necessarily have to be alien life, but just evidence of something that
0:26:06 you would call supernatural.
0:26:09 This is the evidence that we have first throughout the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s of radar blips
0:26:20 and things that are on radar that go on and off that we can see and then in that area,
0:26:27 people will have seen what they then called reported in a UFO, people who didn’t even
0:26:31 know each other.
0:26:32 So it’s these observational things with accompanying evidence of radar reports.
0:26:37 I don’t know what those are.
0:26:39 Those could very well be advanced technology, but I have had people tell me, “This is not
0:26:44 our technology, and these are people that are supposed to know.”
0:26:47 When we see these things with those types of instruments, we also have people on the
0:26:51 ground saying, “Oh, I saw a UFO,” and this is well recorded.
0:26:55 Why if aliens are real and they have visited in some form or another, why would they deliberately
0:27:03 choose to reveal themselves to so few people instead of to everyone?
0:27:07 So as to remove all doubt, I mean, presumably if they’re advanced enough to get here or
0:27:10 communicate with us, they could observe us without being detected.
0:27:16 So why do it in this way?
0:27:17 If you have an education in the historical religions, you can see that angels work that
0:27:22 way too.
0:27:23 So they actually intervene in human history, apparently, for those who believe in them,
0:27:29 but they don’t do so on the White House lawn, right?
0:27:32 They’re not like, “Hey, God exists,” you know, and you need to believe in God.
0:27:36 They only do it to certain people, and then those people then tell others and others believe
0:27:41 or disbelieve.
0:27:42 So you asked me before, you know, “How is this like a religion?”
0:27:44 Well, this is how it’s like a religion.
0:27:47 There are things that are based on faith.
0:27:49 They’re not based on something that we can replicate and show like in a laboratory.
0:27:56 One thing that’s clear reading this book is that there is a huge gap between the representations
0:28:05 of UFOs and aliens in the press and in popular culture, and the first person accounts of
0:28:15 these encounters.
0:28:16 Do you find that disconnect to be maybe the biggest obstacle to having a serious public
0:28:23 discussion about what the hell is happening here or what the hell has happened?
0:28:29 This is something that a lot of people don’t understand.
0:28:32 Even you see religious events from the past, that same disconnect is at play.
0:28:39 So when people back in that time period saw something, they didn’t understand what it
0:28:45 was.
0:28:46 So they had to look through their own cultural narratives in order to interpret it.
0:28:53 And this moment was a moment of confusion, and then this confused the people around them.
0:28:59 They said, “I saw this, I don’t know what it was, help me out ’cause it’s freaky,”
0:29:05 and then the people around them were concerned and said, “This seems like it could be this
0:29:09 type of angel,” or something like that.
0:29:11 Well, this happens with modern day UFO reports as well.
0:29:15 What people see is definitely not what you see in independent stay and that type of thing,
0:29:23 but we have to represent it.
0:29:25 So conventions then arise, right?
0:29:28 And now we have this idea of the saucer type thing, this UFO.
0:29:33 Reading your book and listening to you now, I kept thinking about that movie Arrival.
0:29:36 I’m sure you’ve seen it.
0:29:37 I love that movie.
0:29:39 For me, the smartest thing about that movie was its focus on the limits and possibilities
0:29:46 of language and communication and how that might play out in the event of an encounter
0:29:52 like that.
0:29:54 But was that story, that scenario, the kind of thing the scientists in this book are thinking
0:30:01 about?
0:30:02 I do think so.
0:30:03 When you do learn a different language, remember what happens to the main character in Arrival
0:30:07 is that the way she thinks changes, the way she perceives time changes, and this is definitely
0:30:14 what I see with people who do this kind of work is that their perspective changes the
0:30:20 way they think even changes.
0:30:22 In what way?
0:30:23 Okay.
0:30:24 So there’s a researcher named Jacques Vallée, and he’s been studying UFOs for his whole
0:30:29 life and now he’s in his 80s.
0:30:31 He talks about post-contact effects.
0:30:35 So when people have experiences of things related to UFOs or something associated with
0:30:40 UFOs, that they have effects.
0:30:42 And one of the effects is that they perceive things like coincidences more often, and they
0:30:48 also perceive time differently.
0:30:51 So think about what a coincidence is.
0:30:54 Carl Jung said that it’s something that has to do with a moment in time that seems as
0:30:58 if you’ve been there before, right?
0:31:00 Has this kind of deja vu experience where something that you’re thinking about appears
0:31:05 in your experience of time and also your experience.
0:31:09 So these kinds of effects happen, and this is something that was related in Arrival as
0:31:15 well.
0:31:16 So yeah, so these kinds of effects happen to people.
0:31:18 But I really dig about this book, and I really enjoyed your first book as well, American
0:31:23 Cosmic, but this one is especially interesting to me because it extends this conversation
0:31:28 about UFOs and aliens to a broader exploration of all the possibilities of non-human intelligence,
0:31:40 both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
0:31:43 And what it would mean to take that seriously, and it turns out a lot of scientists have
0:31:50 been quietly taking this seriously, and I had never heard of this group called the Order
0:31:56 of the Dolphin, which apparently included Carl Sagan, a hero of mine, and they were researching
0:32:03 ways to communicate with dolphins, but was the real aim there to discover ways to potentially
0:32:11 communicate with extraterrestrial life in the event of a real-world encounter?
0:32:16 Absolutely.
0:32:17 I think that what they were doing, and by the way, I found out about this group when
0:32:21 I was at the Vatican, has an observatory, and the observatory is in Castle Gandalfo
0:32:29 in Italy, right outside of Rome, and it’s next to this volcanic lake.
0:32:34 It’s really a beautiful place, and they have an archive, so everything space-related goes
0:32:39 to that archive, so I was in that archive, and I kept coming across references to the
0:32:45 Order of the Dolphin, and I was like, “Who are these people?
0:32:48 What were they doing?”
0:32:50 And so they were, of course, Carl Sagan was fascinated with the possibility of extraterrestrial
0:32:56 conversation should that happen.
0:32:59 They were basically trying to have a conversation with another species here on Earth to kind
0:33:04 of get us prepared, but also because wouldn’t that be a great thing to do?
0:33:08 Then scientists right now are utilizing different types of AI in order to interface with different
0:33:14 species like dolphins or whales.
0:33:16 Well, you mentioned AI.
0:33:18 If and when AI becomes truly sentient or when AGI, as they call it, emerges, if it emerges,
0:33:25 that would be an utterly alien form of intelligence.
0:33:29 Would that be much different from the appearance of aliens on Earth?
0:33:33 Well, you see, this is where I think it’s really interesting, so two people of interest
0:33:37 to me here in terms of how they view this.
0:33:40 One of them, he’s former NASA historian, but he was a NASA historian and an astronomer
0:33:44 for NASA for 40-plus years, and his name is Steven Dick.
0:33:49 He, more than 20 years ago, had postulated that if we meet ET, it’s going to be a form
0:33:57 of technology beyond AI to a different form of biotechnological evolution.
0:34:04 That’s why we can’t see it because we’re looking for things that look like us, really, but why
0:34:08 would we be doing that?
0:34:10 Well, that’s what I love about this book.
0:34:12 It gets you to think less and less about little green men and all that shit that we’ve
0:34:18 inhaled through TVs and movies and that kind of thing, and just think more broadly about
0:34:24 non-human intelligences, whatever that may be, and that’s a different way to think about
0:34:29 it.
0:34:30 But the idea of technology as its own kind of alien life is really interesting to me.
0:34:35 I haven’t thought all that much about it, but it’s interesting.
0:34:38 Yeah.
0:34:39 A lot of the people who I know who have been doing AI for 20-plus years, this is what they
0:34:45 think that whatever it is that we’re seeing in the sky is most like a form of AI, and
0:34:51 it is an involved consciousness.
0:35:02 After one more short break, we get into the recent congressional hearings that might hint
0:35:07 at alien life or something like that.
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0:38:23 This is from your last book, I believe, but you were brought to an alleged crash site
0:38:29 in New Mexico years ago.
0:38:31 You were given rare access, and you encountered a material that did not appear to be of this
0:38:39 world.
0:38:40 Let’s put it that way.
0:38:41 Allegedly, yes.
0:38:43 So that is how I opened the book.
0:38:44 So I was working with scientists, and one of them knew that I didn’t believe at all.
0:38:50 He said, “I think that you think that people are seeing this in their imagination, but
0:38:53 I want to take you to a place where, you know, I have some evidence, some physical evidence.”
0:38:59 And so I said, “Okay.
0:39:00 Where’s that?”
0:39:01 And he goes, “Well, it’s in New Mexico, and it’s a crash site.”
0:39:03 Now, this is, of course, a long time ago before any talk of crash sites.
0:39:08 I mean, I thought that he was crazy.
0:39:10 Honestly, I thought, “Okay, well, he’s really smart, and he has a really amazing job, and
0:39:16 you know, he seems like a normal person, but I thought maybe I was being given misinformation.”
0:39:22 There was definitely stuff out there, and it looked like it had been the site of some
0:39:28 very important thing that happened, because you could tell that, you know, there was rubble
0:39:33 everywhere and, you know, and it was really old.
0:39:37 So I wasn’t buying into the Roswell mythology, but I was saying that this is part of the
0:39:43 Roswell mythology, and, you know, I’m here where people believe in this, and I’m just
0:39:50 hoping that through my book, I’m not, like, reinforcing that belief, but that ship has
0:39:56 sailed.
0:39:57 You know, that’s already been done.
0:40:00 But it was at the time when The New York Times came out and said that there were these programs,
0:40:04 and they, in fact, were crash retrieval programs.
0:40:06 So inadvertently, I was doing this research, and this is what I found.
0:40:11 It seemed like, you know, such a coincidence, you could say, that it came out right after
0:40:17 The New York Times stories came out, but that was purely unintentional.
0:40:22 When those times stories came out, and, you know, obviously, you know, the Pentagon released
0:40:27 those Navy videos, there was a lot of speculation that this, there has to be some reason for
0:40:35 this.
0:40:36 Why would they do it?
0:40:37 And that perhaps it was, you know, part of some active disinformation campaign to muddy
0:40:43 the waters for whatever reason.
0:40:46 Is there something to that, in your opinion?
0:40:49 There could possibly be something to that.
0:40:51 My own work is completely uninvolved with that, whatever is happening in Congress.
0:40:58 I did a historical comparison between, you know, ascent narratives from history, Catholic
0:41:03 history in particular, and modern-day UFO reports.
0:41:07 I stumbled upon a group that was studying UFOs.
0:41:12 I wrote about that group.
0:41:14 I believe that there is a continuation of experiences that people have that you can
0:41:21 identify in the historical record for the various reasons that I’ve stated.
0:41:27 So I guess I feel like I’m in a parallel research tradition to whatever is happening
0:41:33 with the government right now.
0:41:34 Do you think that those, whatever that was in those videos was an actual, I won’t say
0:41:42 alien craft, but crafts that defied the laws of physics as we understand them in the way
0:41:47 that they appear to on the videos?
0:41:49 I think we have to be really careful about what we see these days because of deep fakes
0:41:53 and everything like that.
0:41:54 So I think that being very, very sober with respect to what we conclude about what we
0:42:00 see is the best position to take.
0:42:04 Okay, so I’m just going to give you an anecdote here, if that’s all right, Sean.
0:42:08 So when I was a child, my father had been in the Coast Guard, and he always had this story
0:42:15 that he told in our family about something that stopped the ship he was on.
0:42:20 It was called the bittersweet, and he was the sonar man.
0:42:23 The sonar kept going, and they were able to see something in the ocean, down at the bottom
0:42:28 of the ocean.
0:42:29 It actually stopped their ship, but all the electricity on their ship stopped, and it
0:42:33 was terrifying.
0:42:34 So this was an interesting kind of phenomena, you know, family history type thing.
0:42:39 Well I had forgotten all about it, and then I meet Tim Gallaudet, who is an admiral in
0:42:45 the Navy, and he told me the very same story.
0:42:48 Now he didn’t know that my father had this story as well, and he actually has data about
0:42:53 it.
0:42:54 My dad only had the members of his ship, and you know, it was only testimonial evidence.
0:42:58 So I guess that what we have are credible witnesses, and we do have data.
0:43:05 But I think that when we look at things on the internet and social media, that we should
0:43:10 probably just be like agnostic at this point.
0:43:13 I should probably say that the government has not acknowledged the existence of aliens.
0:43:20 It has simply acknowledged the existence of these unidentified aerial phenomena, if
0:43:26 that’s still the term we’re using.
0:43:28 The name keeps changing, so it’s unidentified anomalous phenomena now, and that’s because,
0:43:33 I know, I know.
0:43:35 That’s because they allow for transmedia, like, you know, some of these things come
0:43:38 out of the ocean, and they’re seen by people in the Navy.
0:43:42 What do you think this conversation around UFOs and aliens looks like in 10, 15 years?
0:43:48 Honestly, I don’t have an answer, because I feel like I couldn’t have predicted what
0:43:51 happened after American Cosmic was published in 2019.
0:43:55 I couldn’t have predicted that Congress would be talking about this, and I can only say
0:43:59 that I think we’re going to be surprised.
0:44:03 Tell me more.
0:44:04 Well, I was surprised, you know, I thought I had written this book, and you know, I
0:44:08 did the best I could in terms of the field research, and I said, “Look, you know, these
0:44:11 people are studying this, and they’re very well-educated, and they’re affiliated with
0:44:15 our space program.”
0:44:16 And then the New York Times articles came out, and then before I knew it, there was
0:44:21 the Pentagon report that talked about UAP, and the name UAP shifted a couple different
0:44:27 times, and you know, there was a constant conversation in Congress about this, so none
0:44:32 of that I could have predicted.
0:44:34 I’m not even going to ask if the discovery of alien life would be the most significant
0:44:39 event in human history, because it obviously would be, but I do wonder what you think the
0:44:46 most significant implication of that discovery would be.
0:44:49 So for a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in
0:44:54 the world believe in non-human intelligence, because most people are religious.
0:44:58 And so within various different religions, you have different forms of non-human intelligences
0:45:03 that display themselves in different ways to people.
0:45:06 So it’s the people post-enlightenment in the West.
0:45:10 We’re disbelievers in that narrative, so it would be the most shocking event for us.
0:45:16 And the implications is almost like a post-secular society.
0:45:21 What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just
0:45:26 scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity in the grand scheme of
0:45:34 things.
0:45:35 Earth is not the center of the universe.
0:45:37 Humanity is not a special animal with some unique significance.
0:45:42 We’re part of the same historical process as everything else.
0:45:46 And the discovery of the alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible
0:45:50 to deny, that would be the final step.
0:45:56 And the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin and would in a terminal way, I
0:46:01 think, up in our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful
0:46:08 thing in some ways, but would be totally not worth it if the price of that discovery was
0:46:14 aliens destroying us.
0:46:17 Hopefully that doesn’t happen.
0:46:18 Yeah.
0:46:19 That would be a bad scenario.
0:46:20 Again, if you just look at the history on our planet, it’s not a pretty picture when
0:46:27 populations or species collide where there’s a significant power or technological asymmetry.
0:46:34 It tends not to go well for the side.
0:46:36 That’s weaker.
0:46:37 So yeah, that’s the game I don’t want to play.
0:46:40 That’s right.
0:46:41 That’s right.
0:46:42 I agree with you there.
0:46:43 You mentioned earlier that you started out as a typical academic skeptic, and I guess
0:46:48 you’re still agnostic on a lot of this stuff, but maybe I’m just trying to tease out as
0:46:55 much as I can from you, but how has all of this research transformed you?
0:47:02 Not just your worldview, but you as a person, really.
0:47:06 I have to say that it completely changed me.
0:47:08 Like you said, I was a skeptic, and it took a few years to really shake that out of me,
0:47:15 and it took a lot of meeting people like the admirals and the scientists and these people
0:47:21 that I know, and then thinking back on things like the story of my dad and other people
0:47:28 and what they’ve said, and then seeing the historical record as well.
0:47:33 And so this shook me out of the assumptions that I had, and it made me think, okay, well,
0:47:39 I actually don’t know that much about this.
0:47:42 Maybe I should learn.
0:47:44 And so it put me into a space of questioning, and I’ve been in that space ever since.
0:47:49 I don’t know what the threshold would be for you, but what would it take for you to step
0:47:53 off the agnostic ledge and say, yeah, aliens are real?
0:47:57 Is it a spacecraft landing on the White House lawn?
0:48:00 Well, something that was anomalous in 1952 did fly over the White House.
0:48:05 So we do have that, and that’s one of those cases that is still weird.
0:48:12 What would it take for me to say, okay, aliens are a fact and they’re real?
0:48:17 If they landed and we met them and they would say, okay, we’d like to give you this really
0:48:21 awesome technology and your problems are going to be erased.
0:48:24 And I mean, that’s probably what it would take.
0:48:27 Now I would be very suspicious of them if they did that.
0:48:30 Why?
0:48:31 Probably because I’ve seen too many X-files and twilight zones.
0:48:39 This stuff is so crazy, Diane.
0:48:41 Again, I don’t know what I believe, I really don’t, other than it feels like a cop-out,
0:48:48 but I don’t know what else to say other than I’m intrigued, but I need more evidence.
0:48:52 I agree.
0:48:53 And I think what’s really interesting is that we don’t have to be convinced to be
0:48:57 completely interested.
0:48:59 And we’re going to find out more as time goes on.
0:49:02 Well, I’ve read your last two books and I enjoyed the hell out of them.
0:49:06 And I’m just, I just think it’s incredibly cool that you stumbled into this space as
0:49:11 a scholar and you did it really at the perfect time.
0:49:15 And now you’ve kind of become one of the point people for UFO discourse.
0:49:20 So congratulations.
0:49:21 I don’t know.
0:49:22 I agree with you, I’ve become that person, but it wasn’t intentional at all.
0:49:28 At this point, even if you want to do something else, I’m not sure the world’s going to let
0:49:31 you.
0:49:32 No, I don’t think so.
0:49:33 Once again, the book is called Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences.
0:49:39 I read it.
0:49:40 It is really terrific.
0:49:41 I cannot recommend it enough.
0:49:43 Diana Posuka, thanks so much for doing this.
0:49:45 Oh yeah.
0:49:46 Thank you so much.
0:49:47 Thank you so much for this conversation.
0:49:53 All right, aliens, am I right?
0:50:02 I don’t know about you.
0:50:04 I love this conversation.
0:50:05 I love aliens.
0:50:06 I love UFOs.
0:50:07 I love all of it.
0:50:09 And I think what I loved most about this particular conversation with Diana is that I think she
0:50:14 has the almost perfect balance between being open-minded and skeptical, between genuine
0:50:21 curiosity and also scholarly seriousness.
0:50:26 And I think that’s the right orientation to all this, because it is kind of weird.
0:50:30 And there is a lot of strange stuff going on.
0:50:33 And I don’t believe much of it, but it’s worth taking seriously.
0:50:37 And she does in a way that doesn’t feel overly credulous.
0:50:42 Let me know what you think.
0:50:43 Thank you.
0:50:44 Thank you.
0:50:45 Bye.
0:50:45
0:50:47 Bye.
0:50:48 This episode was produced by John Ehrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick
0:50:54 Boyd, and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
0:50:57 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:51:00 Listen and subscribe.
0:51:02 The Gray Area is part of Vox, which doesn’t have a paywall.
0:51:06 Help us keep Vox free by going to vox.com/give.
0:51:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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0:01:52 If you’re into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.
0:01:59 Congress is investigating what they call unidentified anomalous phenomena.
0:02:04 The rest of us call them UFOs.
0:02:06 After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there’s something out there.
0:02:11 Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are pressing the Pentagon and other government
0:02:16 agencies for more answers about UFOs.
0:02:19 A Pentagon report is detailing a dramatic increase in UFO sightings.
0:02:24 Back in 2019, The New York Times published an article about reports of UFOs off the
0:02:30 East Coast.
0:02:32 It included several Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded mysterious flying objects.
0:02:44 If you haven’t seen the videos, it’s worth checking out.
0:02:48 They are strange.
0:02:57 I still haven’t seen any evidence that actual aliens were involved, and that remains the
0:03:02 least plausible explanation, in my opinion.
0:03:07 But the story itself, that was a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien
0:03:15 life.
0:03:17 The mere acknowledgement by the government that these objects were real was unprecedented.
0:03:28 And the possibility that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions.
0:03:36 How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding
0:03:42 of our place in it?
0:03:44 And what if aliens are real, but so unlike anything we can imagine, that we can’t even
0:03:50 begin to understand the implications?
0:03:55 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:04:07 Today’s guest is Diana Posuka.
0:04:10 She’s a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and
0:04:14 the author of two books on this topic.
0:04:17 Her latest is called Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligency.
0:04:24 Posuka has been studying UFO culture for roughly a decade now, and I think she’s done the
0:04:29 most compelling work in this space.
0:04:32 And that’s because it isn’t really about UFOs and aliens, at least not directly.
0:04:39 This new book dives more deeply into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien
0:04:44 life.
0:04:46 And those experiences, I assure you, are so much weirder than you think.
0:04:51 They’re also, as we discuss here, profoundly religious in their own way.
0:04:58 Reading it, I kept coming back to that famous Werner Heisenberg quote.
0:05:03 Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
0:05:15 Diana Posuka, welcome to the show.
0:05:18 Well thanks for having me on the show.
0:05:20 Well Diana, it’s a hell of a time to be on the UFO beat.
0:05:26 Do you think we’ve reached escape velocity on this topic, and this is just going to be
0:05:31 part of the public conversation?
0:05:33 Moving forward?
0:05:34 Absolutely.
0:05:35 Well, so when you write in this book that UFO events are a spiritual reality, what does
0:05:43 that really mean?
0:05:45 UFO events are transformative realities, not necessarily good.
0:05:51 Religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good.
0:05:55 So I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs, sometimes with what they called
0:06:01 beings associated with UFOs, and they were having transformative experiences, and it
0:06:07 sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.
0:06:13 I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that
0:06:17 there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record.
0:06:22 There were no planes, there were no rockets back then, so people were seeing things in
0:06:25 the sky, and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could
0:06:31 be souls from purgatory, or they could be houses of saints and things like that that
0:06:36 are up in the sky.
0:06:37 And so when I say that we’re dealing with something that I would call not necessarily
0:06:42 a new religion, I would call it a new form of religion, a new form of spirituality, because
0:06:49 a lot of people, when they have these events, and say they happen to be religious, say
0:06:54 they’re Christian, they look at this and at first it challenges their religious framework.
0:06:59 But then what they do, I noticed within a few months, sometimes a year, they reinterpret
0:07:05 their own religion.
0:07:06 They start to read the event back into their religion.
0:07:11 So then you get the idea of like Ezekiel’s wheel was a UFO or what happened to Mary when
0:07:16 Gabriel came and announced that she was pregnant, you know, that was a UFO type event and things
0:07:22 like that.
0:07:24 Muslims were doing this, Catholics were doing this, Baptists were doing this, atheists were
0:07:29 doing this, right?
0:07:30 So I begin to see this as a non-regional form of religion.
0:07:35 I may end up repeating some version of this refrain several times in this conversation,
0:07:42 but I just don’t know what I believe with so much of this.
0:07:48 One thing that’s pretty consistent with so many people who report these experiences is
0:07:54 that there’s this psychic dimension, you know, people report having intuitions, experiencing
0:08:00 bizarre synchronicities, visions before and after the encounter, and they seem to believe
0:08:07 that these beings or these intelligences are able to communicate with them telepathically,
0:08:15 you know, that these things, whatever they are, are interdimensional, you know, they’re
0:08:20 here and not here, or they’ve always been here, just outside of space-time.
0:08:24 And I sound like I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs just describing all of that.
0:08:29 I don’t even know what half those words mean, but that’s accurate, right?
0:08:33 Yes.
0:08:34 So you have to understand that that’s not actually very new.
0:08:38 Maybe the framework of science and kind of outside space-time is new.
0:08:43 But what struck me when I began this study is, first of all, every religious tradition
0:08:47 that I study, practitioners talk to me about synchronicities, meaningful synchronicities.
0:08:53 So they could be Catholic, and they say, “I was converted because something happened,
0:08:58 and it was obviously meant to be because it was so coincidental, it was improbable.”
0:09:03 So when I talk to people who are experiencers, people who experience UFO events, they have
0:09:08 the same language.
0:09:09 So I suggest that synchronicity or these meaningful coincidences, this is the engine of spiritual
0:09:16 belief.
0:09:17 It’s not just within the UFO community that people are experiencing their religiosity as
0:09:23 this moment.
0:09:25 About these beings that seem to have telepathic abilities and people experiencing telepathy
0:09:32 with them.
0:09:33 You see this in the history of religions.
0:09:37 When a person meets an angel, an angel usually doesn’t move their mouth when they’re talking
0:09:40 to a person.
0:09:41 They just beam thoughts that these people understand.
0:09:44 You do have very, very similar patterns within the historical religions.
0:09:50 You say that the UFO event is like a door that opens a person to a non-ordinary world.
0:10:00 What does that mean exactly?
0:10:02 It sounds like something you’d say about psychedelics.
0:10:05 Yes, it does.
0:10:07 I think that when a person experiences the UFO, this is just from the data that I’ve
0:10:13 seen, something shifts in them.
0:10:17 This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen to many people.
0:10:20 I think they don’t take life for granted.
0:10:24 They don’t see it in the same way as they saw it.
0:10:26 They don’t make the same assumptions.
0:10:28 And because of that, they see it differently.
0:10:32 So when people tell you that they’ve encountered aliens or had been visited by angels in their
0:10:40 dreams or any of these sorts of accounts, do you believe them?
0:10:45 Or do they put that differently?
0:10:46 Maybe that’s the wrong question.
0:10:48 Do you believe that they believe what they’re saying?
0:10:51 I definitely do.
0:10:53 So I believe that they believe it, but that doesn’t commit me to believe that it happened.
0:10:58 And I’ll give you an example.
0:10:59 Ashuna Vasan Ramanujan is that very famous mathematician in the early 20th centuries
0:11:04 from India, and he was a genius, and he believed these math calculations were whispered in
0:11:11 his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region.
0:11:15 I think she was a version of Lakshmi.
0:11:17 So okay, when I start to look at that, there’s this story that gets repeated.
0:11:22 And so am I committed to believe that it was Lakshmi that gave Ramanujan that?
0:11:28 No, I’m not.
0:11:29 But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that
0:11:34 they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse.
0:11:41 Some people say it was an angel that gave it to them.
0:11:43 Let’s study the process of it, and we leave aside that question of does it actually objectively
0:11:49 exist?
0:11:50 Because there are a lot of things that you’ll see that appear to be unbelievable.
0:11:53 And you’ll say, “That’s unbelievable.”
0:11:56 Because if I was a scientist, my mind would be shattered, I think, if I started to get
0:12:00 into this data.
0:12:01 But as a person who studies religion, we’re already studying things that people believe,
0:12:06 but for which we have no evidence of.
0:12:08 Of all the interviews you’ve done with people in this world, all the stories you’ve read
0:12:14 about, all the stories you’ve heard, what is the most mind-blowing thing you’ve encountered?
0:12:22 What is the most holy shit revelation or anecdote you’ve seen or heard?
0:12:28 I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying
0:12:34 and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face.
0:12:39 And then he started to see this person in crowds.
0:12:42 He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldn’t tell anybody because he noticed that
0:12:50 other people didn’t see that.
0:12:52 And he also had burns, like his eyes started to hurt.
0:12:57 I asked a scientist about that and said, “What’s this effect?”
0:13:01 And he said it was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.
0:13:06 So that was pretty weird.
0:13:09 I wouldn’t want that to happen to me.
0:13:12 I don’t think I’d sign him for that either.
0:13:15 Some of these stories or these characters you profile in the book, I mean, it is just
0:13:20 extraordinary that the vividness and some of the consistencies across these accounts,
0:13:26 you know, like there’s some part of me that cannot dismiss the thousands of testimonies
0:13:31 of serious people and it’s hard to believe there’s nothing to see here.
0:13:35 I just don’t know how much there is to actually see, but I don’t think it’s nothing.
0:13:40 Well, I agree with you.
0:13:41 I mean, I started out as a complete non-believer and even though I’m not supposed to be, I
0:13:48 actually was.
0:13:49 Then when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford,
0:13:56 and there were so many of them, and I was shocked.
0:14:00 I was absolutely shocked.
0:14:02 And that shock lasted for a couple of years.
0:14:04 You know, I’ve been studying this now for about 14 years, so that’s a long time.
0:14:08 I actually believe these people.
0:14:11 I also believe that there’s a there there, but I don’t know what it is.
0:14:16 And so it’s definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as the,
0:14:22 you know, what people are talking about today.
0:14:25 So what’s the there there?
0:14:26 No, I don’t know that.
0:14:27 Oh, come on.
0:14:28 So we’re not there.
0:14:30 We can only say that these people are having these experiences.
0:14:33 Most of these people will not come out and say that they are because of their jobs.
0:14:38 And you know, there’s still a stigma regardless of what happened with the New York Times, you
0:14:42 know, coming out and talking about it.
0:14:44 There’s still a stigma, and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly.
0:14:49 And I’m not going to disbelieve them because I’ve met so many now, thousands of people
0:14:54 who are credible witnesses.
0:14:57 And the patterns are so similar, too, that it leads me to then say, OK, you know, I am
0:15:02 no longer that disbeliever.
0:15:04 But then I’m I don’t know what it is either.
0:15:07 And that’s where we have to keep being credulous, you know, like, OK, we know that these people
0:15:11 are having these experiences, we’re not going to stigmatize them like, you know, what happened,
0:15:17 you know, 10 years ago.
0:15:19 But we don’t I don’t honestly can’t say that we know where we’re at.
0:15:22 Yeah.
0:15:23 You know, and again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my
0:15:28 own ambivalence, you know, the will to believe the extraordinary is strong for sure.
0:15:34 But so is the will to hold on to our current worldview, because letting go of that means
0:15:40 letting go of almost everything we take to be true.
0:15:43 And that’s scary.
0:15:44 So there are forces pulling in both directions here in the direction of belief and in the
0:15:48 direction of disbelief.
0:15:51 And I think, I don’t know, maybe the only sensible position, at least at this moment
0:15:56 is agnosticism on this, just openness to the evidence, but, you know, remaining inconclusive.
0:16:03 Yeah, I do think that I want to also push back on a little bit of what you say about,
0:16:09 you know, the will to believe.
0:16:11 It seems like most people don’t want to see like that pilot didn’t want that experience.
0:16:17 He didn’t want to believe it.
0:16:19 You know, if you’re just going about your daily life and you have a pretty okay life,
0:16:24 you know, it’s not like you’re looking for a UFO and you want to see it.
0:16:29 And then all of a sudden it plagues you by appearing, you know, daily in the clouds almost
0:16:35 like mocking you like who would want that experience.
0:16:38 This is also the case with people who say see angels or see souls from purgatory in
0:16:43 the 1600s or 1700s.
0:16:46 They weren’t actually looking for that.
0:16:47 So, you know, I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory and, you know,
0:16:52 it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent.
0:16:58 And she was terrified.
0:16:59 And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept her story.
0:17:04 And finally the mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough, she saw the same thing.
0:17:09 And so they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent
0:17:13 prayed for weeks to get rid of it and it finally disappeared.
0:17:18 I think the skeptic in me will think the will to believe is so strong in the human mind
0:17:24 and we can convince ourselves of almost anything.
0:17:27 And I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they’re telling
0:17:32 you to be true.
0:17:33 Because you were saying that doesn’t mean they’re true or it doesn’t mean that they’re
0:17:36 reliably true.
0:17:37 You know, so there’s that guy you talked to who moved his family out of LA to live in
0:17:41 some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so, right?
0:17:47 Like that could just be the hallucinations of a confused person.
0:17:50 In fact, I’m pretty confident that it is, you know, so when you hear stories like that,
0:17:56 what’s your reaction?
0:17:59 I mean, what did the pilgrims do, you know, or what did people who had visions and thought
0:18:05 that they needed to leave Egypt or, you know, go someplace, you know, because a God told
0:18:10 them to or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this.
0:18:15 This is how I see that type of thing.
0:18:16 I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years
0:18:23 really.
0:18:24 So it’s a religious impulse.
0:18:26 That’s how I see it.
0:18:27 Well, for all the utility of science, it has gradually destroyed a lot of the spaces for
0:18:36 mystery in human life.
0:18:38 And to be clear, I think that’s a more than fair price to pay for the benefits of science,
0:18:43 you know.
0:18:44 I don’t want to live in the Bronze Age.
0:18:45 I don’t think anybody does.
0:18:47 But there does remain this yearning for the unknown, for genuine awe.
0:18:53 I mean, I think I’m probably like a lot of people in that the closest thing I’ve had
0:18:58 to a religious experience is an extremely heavy dose of psychedelics.
0:19:04 And I’ll just say that on the other side of that, I was much less certain of what I thought
0:19:09 I knew and all that stuff I had heard about, you know, some kind of higher consciousness,
0:19:15 which always sounded like pure New Age dribble to me suddenly felt like a real possibility.
0:19:21 I mean, that’s the only way I can relate to the stories you described in this book, because
0:19:24 I can’t quite go full alien yet.
0:19:28 I’m going to need more evidence.
0:19:30 I would push back on the idea that science has gotten rid of the mystery of life.
0:19:37 The more I learn about science and the more scientists I meet, I mean, quantum theory
0:19:42 is pretty weird.
0:19:43 So once we start to study the universe, I’ve met a lot of astrophysicists.
0:19:49 And what they’re doing is mind blowing the kinds of things like black holes that they’re
0:19:54 studying, the event horizon, I mean, that’s a very strange thing right there, right?
0:20:00 So it’s not necessarily that the more scientific we are, the less of a mystery life is.
0:20:08 I think the more scientific we are and the more we delve into the science, I think it’s
0:20:13 much more mind blowing to us.
0:20:15 That’s a very good point.
0:20:18 The destruction of mystery as such is not really what I’m thinking about.
0:20:23 And if it was, I was just wrong.
0:20:26 I mean, if the images from the Hubble telescope don’t invoke mystery and awe, nothing does.
0:20:33 I think what I mean is that religion and mythology were really our first attempts as a species
0:20:39 to make sense of the world.
0:20:41 And science has undermined them in various ways, which has created a lot of tension to
0:20:47 say the least.
0:20:48 But the mystery is still there.
0:20:50 The awe is still there.
0:20:53 Maybe we just need new language, new myths, new stories.
0:20:57 Yeah, I think that the instruments have changed.
0:21:00 So we’ve developed instruments to allow us to go to Mars and see what’s there and to
0:21:07 look at the strange ways that space, time bends and works and works in different places.
0:21:14 And I think that this is awe-inspiring, frankly.
0:21:17 I think it’s really amazing.
0:21:19 And it’s just think about people a thousand years ago and the ways in which they talked
0:21:25 about the mystery, they try to explain it.
0:21:28 So I think that it’s always the case that we’re going to try to explain the mystery
0:21:33 to ourselves.
0:21:34 But I think that the more instruments we have in order to study the mystery, the weirder
0:21:39 it becomes, frankly.
0:21:41 When we get back from the break, we’ll talk about what extraterrestrial life would even
0:21:55 look like.
0:21:57 Stay with us.
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0:25:45 What is the best evidence you’ve encountered?
0:26:02 It doesn’t even necessarily have to be alien life, but just evidence of something that
0:26:06 you would call supernatural.
0:26:09 This is the evidence that we have first throughout the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s of radar blips
0:26:20 and things that are on radar that go on and off that we can see and then in that area,
0:26:27 people will have seen what they then called reported in a UFO, people who didn’t even
0:26:31 know each other.
0:26:32 So it’s these observational things with accompanying evidence of radar reports.
0:26:37 I don’t know what those are.
0:26:39 Those could very well be advanced technology, but I have had people tell me, “This is not
0:26:44 our technology, and these are people that are supposed to know.”
0:26:47 When we see these things with those types of instruments, we also have people on the
0:26:51 ground saying, “Oh, I saw a UFO,” and this is well recorded.
0:26:55 Why if aliens are real and they have visited in some form or another, why would they deliberately
0:27:03 choose to reveal themselves to so few people instead of to everyone?
0:27:07 So as to remove all doubt, I mean, presumably if they’re advanced enough to get here or
0:27:10 communicate with us, they could observe us without being detected.
0:27:16 So why do it in this way?
0:27:17 If you have an education in the historical religions, you can see that angels work that
0:27:22 way too.
0:27:23 So they actually intervene in human history, apparently, for those who believe in them,
0:27:29 but they don’t do so on the White House lawn, right?
0:27:32 They’re not like, “Hey, God exists,” you know, and you need to believe in God.
0:27:36 They only do it to certain people, and then those people then tell others and others believe
0:27:41 or disbelieve.
0:27:42 So you asked me before, you know, “How is this like a religion?”
0:27:44 Well, this is how it’s like a religion.
0:27:47 There are things that are based on faith.
0:27:49 They’re not based on something that we can replicate and show like in a laboratory.
0:27:56 One thing that’s clear reading this book is that there is a huge gap between the representations
0:28:05 of UFOs and aliens in the press and in popular culture, and the first person accounts of
0:28:15 these encounters.
0:28:16 Do you find that disconnect to be maybe the biggest obstacle to having a serious public
0:28:23 discussion about what the hell is happening here or what the hell has happened?
0:28:29 This is something that a lot of people don’t understand.
0:28:32 Even you see religious events from the past, that same disconnect is at play.
0:28:39 So when people back in that time period saw something, they didn’t understand what it
0:28:45 was.
0:28:46 So they had to look through their own cultural narratives in order to interpret it.
0:28:53 And this moment was a moment of confusion, and then this confused the people around them.
0:28:59 They said, “I saw this, I don’t know what it was, help me out ’cause it’s freaky,”
0:29:05 and then the people around them were concerned and said, “This seems like it could be this
0:29:09 type of angel,” or something like that.
0:29:11 Well, this happens with modern day UFO reports as well.
0:29:15 What people see is definitely not what you see in independent stay and that type of thing,
0:29:23 but we have to represent it.
0:29:25 So conventions then arise, right?
0:29:28 And now we have this idea of the saucer type thing, this UFO.
0:29:33 Reading your book and listening to you now, I kept thinking about that movie Arrival.
0:29:36 I’m sure you’ve seen it.
0:29:37 I love that movie.
0:29:39 For me, the smartest thing about that movie was its focus on the limits and possibilities
0:29:46 of language and communication and how that might play out in the event of an encounter
0:29:52 like that.
0:29:54 But was that story, that scenario, the kind of thing the scientists in this book are thinking
0:30:01 about?
0:30:02 I do think so.
0:30:03 When you do learn a different language, remember what happens to the main character in Arrival
0:30:07 is that the way she thinks changes, the way she perceives time changes, and this is definitely
0:30:14 what I see with people who do this kind of work is that their perspective changes the
0:30:20 way they think even changes.
0:30:22 In what way?
0:30:23 Okay.
0:30:24 So there’s a researcher named Jacques Vallée, and he’s been studying UFOs for his whole
0:30:29 life and now he’s in his 80s.
0:30:31 He talks about post-contact effects.
0:30:35 So when people have experiences of things related to UFOs or something associated with
0:30:40 UFOs, that they have effects.
0:30:42 And one of the effects is that they perceive things like coincidences more often, and they
0:30:48 also perceive time differently.
0:30:51 So think about what a coincidence is.
0:30:54 Carl Jung said that it’s something that has to do with a moment in time that seems as
0:30:58 if you’ve been there before, right?
0:31:00 Has this kind of deja vu experience where something that you’re thinking about appears
0:31:05 in your experience of time and also your experience.
0:31:09 So these kinds of effects happen, and this is something that was related in Arrival as
0:31:15 well.
0:31:16 So yeah, so these kinds of effects happen to people.
0:31:18 But I really dig about this book, and I really enjoyed your first book as well, American
0:31:23 Cosmic, but this one is especially interesting to me because it extends this conversation
0:31:28 about UFOs and aliens to a broader exploration of all the possibilities of non-human intelligence,
0:31:40 both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
0:31:43 And what it would mean to take that seriously, and it turns out a lot of scientists have
0:31:50 been quietly taking this seriously, and I had never heard of this group called the Order
0:31:56 of the Dolphin, which apparently included Carl Sagan, a hero of mine, and they were researching
0:32:03 ways to communicate with dolphins, but was the real aim there to discover ways to potentially
0:32:11 communicate with extraterrestrial life in the event of a real-world encounter?
0:32:16 Absolutely.
0:32:17 I think that what they were doing, and by the way, I found out about this group when
0:32:21 I was at the Vatican, has an observatory, and the observatory is in Castle Gandalfo
0:32:29 in Italy, right outside of Rome, and it’s next to this volcanic lake.
0:32:34 It’s really a beautiful place, and they have an archive, so everything space-related goes
0:32:39 to that archive, so I was in that archive, and I kept coming across references to the
0:32:45 Order of the Dolphin, and I was like, “Who are these people?
0:32:48 What were they doing?”
0:32:50 And so they were, of course, Carl Sagan was fascinated with the possibility of extraterrestrial
0:32:56 conversation should that happen.
0:32:59 They were basically trying to have a conversation with another species here on Earth to kind
0:33:04 of get us prepared, but also because wouldn’t that be a great thing to do?
0:33:08 Then scientists right now are utilizing different types of AI in order to interface with different
0:33:14 species like dolphins or whales.
0:33:16 Well, you mentioned AI.
0:33:18 If and when AI becomes truly sentient or when AGI, as they call it, emerges, if it emerges,
0:33:25 that would be an utterly alien form of intelligence.
0:33:29 Would that be much different from the appearance of aliens on Earth?
0:33:33 Well, you see, this is where I think it’s really interesting, so two people of interest
0:33:37 to me here in terms of how they view this.
0:33:40 One of them, he’s former NASA historian, but he was a NASA historian and an astronomer
0:33:44 for NASA for 40-plus years, and his name is Steven Dick.
0:33:49 He, more than 20 years ago, had postulated that if we meet ET, it’s going to be a form
0:33:57 of technology beyond AI to a different form of biotechnological evolution.
0:34:04 That’s why we can’t see it because we’re looking for things that look like us, really, but why
0:34:08 would we be doing that?
0:34:10 Well, that’s what I love about this book.
0:34:12 It gets you to think less and less about little green men and all that shit that we’ve
0:34:18 inhaled through TVs and movies and that kind of thing, and just think more broadly about
0:34:24 non-human intelligences, whatever that may be, and that’s a different way to think about
0:34:29 it.
0:34:30 But the idea of technology as its own kind of alien life is really interesting to me.
0:34:35 I haven’t thought all that much about it, but it’s interesting.
0:34:38 Yeah.
0:34:39 A lot of the people who I know who have been doing AI for 20-plus years, this is what they
0:34:45 think that whatever it is that we’re seeing in the sky is most like a form of AI, and
0:34:51 it is an involved consciousness.
0:35:02 After one more short break, we get into the recent congressional hearings that might hint
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0:38:23 This is from your last book, I believe, but you were brought to an alleged crash site
0:38:29 in New Mexico years ago.
0:38:31 You were given rare access, and you encountered a material that did not appear to be of this
0:38:39 world.
0:38:40 Let’s put it that way.
0:38:41 Allegedly, yes.
0:38:43 So that is how I opened the book.
0:38:44 So I was working with scientists, and one of them knew that I didn’t believe at all.
0:38:50 He said, “I think that you think that people are seeing this in their imagination, but
0:38:53 I want to take you to a place where, you know, I have some evidence, some physical evidence.”
0:38:59 And so I said, “Okay.
0:39:00 Where’s that?”
0:39:01 And he goes, “Well, it’s in New Mexico, and it’s a crash site.”
0:39:03 Now, this is, of course, a long time ago before any talk of crash sites.
0:39:08 I mean, I thought that he was crazy.
0:39:10 Honestly, I thought, “Okay, well, he’s really smart, and he has a really amazing job, and
0:39:16 you know, he seems like a normal person, but I thought maybe I was being given misinformation.”
0:39:22 There was definitely stuff out there, and it looked like it had been the site of some
0:39:28 very important thing that happened, because you could tell that, you know, there was rubble
0:39:33 everywhere and, you know, and it was really old.
0:39:37 So I wasn’t buying into the Roswell mythology, but I was saying that this is part of the
0:39:43 Roswell mythology, and, you know, I’m here where people believe in this, and I’m just
0:39:50 hoping that through my book, I’m not, like, reinforcing that belief, but that ship has
0:39:56 sailed.
0:39:57 You know, that’s already been done.
0:40:00 But it was at the time when The New York Times came out and said that there were these programs,
0:40:04 and they, in fact, were crash retrieval programs.
0:40:06 So inadvertently, I was doing this research, and this is what I found.
0:40:11 It seemed like, you know, such a coincidence, you could say, that it came out right after
0:40:17 The New York Times stories came out, but that was purely unintentional.
0:40:22 When those times stories came out, and, you know, obviously, you know, the Pentagon released
0:40:27 those Navy videos, there was a lot of speculation that this, there has to be some reason for
0:40:35 this.
0:40:36 Why would they do it?
0:40:37 And that perhaps it was, you know, part of some active disinformation campaign to muddy
0:40:43 the waters for whatever reason.
0:40:46 Is there something to that, in your opinion?
0:40:49 There could possibly be something to that.
0:40:51 My own work is completely uninvolved with that, whatever is happening in Congress.
0:40:58 I did a historical comparison between, you know, ascent narratives from history, Catholic
0:41:03 history in particular, and modern-day UFO reports.
0:41:07 I stumbled upon a group that was studying UFOs.
0:41:12 I wrote about that group.
0:41:14 I believe that there is a continuation of experiences that people have that you can
0:41:21 identify in the historical record for the various reasons that I’ve stated.
0:41:27 So I guess I feel like I’m in a parallel research tradition to whatever is happening
0:41:33 with the government right now.
0:41:34 Do you think that those, whatever that was in those videos was an actual, I won’t say
0:41:42 alien craft, but crafts that defied the laws of physics as we understand them in the way
0:41:47 that they appear to on the videos?
0:41:49 I think we have to be really careful about what we see these days because of deep fakes
0:41:53 and everything like that.
0:41:54 So I think that being very, very sober with respect to what we conclude about what we
0:42:00 see is the best position to take.
0:42:04 Okay, so I’m just going to give you an anecdote here, if that’s all right, Sean.
0:42:08 So when I was a child, my father had been in the Coast Guard, and he always had this story
0:42:15 that he told in our family about something that stopped the ship he was on.
0:42:20 It was called the bittersweet, and he was the sonar man.
0:42:23 The sonar kept going, and they were able to see something in the ocean, down at the bottom
0:42:28 of the ocean.
0:42:29 It actually stopped their ship, but all the electricity on their ship stopped, and it
0:42:33 was terrifying.
0:42:34 So this was an interesting kind of phenomena, you know, family history type thing.
0:42:39 Well I had forgotten all about it, and then I meet Tim Gallaudet, who is an admiral in
0:42:45 the Navy, and he told me the very same story.
0:42:48 Now he didn’t know that my father had this story as well, and he actually has data about
0:42:53 it.
0:42:54 My dad only had the members of his ship, and you know, it was only testimonial evidence.
0:42:58 So I guess that what we have are credible witnesses, and we do have data.
0:43:05 But I think that when we look at things on the internet and social media, that we should
0:43:10 probably just be like agnostic at this point.
0:43:13 I should probably say that the government has not acknowledged the existence of aliens.
0:43:20 It has simply acknowledged the existence of these unidentified aerial phenomena, if
0:43:26 that’s still the term we’re using.
0:43:28 The name keeps changing, so it’s unidentified anomalous phenomena now, and that’s because,
0:43:33 I know, I know.
0:43:35 That’s because they allow for transmedia, like, you know, some of these things come
0:43:38 out of the ocean, and they’re seen by people in the Navy.
0:43:42 What do you think this conversation around UFOs and aliens looks like in 10, 15 years?
0:43:48 Honestly, I don’t have an answer, because I feel like I couldn’t have predicted what
0:43:51 happened after American Cosmic was published in 2019.
0:43:55 I couldn’t have predicted that Congress would be talking about this, and I can only say
0:43:59 that I think we’re going to be surprised.
0:44:03 Tell me more.
0:44:04 Well, I was surprised, you know, I thought I had written this book, and you know, I
0:44:08 did the best I could in terms of the field research, and I said, “Look, you know, these
0:44:11 people are studying this, and they’re very well-educated, and they’re affiliated with
0:44:15 our space program.”
0:44:16 And then the New York Times articles came out, and then before I knew it, there was
0:44:21 the Pentagon report that talked about UAP, and the name UAP shifted a couple different
0:44:27 times, and you know, there was a constant conversation in Congress about this, so none
0:44:32 of that I could have predicted.
0:44:34 I’m not even going to ask if the discovery of alien life would be the most significant
0:44:39 event in human history, because it obviously would be, but I do wonder what you think the
0:44:46 most significant implication of that discovery would be.
0:44:49 So for a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in
0:44:54 the world believe in non-human intelligence, because most people are religious.
0:44:58 And so within various different religions, you have different forms of non-human intelligences
0:45:03 that display themselves in different ways to people.
0:45:06 So it’s the people post-enlightenment in the West.
0:45:10 We’re disbelievers in that narrative, so it would be the most shocking event for us.
0:45:16 And the implications is almost like a post-secular society.
0:45:21 What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just
0:45:26 scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity in the grand scheme of
0:45:34 things.
0:45:35 Earth is not the center of the universe.
0:45:37 Humanity is not a special animal with some unique significance.
0:45:42 We’re part of the same historical process as everything else.
0:45:46 And the discovery of the alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible
0:45:50 to deny, that would be the final step.
0:45:56 And the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin and would in a terminal way, I
0:46:01 think, up in our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful
0:46:08 thing in some ways, but would be totally not worth it if the price of that discovery was
0:46:14 aliens destroying us.
0:46:17 Hopefully that doesn’t happen.
0:46:18 Yeah.
0:46:19 That would be a bad scenario.
0:46:20 Again, if you just look at the history on our planet, it’s not a pretty picture when
0:46:27 populations or species collide where there’s a significant power or technological asymmetry.
0:46:34 It tends not to go well for the side.
0:46:36 That’s weaker.
0:46:37 So yeah, that’s the game I don’t want to play.
0:46:40 That’s right.
0:46:41 That’s right.
0:46:42 I agree with you there.
0:46:43 You mentioned earlier that you started out as a typical academic skeptic, and I guess
0:46:48 you’re still agnostic on a lot of this stuff, but maybe I’m just trying to tease out as
0:46:55 much as I can from you, but how has all of this research transformed you?
0:47:02 Not just your worldview, but you as a person, really.
0:47:06 I have to say that it completely changed me.
0:47:08 Like you said, I was a skeptic, and it took a few years to really shake that out of me,
0:47:15 and it took a lot of meeting people like the admirals and the scientists and these people
0:47:21 that I know, and then thinking back on things like the story of my dad and other people
0:47:28 and what they’ve said, and then seeing the historical record as well.
0:47:33 And so this shook me out of the assumptions that I had, and it made me think, okay, well,
0:47:39 I actually don’t know that much about this.
0:47:42 Maybe I should learn.
0:47:44 And so it put me into a space of questioning, and I’ve been in that space ever since.
0:47:49 I don’t know what the threshold would be for you, but what would it take for you to step
0:47:53 off the agnostic ledge and say, yeah, aliens are real?
0:47:57 Is it a spacecraft landing on the White House lawn?
0:48:00 Well, something that was anomalous in 1952 did fly over the White House.
0:48:05 So we do have that, and that’s one of those cases that is still weird.
0:48:12 What would it take for me to say, okay, aliens are a fact and they’re real?
0:48:17 If they landed and we met them and they would say, okay, we’d like to give you this really
0:48:21 awesome technology and your problems are going to be erased.
0:48:24 And I mean, that’s probably what it would take.
0:48:27 Now I would be very suspicious of them if they did that.
0:48:30 Why?
0:48:31 Probably because I’ve seen too many X-files and twilight zones.
0:48:39 This stuff is so crazy, Diane.
0:48:41 Again, I don’t know what I believe, I really don’t, other than it feels like a cop-out,
0:48:48 but I don’t know what else to say other than I’m intrigued, but I need more evidence.
0:48:52 I agree.
0:48:53 And I think what’s really interesting is that we don’t have to be convinced to be
0:48:57 completely interested.
0:48:59 And we’re going to find out more as time goes on.
0:49:02 Well, I’ve read your last two books and I enjoyed the hell out of them.
0:49:06 And I’m just, I just think it’s incredibly cool that you stumbled into this space as
0:49:11 a scholar and you did it really at the perfect time.
0:49:15 And now you’ve kind of become one of the point people for UFO discourse.
0:49:20 So congratulations.
0:49:21 I don’t know.
0:49:22 I agree with you, I’ve become that person, but it wasn’t intentional at all.
0:49:28 At this point, even if you want to do something else, I’m not sure the world’s going to let
0:49:31 you.
0:49:32 No, I don’t think so.
0:49:33 Once again, the book is called Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences.
0:49:39 I read it.
0:49:40 It is really terrific.
0:49:41 I cannot recommend it enough.
0:49:43 Diana Posuka, thanks so much for doing this.
0:49:45 Oh yeah.
0:49:46 Thank you so much.
0:49:47 Thank you so much for this conversation.
0:49:53 All right, aliens, am I right?
0:50:02 I don’t know about you.
0:50:04 I love this conversation.
0:50:05 I love aliens.
0:50:06 I love UFOs.
0:50:07 I love all of it.
0:50:09 And I think what I loved most about this particular conversation with Diana is that I think she
0:50:14 has the almost perfect balance between being open-minded and skeptical, between genuine
0:50:21 curiosity and also scholarly seriousness.
0:50:26 And I think that’s the right orientation to all this, because it is kind of weird.
0:50:30 And there is a lot of strange stuff going on.
0:50:33 And I don’t believe much of it, but it’s worth taking seriously.
0:50:37 And she does in a way that doesn’t feel overly credulous.
0:50:42 Let me know what you think.
0:50:43 Thank you.
0:50:44 Thank you.
0:50:45 Bye.
0:50:45
0:50:47 Bye.
0:50:48 This episode was produced by John Ehrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick
0:50:54 Boyd, and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
0:50:57 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:51:00 Listen and subscribe.
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0:51:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Religious studies professor Diana Pasulka was a total nonbeliever in alien life, but she began to question this after speaking with many people who claim to have had otherworldly encounters. She also noticed how these accounts parallel the foundational texts of many religions. She has since written two books on the topic, the most recent of which is Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. She joins Sean to talk about extraterrestrial life, God, angels, and the renewed interest in UFOs.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Diana Pasulka (@dwpasulka). Her new book is Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences.
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