A Review of American Cosmic by Diana Walsh Pasulka
American Cosmic is a book that transcends categories—and judgements. It’s not one of many answers, but it does offer—and provoke—a boatload of questions and uncertainties. It’s probably not one to read if your faith is weak, even if it concludes with the story of a “conversion”[1] from secularism to the Catholic faith. It’s part social commentary, part personal travelogue, theological and materialist, managing to combine firsthand accounts of UFO encounters, or to be less assumptive, incidents of anomalous phenomena with discussions of Christian miraculous phenomena like the Shroud of Turin, the bilocation of Sister Maria of Agreda, and the Marian 1917 apparition at Fatima. Research into the occult origins of, or at least influence upon the founders Russian and American space programs lie alongside the tale of a conversion of a major biomedical technologies researcher through a Latin Mass at the Vatican. Reductionist theories of the psychology of human intuition are paired against a Nietzschean and yet mystical delve into the concept of synchronicity. Tales of the author’s trips to alleged “UFO crash sites” and an investigation into social phenomena of the pseudo-religion of “Jediism” as well as lots of references to the philosophers Marshall McLuhan and Heidegger round out this very odd book.
I first learned of Pasulka and this book through her 2021 interview on the Lex Fridman podcast. The episode description described her as a “professor of religious studies,” something almost obviously off-putting to those who are of a religion, but I decided to listen to the interview on the notion that I’d at least have some interesting takes to object to by someone who I assumed was going to be a completely secular academic adverse to religion. Within the first few minutes of Fridman’s interview, however, the same odd juxtaposition that ultimately will characterize American Cosmic struck me from her answers to his opening questions. Pasulka claims to be a practicing Catholic, and in fact had researched and written a book about Catholic beliefs on purgatory (Heaven Can Wait) which she discussed, but yet complained, incorrectly, that the Church had unfairly and wrongly taught for centuries that women did not have souls.[2] She seemed to be, unexpectedly to my liking, rather orthodox in thought, and yet, on a major detail, wrong—as well as quite angry at the Church for this non-existent fault.
Lex Fridman’s interview of Diana Walsh Pasulka was an abridged discussion of the same topics addressed in American Cosmic, so it is needless to delve into it, but, while slightly bothered and off-put from the start by her weird belief on supposed Catholic philosophical misogyny, I decided to delve into her full book.
I’ll start with how Pasulka herself describes her aim in the book on the inside of its dust cover:
More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.
Pasulka spent six years researching for this book, following around UFO experiencers, believers, skeptics, and investigators. She describes her goal as an ethnographic investigation into both the phenomena of UFOs as the manifestation of nonhuman intelligences, as well as more importantly into the belief in the phenomena itself. As she describes: “Eventually I knew that my task was to document the formation of a new religious form—not to reach ultimate conclusions about the ontological status of its mystery.”[3] She is not here to decide if aliens exist or of what sort of reality reported manifestations consist in, although parts of her book seem to lean strongly in this direction, other parts somewhat skeptically against. Rather, however, her main goal is to describe the effects of the fact that some people do believe. UFOism, cosmism is a new religion in its infancy that will have very real social effects providing the ground of meaning and morality for its believers.
What justifies the analogy between belief in aliens and UFOs and religion is for Pasulka that “the history of religion is, among other things, a record of perceived contact with supernatural beings, many of which descend from the skies as beings of light, or on light, or amid light.” Modern belief in aliens is for her, fully analogous in general to all earlier religion in general, to which end she quotes author Jeffery Kripal, “the modern experience of the alien coming down from the sky can be compared to the ancient experience of the god descending from the heavens.” Both are “contact events”[4] between man and some other, higher intelligent being from which a theological, moral, and cultural framework of practice develops. The only major difference between the two, although there is much discussion throughout the book on this point as UFO believers disagree exactly on this point of the nature of the phenomena, is as the materialism or spiritualism of UFOism. Some take UFOism in a very material sense, aliens as material beings just like us who descend in physical craft, others have more mystical, spiritual, or otherworldly, what many call “extra-dimensional” take on the phenomena that is closer to religious understandings of God.
What makes this book most provocative, however, is that the UFO believers Pasulka is describing aren’t just cranks on the fringes of society. Pasulka didn’t look into fringe movements that included extraterrestrial aliens and UFOs as core to their beliefs like Elijah Muhammed’s Nation of Islam or the 1990s Heaven’s Gate cult. Many of the “experiencers” that she profiles and examines in this book are very mainstream in terms of their influence on society even if their names are little known, or in the case of Pasulka’s main sources, anonymous. The main unifying thread of Pasulka’s book is a friendship with an anonymous biomedical inventor, aeronautical engineer and UFO researcher that Diana nicknames Tyler D. If Pasulka’s account can be believed, Tyler is an enigma, a man of little direct training in his field of biomedical technology who is one of its richest and most prolific inventors. Someone who doesn’t know where his ideas come from, and claims in fact not really to have come up with them at all, but merely to have “remembered” them, in what he calls a “download” of information from some sort of “off-planet intelligence” by way of his DNA acting as a “transceiver.”
Well, Tyler’s method may still make him sound like a crank—somewhat—but his inventions work. According to Pasulka, he worked on the space shuttle program, has over forty patents, and is on the cusp of, if not already, a billionaire. Tyler, she says, is but a modern day version of men such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky or Jack Parsons, each respectively key to the founding of the Russian and American space programs and who each also believed themselves to be “in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence” which was “directing their paths and seeding them with information that directly led to the creation of innovative technologies.”[5] Parsons, for instance, connected each of his early 20th-century rocket launches to occult rituals and was a close friend of English gnostic occultist Aleister Crowley as well as L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
It was from a book on these esoteric origins of the Russian space program that formed part of Pasulka’s research named The Russian Cosmists that the otherwise cryptic title of this book originates, explained not in the book proper, but only in its “Acknowledgements” section. This is a book on the American cosmists like Tyler, those who lie at the intersection of technology and science, and this vague proto-religion of alienism, UFOism, or cosmism, a belief in some sort of intelligence or intelligences out there that make regular manifestations of themselves, hierophanies, and are feeding man the keys to technological advancement. It is a religion in the basic pattern of the established practices, but, importantly, not yet fully developed with a code of morality or practice.
Moreover, in Pasulka’s year of research with various of these experiencers, she encountered so-called physical evidence of such alien hierophanies. Spending several days digging with specialized metal detectors in a New Mexico location where UFOs had supposedly crashed alongside her sources, she herself found scraps of anomalous material of apparently manufactured and artificial nature, but of a kind impossible to produce with current technology. One of these metal pieces, as she carried it through an airport security checkpoint, somehow shut off the metal detector, forcing her, she accounts, into an odd conversation with the TSA officers as to what she was carrying and where it had come from.
Pasulka, while believing that anomalous, difficult-to-explain things are happening, does clarify after nearly a hundred pages of wild such accounts near the middle of the book that anomalous experiences do not of themselves constitute a “UFO event or religious experience. They become UFO events or religious experiences through interpretation.”[6] What we expect to see, she says, determines what we think an event actually is. Pasulka was led herself to begin investigating supposed UFOs and alien experiences by noting similarities between an earlier object of her investigation—medieval Catholic reports of visits from souls in purgatory as well as some of the visions by the 14th century St. Teresa of Avila of angels—and UFO reports. She believes that our interpretative cultural framework, what we expect to see or don’t expect to see, influences how we interpret and understand what happens to us. This is especially true in the digital postmodern age, with movies and popular culture full of ideas of extraterrestrial civilizations, advanced technology, and the like. This media technology in particular, as she spends a chapter on, can easily blur the distinction in our memory and imagination. Our imagination is filled with very different, secular preconceptions, biasing us towards very different explanations of the difficult to explain than what we might have understood them as in the past.
This distinction is important throughout the remainder of the book. As Pasulka describes another experiencer and UFO investigator whom she nicknames James, who had several UFO and apparitional experiences of lights and frightening beings as a child, this many and many others whom he knew could describe their experiences as being “bedeviled.” Previous ages wouldn’t have wondered at many of their anomalous and frightening experiences, they would have known exactly what they were looking at, and immediately called for a priest or exorcist. Tales of demons, fairies and gnomes, as Declan Leary, put it in his article “Take Us To Your Leader” in The American Conservative, have been replaced today with those of extraterrestrials:
It makes sense chronologically, if nothing else. In the last years of the 19th century, as man turned his eye for conquest toward the skies, the dark things that had always lurked at the edge of human knowledge moved in the necessary direction. With fewer forests and less of man’s mind directed into them, fairies and the like essentially vanished from the field of industrial man’s perception. Extraterrestrials popped up conveniently in their place.[7]
Pasulka agrees that the UFO or alien explanatory framing on anomalous experiences is a modern one, but not all past experiences were necessarily negative. She expounds at length throughout the latter part of her book on Christian encounters with angels from the Old Testament onwards as well as of the Virgin Mary as at Fatima in 1917, reports of levitation like that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, and bilocation as with the 17th century Sister Maria of Agreda, and on anomalous miraculous objects like the Shroud of Turin and the incorruptible bodies of saints. I appreciated that unlike secular religious skeptics (but alien believers) who often try to force such Christian examples of the miraculous into a UFO framework, Pasulka does not attempt to claim that all of the Christian faith is but us misinterpreting UFO or alien manifestations. She makes no declaratory judgement on all such events or phenomena within Christianity, noting that the Catholic distinction between public revelation (the Bible and the teachings of Christ and the Apostles) and private revelation (any manifestations of God, the angels and the saints) means no one has to believe in the veracity of any particular such example. She is, as everywhere in the book, almost too open-minded for my taste, yet again intrigued by the similarity between many details of alien and UFO encounters and both demonic visitations and Christian apparitions.
The oddest part of the book is the conclusory chapter, where she recounts a visit she made with Tyler to the Vatican to examine records held there of Sister Maria of Agreda and St. Joseph of Cupertino. Here, Pasulka says, she encountered what she calls “the most miraculous and strange event of my eventful six years of research.”[8] This was the conversion to the Catholic faith of the central figure of this book, Tyler D., who had some Christian faith but was of relatively secular outlook in regard to his “downloads” of alien technology from “off-planet intelligences.” The tale is twisting—I think it the most redeeming chapter of the book even if it is odd—and revolves around an encounter with the self-giving ministry of a Catholic priest he met in Rome named Fr. McDonnell to the sick as well as his investigation into the life of Sister Maria of Agreda, who reportedly bilocated with the assistance from angelic beings from Spain in the 17th century to preach the gospel to the Indians of New Mexico. As Pasulka explains the transformation in Tyler on the last page of her book:
Tyler’s life had been unusual by any standard, but it had not been overtly religious. He believed that he was in contact with beings of some sort, and that this contact was spiritual. However, he never theorized about what the beings were, other than that they were related to spirituality and space. The trip motivated him to begin thinking about who the beings might be. He now felt a kinship with Sister Maria of Agreda, and he vowed to devote his life to a new ministry. He believed that these beings were, or were similar to, the beings spoken of by Sister Maria … Tyler’s understanding of his relationship to the beings shifted completely.[9]
It’s an odd ending that I appreciate, but yet like the book as a whole, paradoxically slightly bothers me at the same time. I want to think the best of Tyler’s story, that angels and God have been handing him clues to biomedical and aeronautical technology advancements, but his juxtaposition against clearly occult and demonically worshiping analogues in Pasulka’s tale like Jack Parsons gives me a tinge of fear. There is something, it seems to me, heavily influenced by such articles as Declan Leary’s mentioned above and Charles Taylor’s massive A Secular Age, to the more traditional interpretations that, on the positive side, God, the angels, and the saints continue to interact with mankind, while on the negative side, demons attempt to interfere, tempt, and bedevil us. I fear that Tyler is not really in interaction with angels like those who took Sister Maria Agreda to New Mexico but with demons who are handing us technology to further influence and corrupt us. But Pasulka’s aim in this book, even with her personally held Catholic faith, is not to reach such conclusions, and sadly in regard to support for my own interpretation of these phenomena, she does not reach as far as Leary’s claim in his article that all UFO encounters are manifestations of demons.
Perhaps the way author Diana Walsh Pasulka sums up her first chapter is the best way to summarize what this book offers: “Is it [UFOs] real, or is it imaginary? What follows suggests that it is both.”[10] In other words, there are real effects of something otherworldly upon the world, and many people who believe in this something and act upon it, although our interpretation of exactly what kind of being or beings are the source of these phenomena depend on our imagination and some incidents may be solely imaginary with no basis in ontologically substantive reality. What this book does not offer, however, is what is more important, and again, more worrying to me. Who are these beings? I am somewhat open, but mostly dubious about the purely material explanation that there are alien physical beings like us elsewhere in the universe that are attempting to interact with our civilization. Rather, it seems to me, as such popular figures as Tucker Carlson have recently concluded, that the spiritual, and in particular demons, are to account for most of the UFO and alien phenomena, and whatever religion of cosmism and UFOism is but the newest trickstery work of the devil, the ultimate tempter, reaching out to corrupt mankind through the frameworks most effectual for this current technological age.
If one agrees with this claim, then perhaps, the counterpoint offered by Pasulka’s book is to question whether all of this is of the evil one. Pasulka’s offering of examples of saintly and angelic appearances and miraculous objects from the Christian tradition makes, although she does not again want to state it directly, the claim that perhaps some of the UFO and alien phenomena of today are of God and his angels. I am again uncomfortable with this. I don’t see much reason for God to bestow technological inspiration as in cases like Tyler’s, and I worry that he has been tricked, but I must admit that we do not know, and will never know until the Kingdom of all of the works of grace and of God. Pretty much every believer probably knows someone who has had mystical or miraculous experiences within their practice of the Faith and many also know those who have been bedeviled in some way or another by the attacks of the enemy. The world is mysterious and the believer must be careful and discerning, and perhaps like Pasulka we should be careful about coming to immediate ultimate interpretations about the mysterious when we know not its source.
Personally, I’m unsure about the net benefit of reading this book. While it can be read by the Christian in a careful, positive way, I think it is somewhat dangerous to blindly investigate topics like those encountered in this book without already having a strong conviction and faith to remain steadfast in the Faith. The tempter will try to induce doubts in you about your faith by way of the UFO interpretation, as Leary recounts in his essay mentioned above. I think a better introduction to the topic might be through the thoughts of Tucker Carlson on this topic or of Hugh Ross on the Babylon Bee’s podcast. Whatever the case, Pasulka’s approach is better than that of those who seem to have fallen away from faith in God by way of belief in UFOs, or of secular pop-culture takes like those of Joe Rogan, and I do admire her effort in this otherwise extremely captivating and informative book. Just don’t make it the only thing you read or listen too on the topic.
[1] I am, for reasons to be discussed later, slightly skeptical.
[2] Perhaps she was speaking rather vaguely and unclearly to Aquinas’ views on the timeline for ensoulment of unborn children in the womb, but this is not a denial that women have souls, as Aquinas’ claim in the same place also denies that male children immediately have a soul at the very beginning of development in the womb. Surely she would have grasped the distinction between her claim and Aquinas’ given how passionately the supposed problem bothers her.
[3] American Cosmic, 112.
[4] American Cosmic, 11.
[5] American Cosmic, 37.
[6] American Cosmic, 80.
[7] Declan Leary, “Take Us To Your Leader.” The American Conservative. June 10, 2023.
[8] American Cosmic, 216.
[9] American Cosmic, 238-39.
[10] American Cosmic, 16.