MS: How would you describe your own process, intellectually, professionally,  and in any other terms, of engaging with the paradox you talk about in American Cosmic,  of dealing with UFOs and entities as apparently both physical and mentally-contingent:  what has it been like to go into that question?

 

          DWP: This is a question that is a theme in my research from back a long time ago, when I was doing my dissertation and even throughout my book on purgatory [Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture],  where I identify this split between what people call spiritual and what people call material, and how it impacts religion, especially Catholicism.  So this has been a theme.

          Right now, I think that we’re at the point – I’ve been talking a lot to people who are scientists,  but also computer scientists,  and I’m learning a lot from them.  And one of the things I’m learning from them is that they’re not vexed by this question.  So to me, this question is a modernist question, it’s a question of modernity, and it’s not even relevant today.

          So whereas it used to vex me,  and it vexed lots of people, I now see it as an historical – it’s almost an archaic question.  Because if atoms and things like that can behave in ways that we now observe to be strange like this, then why are we holding these almost-epigenetic beings,  these things that can actually impact humans on a level that’s not necessarily internal or genetic,  but surely on a societal level,  influence us  –  why are we holding those to the same [old] standards?  We just have to understand them in different ways  –  we have to change.

 

          MS: There has at times been brutal ridicule of interest in ufology, and brutal ridicule of abductees, and much of it is very recent.  Certainly, in the mainstream scientific community  –  and I just know this from the most mainstream media,  but without naming names,  you can see [some of] the most famous people ridiculing it and shutting it down [in recent years].  As much as you’re describing this sea change in academia,  and clearly there’s been a sea change in media coverage recently as well,  that still has to have an influence on us, we have to carry that  –  or perhaps you don’t,  but it seems to me that there’s still something to work through in terms of making the subject less disreputable.

          Do you think the reason for the disreputability is ultimately this kind of rationalist reason of,  “How can material objects behave this way? Why would aliens coming from another galaxy ever stumble upon our planet?,” these kinds of rationalistic objections?  Or do you think that it comes more from a place of unease with exploring subjects that (a) are unknown and (b) have these religious overtones? 

 

          DWP: The ridicule is for several reasons. First off, I think that we’ve been constrained by these modernist beliefs and understandings of physical reality.  There’s that.  But there’s also an anti-religion sentiment: anti-anything that has to do with things we can’t actually touch and see.  So there’s that.

          But also there’s Project Blue Book,  which was a very successful disinformation campaign run by our government,  to assassinate the characters of many people,  physicists like James MacDonald,  people like that.  That all worked,  and it sent a message.  It sends a message.

          The reason I was able to do what I did when I did it,  was because,  first, like I said,  I was a tenured full professor,  had done a lot of things,  had won lots of grants,  things like that,  so I was very comfortable in my position. However, I’m in religious studies, so I’m already studying weird things.  So I can take what I’ve learned from looking at,  say,  apparitions of the Virgin Mary – which,  by the way,  lots of people don’t believe in – and I can take that and apply it to UFOs and UFO communities.  And for my field,  that’s not weird at all,  that’s just a normal thing,  because the UFO idea is very prevalent,  and therefore we should study it in my field.

          So in my field,  it wasn’t a big deal.  But I can see where it would be in the field of physics,  and different other humanities, even,  like in philosophy.

 

          MS: Do you think that the revolution that is underway in quantum physics is adequate to allow for mainstream academic scientists to begin to accept this phenomenon? 

 

          DWP: This is a generational thing. I predict in ten years, the stigma will be gone. So it’s a generational thing.

 

          MS: You don’t view it as potentially cyclic, like yet another moment of cultural amnesia will fall when breakthroughs fail to be made, and we’ll just be returned to square one, with people starting over again in a generation?

 

          DWP: No. We’re completely at a point, as you know, with A.I. and just being saturated with the atmosphere of the digital infrastructure, where society on every level is changing.  And how we are implicated, how we are influenced, what we believe, so is determined by what we are seeing on screens, all the time – unconsciously.  There’s nothing we can do about it. And I’ve written about how hoaxed UFO videos and content make people believe more than stuff that’s actually unidentified,  because it looks like what we think a UFO should look like. 

          So I guess what I’m saying is,  that’s done – it’s already gone out there, it’s autonomous.  We can’t bring it back in.  It’s already impacting kids. And these kids are gonna grow up.

          When I take a poll of students in my classes,  these are kids around 20 years old  –  I used to take it every semester,  I’d take about 140 students and poll them about their various beliefs in E.T.,  UFOs, things like that,  and belief is up there around 84%,  87%,  among young people.

 

          MS: Wow, wow. 

          So, branching in different directions. You mentioned Project Blue Book,  so I want to bring it back to questions about intelligence agencies,  of which I have a couple.

          You mentioned there being essentially a visionary tradition of some kind in intelligence agencies.  The remote-viewing programs are well-documented [e.g., Remote Viewing: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, Jim Schnabel].  But in terms of this engagement,  is this stuff that’s not chronicled in official history,  which you’ve been discovering?

 

          DWP: Yeah, absolutely not chronicled.  And it’s known.  So a lot of people know about it.  Jacques Vallée knows about it,  Hal Puthoff knows about it.  I know about it only because I discovered people who are carrying the tradition.

 

          MS: Is Tyler this kind of person?

 

          DWP: Yes.

 

          MS: Is the idea that certain, essentially chosen kinds of people, have information – the possibility for innovations and breakthroughs – in a sense downloaded into them, or generated in them over time, by their visionary contacts?

 

          DWP: Yeah – they’re not choosing themselves, and they’re not being chosen by a group of people; what happens is, their attributes come to light. And then they’re directed toward the different places where they’re supposed to be.

 

          MS: Yeah, I love that passage in your book about Tyler working outside of the room that he never enters. That’s really cool.

 

          DWP: [Laughing] Yeah, there were so many things that I wrote in the book – I didn’t understand them at the time, and my editor even asked me to take them out, because she said, “That just sounds crazy.”  I said, “I know it sounds crazy!” 

          You know the rubble in the desert?  She wanted me to take that out too,  and now I’ve had so many people tell me about the rubble,  and they’ve been there.  I knew we needed to keep it in,  because we wouldn’t know what it meant till later,  and I was right.  So that’s one of them,  the room.

 

          MS: What has happened with the material  [from an alleged crashed UFO]  that you described recovering  [from the rubble]  in that scene?

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          DWP: Yes,  so I thankfully had the good sense that I didn’t want any of that near me – I didn’t want it near me in my house,  in my town,  anything, so Garry took it. 

          By the way, that did happen exactly as I said in the airport, as Tyler said it would  –  that whole airport thing, that was so terrifying. [Footnote 1].

          And so Gary took it and studied it in his labs. And it’s with various people. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

 

          MS: More on intelligence agencies:  how much is research into disinformation necessarily a part of your research and your work?

 

          DWP:  It never was, until I recognized that it has to be now.  In 2013, 2014,  I was surrounded by these people:  I’ve had many conversations with FBI agents and things like that,  and I knew that in order to do this topic justice, I had to actually do some type of analysis  [of intelligence agencies’ UFO-related disinformation]. 

          I read histories and things, but even if you read the history of the CIA, you know that’s not the [real] history, right? 

          And so you have to develop a certain method and strategy in order to get any kind of relevant information that might be helpful.  But if you don’t do it,  you’re not being a responsible scholar or historian of this topic.  You can get away with it if you’re a scientist,  but you surely can’t get away with that if you’re in my field,  or anthropology or anything like that.

 

          MS: It seems extremely convoluted. 

          I’m also a fan of one of the books you cite in American Cosmic, The Trickster and the Paranormal.

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          DWP: Oh yeah!

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          MS: George Hansen talks in that book about an episode in which, according to him,  Roswell was essentially explained as having been one particular military program. 

          But I haven’t come across his story of explanation in a different source besides that. 

          And then, from American Cosmic what I take is that, again, this legend of a saucer crash in New Mexico may not be a legend – perhaps the true story [at a different location]  got mixed together with details about Roswell, somehow.  

          So, I don’t know what my question is here – can you tell me what happened at Roswell, I guess, or what didn’t?  Do you know the answer? 

 

          DWP: [Laughter] Yeah – right! I’m still trying to figure it out.  But I can tell you some.

          This is Tyler’s idea – and by the way,  Tyler gave me so much information that was corroborated and true that I tend to listen to him when he says things.  He totally believes that there were a number of crashes in the New Mexico desert,  of which that one,  the site that I went to, was just one.  There were four or something like that,  maybe more.  And they all occurred around 1947 – between 1946 and 1948.

 

          MS: There were flying green fireballs being reported in New Mexico at that time – do you know whether it was related to that?

 

          DWP: Well, that area – first, there’s a lot going on in that area, both defense-wise,  of course,  but also the lore of the area is even very strange. 

In American Cosmic,  I talked about how later I learned that the Woman in Blue [Footnote 2], those were the areas in which she was seen. 

          I used to think that was a total myth,  and then I had to revisit it as I was doing research that I thought was completely unrelated – I thought it was just my Catholic research,  [but] it turned out to be very,  very specific to New Mexico and that area, and that really blew my mind.

          So right now, the Invisible College is still actively researching – do you know who they are?

 

          MS: I know the concept. I don’t know who they are.

 

          DWP: Garry outed who they were, so you might want to check it out. [Footnote 3].

          I’m in contact with those people,  and they just actually discussed that – Roswell and the aliens and the crash.  So of course I read everything they said in that email thread,  because we’re on an email thread together.  So I just revisited that just two or three days ago. 

          I still don’t know what I think.  Obviously, there’s a lot of misinfo because of stealth weaponry – like Annie Jacobsen’s book about Area 51.  I don’t know,  I can’t say anything conclusive about it at all,  but I’m still mystified by it.

 

          MS: What about the taxonomy of UFOs? 

          My sense is that, for instance, when people talk about the black triangles, there’s frequently a belief that those are secret government projects. 

          And then, for instance, there’s a phenomenon I keep hearing about in your part of the country,  the Carolinas,  where people talk about flying orange orbs. 

          And then of course you have the tic tac or the cigar-type thing,  and you have saucers,  and I’m sure others. 

          So – do you view this as a single umbrella topic, or do you see it as, some of these are what you mean by UFOs or UAPs,  and some of them are kind of a different thing that got pulled in by virtue of being in the sky?

 

          DWP: I do think that a lot of them are quote-unquote ours, misidentified, but some of them definitely aren’t.

          In my upcoming book,  I actually spend two chapters on UFO sightings that happened pre-Internet.  There’s a really famous UFO sighting in Rochester,  New York, in the nineteen-sixties  –  it’s a UFO flap.  So I interviewed some people who were a part of that flap  –  two of them were children.  I did a lot of research on the actual articles and primary sources, and NICAP [National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena] actually did an investigation there – this was during Project Blue Book. 

          This is what happened.  The first person who sees a UFO from this flap – and by the way, it traverses about a hundred miles, this UFO flap, so people as far away as a hundred miles see things that are unexplained, and we’re talking police officers,  trained observers – the first person who sees it is a night watchman.  He goes out, and he hears something, and he sees a saucer landing in the parking lot,  with these little green men or these little beings.  He freaks out, calls the police, the police think he’s crazy – but they take his report, because it’s the nineteen-sixties, so they take his report.

          After that,  the police are inundated with calls of all kinds of different – well, some of them are very similarly described,  and two of the children see exactly the same craft,  which looks like something out of the Steven Spielberg Close Encounters,  where it’s this thing with an orb hanging off the back.

          So what I do in my book is I basically say, we’re gonna look at this flap, and we’re gonna see that you would not know that this was a similar phenomenon that encompassed a whole area  –  and people saw different things.

          And you can see that with Ray Hernandez and his wife in my book [American Cosmic]:  they see something that he calls a plasma ball,  and she thinks it’s an angel.

 

          MS: There’s a passage in your book where you say that initially to say that people were having visionary experiences in different eras of history wasn’t necessarily that far outside your wheelhouse,  and we might say, okay,  so someone in India in this past century will report it as a Hindu goddess,  and someone last century will report it according to that culture’s paradigm,  and nowadays we have aliens from outer space.  And you say, so that’s somewhat in your wheelhouse to view it in that way.

          And yet – I think the words you use are something like,  the charisma and enthusiasm of the scientists who you spoke with,  really pulled you toward their viewpoint of these as technology.  Do you see the experience of people witnessing something, but describing it differently, as technological?

 

          DWP: That’s a really good question.  When I went into this, yes indeed, I thought that when people saw things in the sky today,  they don’t recognize them as souls from purgatory,  like Catholics did in the 1700s and 1800s.  I thought it was easy.  I thought that was how easy it was going to be to do this research.

          But it wasn’t easy, because I met these scientists. Honestly, I didn’t think that people like that believed or studied this – I didn’t even know that the government had programs studying UFOs. So my mind was blown, and I had to consider that these things are actually real. 

          So for somebody like me, coming from a position of studying this stuff as historical phenomena that are really historically contingent, and we just have different frameworks based on our media – that actually is not my framework, anymore.  And it was complicated, honestly.

          I want to go back, because I had a specific answer to your question,  but I can’t remember what it was,  because I had to explain that move that I’ve made.  So can you restate? 

 

          MS: Yes,  the question was,  when people all witness something but they describe it differently,  do you view that as technological? 

 

          DWP: Oh, I see what you’re saying.

          So now I’m in cultures of people, or communities of people, who are computer scientists – really into A.I.,  doing A.I.,  and just like Tyler and James,  very much at the top of their games,  their fields.  And they ask me questions that challenge my assumptions.  One of the assumptions they challenge is  –  and Tyler believed this, too  –  they say that we are technological,  that human biology is technological. 

          And so a student yesterday asked me a question,  “Aren’t you afraid that these technocrats are reducing this thing to just silicon, but you can’t do that with human biology? Why would they say that the human body is a technology?”

          And I asked him, “Why do you think it’s not? What in the human body is not a technology?”

          So the whole idea of “what is technological,”  it has this assumption of artificiality,  where the people that I’m speaking to say,  why do we call it artificial intelligence,  it’s actually just nonhuman intelligence – it’s as artificial as we are,  or it’s as natural as we are.  They’re trying to take away the assumptions that we have in our culture about technology.

 

          MS: What about the specific phenomenon of apparently different visual impressions of the same event? Would you describe that as a technological feature of the phenomenon?

 

          DWP: I would definitely describe it as a feature – there’s no doubt about that. You can take case after case after case, and show how that’s the case. And by the way, you can also do that with Virgin Mary apparitions. 

          You can even do that with the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who’s debunked and hated on, but actually his work is fascinating. He talks about being with Don Juan, and having this indigenous shaman who teaches him these esoteric things, and he has similar experiences, where this group is initiated and they all see completely different things.

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1: Pasulka is referring here, to an early scene in American Cosmic, in which her colleague “James” runs into problems with airport security while in possession of what may be materials from a crashed UFO. [Return].

2: Sister Maria of Ágreda was a seventeenth-century Spanish Franciscan Abbess, who claimed to have “bilocated” to the New World, in the midst of contemplative meditation, and there proselytized to native Americans. Some say that she did in fact appear across the ocean to the Jumano tribe. In Chapter Seven of American Cosmic, Pasulka explores motifs in common between this episode and claims existing in ufology. [Return].

3: The term “Invisible College” refers to a group of scientists fascinated by the UFO problem, who until recently studied the subject anonymously, out of concern for possible consequences to their reputations. [Return].