Diana Pasulka: a religious study of UFOs and nonhuman intelligences

LP: Thank you for making time.

Diana Pasulka: Of course, absolutely.

LP: I love your superhero avatar that was there while you were logging in.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, that's a National Reconnaissance Office patch. Wow. It's a mission patch. Yeah. It's the goddess Athena. Nice. Victory through intelligence. That's what it's about.

LP: I love it. There's so much to talk about with you. And I wonder if you might be willing to take a couple of moments to talk about how you would frame the theme of your work, either currently, as expressed through the most recent book, or if you think you're prepared to say there's a meta-narrative over the last X amount of time, say 5 to 10 years.

Diana Pasulka: So I've been a professor for 22 years. I've been working in the field of Christian history, and my background is also in philosophy and religious studies. I want to say something about religious studies because a lot of people need help understanding what people do in religious studies. We are not ministers, and we don't advocate any religion, but we study religion and its social effects, which are political, social, and economic. Most of the world's population is religious. So it's an important thing to study. 

And that said, in answer to your question, about 18 years ago, one of my mentors asked me, "What's the big question? What is it about your work? If you could, if you were in an elevator and you could say two words or a sentence about your work, what is it about?" And I said, "That's easy. It's about the enchantment of the world."

LP: Wow.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, so during the Enlightenment, rationalism, and science displaced ideas of enchantment that the world was a place that was enchanted with things, right? So things like angels or presences, divine presences, and things like that. Everything became devoid of that. And when I look at the world, I see that most people actually live in an enchanted reality. That's how they perceive it. And I thought that we actually don't live in the world of this scientific materialism, even though that's what we say we live in. If you listen to people who do AI now, which I do actually, they talk about things like emergence, which sounds enchanted to me.

So that's what I've been focusing on, either in Catholic history or in 2012, when I started to look at the rising belief in UFOs, which I didn't believe in at the time. And I thought this was a new form of enchantment.

LP: You immediately jumped to the word I wanted to dig in on a little bit, which is belief, right? It underlines so much of what you talk about in your writing. It's such an easy word to gloss over, but it's such a loaded term. First of all, thank you for describing religious studies because it's so easy to confuse a religious studies figure with a theologian. And theology and religious studies are two different sorts of branches of inquiry. You state in American Cosmic very similarly that religious studies are less about exploring, debunking, or proving a dogma as opposed to just looking at the sociological impacts of religion. What does belief do? How is it formed? How does it impact the people who hold it and the world around them? And it's such an important distinction. 

So, as it relates to the UFO question, right? People say, do you believe in UFOs? It's like a question that it just rolls off people's tongues. It was actually one of Jacques Vallée's books in the trilogy from the early 90s, Dimensions, Confrontations, and Revelations, where he says something the effect of — and it's a bad paraphrase because I haven't read this section in a long time — but he basically says, it's like asking somebody, do you believe in helicopters? Or do you believe in tractor-trailers? It's a glib answer. We know what people are really asking: Do you believe in aliens from outer space? But to say, do you believe in UFOs? Do I believe there are things in the sky that are, as of right now, unidentified? Yeah, probably. (laughter) But that's not really what they're asking, right? And that gets to like the sort of meat of your work, or at least as I've perceived it, which is the nature of belief and how it's shaped and formed and ultimately manipulated. Could you bridge the gap between religious studies and your work there for me? And then how did the UFO question get introduced to you?

Diana Pasulka: Believe me, I never thought I would be doing this study. And it's just amazing to me what has happened with the topic and even the work that I do. If you had told me 12 years ago, this is what you'd be doing. I would have completely shifted direction, saying, "I don't want to do that." But it came about really organically.

The first part of your question was, how does belief figure into my framework of research in religion? And I'll explain this. You have to understand that I went to graduate school in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I started in Berkeley. So I got to see a lot, and I'm from California. So I got to experience the technology revolution as a kid and throughout my 20s and 30s and saw how it really shifted culture and the infrastructure. And I was also always interested in religion. So, I combined these into looking at digital infrastructures and religious beliefs. Okay, so I'm going to break that down. What does that mean in nonacademic talk? What happened was I recognized that a lot of my students were getting all of their information about religion from movies, videos, and even video games. And I thought, okay, this makes sense. 

I started to study the impact that our screen cultures had on the ways in which we believed in things, and I was focusing on religious belief. I started to do this study, and I live in a place that's called Hollywood East. A lot of movies are produced here in Wilmington, and I got a call in about 2011 or 2012 from these Hollywood people, and they said, "We need somebody to help us translate Latin." And immediately, I thought, "Okay, they're doing a movie about exorcism here." And I said, "Sure. I'll help." It was The Conjuring. So it was The Conjuring franchise. I was hired as a consultant. So I started to do embedded research, and I became friends with Chad Hayes and Carey Hayes, who were the screenwriters for The Conjuring and The Conjuring II.

And so what I was able to see firsthand was the creation of basically religious belief. Because when people watch The Conjuring and The Conjuring movies, what they're doing is reinforcing belief. If they're Catholic, I know a lot of Catholics who refuse to see the movie because they're too afraid to see it because they believe in demonic possession.

And so I could see that what was happening was that the movies were reinforcing belief. Even if we go into the movie and this is hyperbole, it's completely fabricated. It's says it's based on real events, but is it? Come on. We have skepticism, but what I found by working with people in cognitive science and neuroscience was that even if we have skepticism in what's our frontal lobe part of the brain, our unconscious is processing these things as real. I started to really do this deep dive into what happens when we watch beings on TV or our phones. And the impact that this had was scary, actually. And you also talked about the use of this, right? So this is being utilized by people who create technologies, create either social media applications or, we're being addicted to these things. These things are affecting us in ways in which we should be more aware, but we're not aware of it generally. 

So, I brought these out into the open in my work on conjuring and Catholic media. And how did I get to the UFO thing? What happened was I had been writing this book about the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, and I wanted to know why Catholics used to believe in it and now don't even know about it even though it's still a Catholic doctrine.

And so I went through a lot of archives, which are libraries that have manuscripts, old manuscripts, from about 1200 to about 1800. I kept coming across aerial phenomena. Catholics, European Catholics, would give these things different interpretations, ranging from These were souls from purgatory, these are angels coming down, these are demons and just all kinds of things. This is the house of the Virgin Mary as she's flying around. These are the interpretations that Catholics gave them, and I kept a log of these even though I didn't write about them. 

As I kept a log of these, I finished my book, turned it in, and moved on to my next project. I had a friend, and I showed him the log of these reports, and he said, wow, these sound like UFOs. And I thought he was crazy. I thought, "Oh, that's ridiculous." But there was a conference on UFOs in my town. UFOs and people there who are experiencers who believe that they either were in contact with UFOs or somehow saw UFOs, and it changed their life. They were there, and they sounded like they were European Catholics, only they were giving this unidentified aerial phenomenon a different interpretation.

That's how I began to study the topic of UFOs. Completely a disbeliever, I wanted to figure out what was going on here in terms of belief. I didn't understand that our government had been studying this for 70-plus years. And I happened upon those programs, which people now know about because of the congressional hearings that are happening in Washington about the topic of UFOs. So, I met people in those programs and was absolutely flabbergasted and astounded.

LP: All right, I want to point out something in my background that led me to be interested in a lot of this stuff. We could define this, but this stuff defines itself. It's funny that when you tell the story in American Cosmic about working on The Conjuring, what lept out at me was the Warrens, right?

I'm from Connecticut, originally. And I was a child in the 70s and 80s. And that was a time when a lot of these sorts of topics were in the air, right? And there's a lot of social history reasons. It was a post-60s cracking open of people being able to talk about mysticism and paranormal and all these things that were the result of the 60s.

Regardless, there was a lot of popular culture and popular media around the paranormal and UFOs and all that stuff. And the Warrens were a big part of that, at least in Connecticut and New England. I only realized that they had national reach once I was much older and realized they were involved with some of the TV shows and things like that. That part of the country was a hotbed. There were some famous UFO flaps. New England has a history because it's the oldest part of our country. We have ghost stories and things like that. And as you've seen in your work, and certainly as I've seen over the years, those little funny synchronicities and coincidences come up.

So, that was something early in your book that grabbed me. I was like, Oh, I like the Warrens. It's just a funny little entry point. I remember going to see them. They'd give talks at the local colleges or whatever or a local whatever. They were just always in the air, and I was fascinated by them.

So I was someone that grew up — I'll put it in air quotes — believing in UFOs in terms of like people from outer space. That was something I believed for a lot of my life until probably my early 20s. I was immersed in pop culture, had a bent towards science fiction, all the sort of profile that, like when you describe people in your books or in the decades of reading books like there's just like a predisposition to some combination of like magical thinking and an interest in those topics.

But it was when I became a young adult and got into my twenties that I started to become a bit more critical in my thinking and exposed to other more academic-leaning writers on the topic as opposed to pop writing on the topic, specifically the work of Vallée. One of the things that stood out and that really changed the way I thought about it was something he said, again, in that trilogy of books, which was to get out of the binary thinking about it, which is that UFOs are either aliens from outer space or there are no UFOs. And he said that that's like such the wrong framing and such the wrong question. And it goes to something you talk about a lot, which is whether we are really going to dismiss all these people who are having these experiences. Isn't the more interesting way to look at it to say we don't know what it is yet, or we have some ideas, or everybody's bringing something to it? But there are many, many, many people who, through the years and ages and history, report experiences with this phenomenon. Do we really want to dismiss them and say they're not aliens from outer space? And that really cracked my mind open to thinking about the folklore, the connections to folklore, the connections to who's the little green man? Well, he's a leprechaun. Well, he's a fairy. Well, he's a sprite. Well, he's a Martian — the iconography of that, the angels, the demons.

As you've explored what I'll call the folkloric connection or how far back the sightings go, how far back does it go? Or a better way to ask, like, where does the comparison or the analogy break down? And to clarify, I think of religion in general as ultimately being a long memory of something that happened, like not something that was invented out of thin air.

And I have no personal theories about what the things were that early people experienced, but they clearly framed things they were in awe of just the same way we are framing UFOs and technological terms or AI or what have you. We do the best we can to make sense of the things we experience.

So I guess what I'm asking is, how far back in time have you gone? Are you primarily interested in the Catholic era, or what are people describing?

Diana Pasulka: It was shocking to me to tell you the truth when I realized that there were so many resonances between the historical work that I did where I focused on this information and contemporary reports of UFOs down to specific details that were just improbable as coincidences, right?

In my work, I go back to the medieval era. And the Catholics kept really great records, and I've been to the Vatican and their various archives and looked at interesting aerial phenomena events that go back to 1200 and on up. My specialty isn't first century or anything before that, but I have obviously had a lot of friends whose specialties cover those areas.

Academics, you have to understand, are pretty risk-averse to doing this type of work. I had already been a full professor and chair of my department, so I felt good. I felt comfortable doing this work and not being stigmatized for it. But absolutely younger professors are going to be reticent to do this work. As my work became influential in my field and anthropology, lots and lots of professors reached out to me and said, okay, I'm ready to do this work. And I do the Hindu tradition, or I do Buddhist traditions, or I do medieval Chinese traditions. I do Islamic traditions. And there are so many people now who are doing this historical work that goes back and identifying these aerial phenomena in these traditions, doing the translations.

It's amazing what's happening. Dr. John Mack, from Harvard, was also studying this from a psychiatric standpoint because he didn't believe when he first started to do the study. He thought that people were having pathologies. 

So he did a study of the people, and he found that they were ordinary in every respect. They didn't have pathologies. So, of course, that led him into the rabbit hole of UFOs, right? And the research route he took right before he passed away was going to indigenous communities because they have oral traditions that are really old. Actually, that's what I started to do, too. I started to say, "Okay, how far back does this go?"

So, I spent a lot of time looking at Australia. I did some interviews with people in Australia for my latest book, and I also talked to people who are indigenous Australians. They claim that their tradition goes back 65,000 years, okay? And that's a huge oral tradition, and they say that there's contact with these beings for that long.

So I don't know how long it goes back. When you look at the records from my research, they look extremely similar to what's happening today. Even the details of the instruments that are used to examine people and things like that are just incredibly strange. They try to talk about it in the way in which a medieval Catholic would be able to talk about it, right? Whereas a person today would say, "Oh, these little green guys or these grays came into my room, and they had this instrument, and they were scanning me, and the instrument looked like this. It looked like a light source, had a light on it, and they were using a laser." A medieval European would say, "This being, which was about three feet tall, had a dart, and on the end of the dart was a fire, and they used the fire to go up and down my spine." That's what I found, and it really shocked me.

LP: Yeah. A few things in there I wanted to comment on. I have yet to be able to divorce whether it's a result of your work or if your work is just part and parcel of this observation that I've had recently. Two figures, John Mack and Allen Hynek, have both had a renaissance in terms of people revisiting and talking about them again. I'm old enough to remember that there was an arc to Mack's public life in terms of him being credible because of his credentials. Then, there was some controversy around his work and his use of regression with the experiencers. Then, he was going on a different path towards the end of his life; that is, he was getting to the heart of his work.

And then you talk about Hynek in your book and your connections to his, even his interest in esoterica and practices. And I've just seen his name coming up again and again, and he's another figure that was always treated as a curio because of his closeness to the world of officialdom and the government. He was treated skeptically, but because of your work and certainly the work of Jacques and other people, he's being cast in a more favorable light, is my perception.

But I wanted to ask you something. You mentioned your conversations with indigenous people in Australia. I recently rewatched The Right Stuff. And have you ever seen the film?

Diana Pasulka: I'm sad to say I haven't. I feel really terrible about that.

LP: Oh, then I hope I don't spoil it. There's a section of the film that reminds me of you and would resonate so powerfully with you.

The film is the story of the Mercury program. During the part of the film that deals with John Glenn's orbit, his initial orbit of the Earth, there's a scene where Gordon Cooper has to go to Australia to a satellite station because when Glenn passes that part of the Pacific, that's the only way they can communicate with him.

And while he's in Australia, there's a group of Aboriginal people hanging out near the satellite station. As he was walking from his car to the satellite station, one of the Aborigines approached him and said, "Hey, what are you doing here?" And he laughed, and he said, "I'm an astronaut, and my friend is going to pass by, and I'm going to talk to him." And the Aborigine says, Oh, we know about space and stars and communication. And he says, really, what are you talking about? Do you do? And he says, no, not me, but him over there. He points to an elder and says, He knows all about it. He communicates. He knows all about it. Would you want him to help you?" And Cooper says, "You know what, man, we could use all the help we could get. I want my friend to be okay." 

And so it cuts to some other stuff. And then when Glenn's overhead, it does this montage, as you talk about actually in some of your work lending fiction and fact. They're stoking a fire. The aboriginal people are stoking a fire, and they're chanting and singing songs. And the fire, the embers, the coal, the red embers drift up into space. At that moment, it cuts to Glenn going through a field of little sparkly lights. And he has the experience that they're alive. And he's talking to ground control, and he's in awe of these little creatures. He calls them little light creatures all around them. And he's asking, "Do you think they could be alive?" And ground control's like, "Whatever, enjoy it." And he takes out a camera and takes a bunch of pictures. 

By the way, they never allude to the pictures again. I'm very curious as to whether that was real, whether he actually took pictures of them. But it keeps going back and forth between the Aborigines.

Diana Pasulka: That's fascinating. That's fascinating. Yeah. I did not know that. I'm going to watch it as soon as possible.

LP: It's a beautiful moment. It's a really beautiful moment. I figured it would resonate with you.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, it does.

LP: So let's use that as an entry point to talk about media and their role in shaping belief. When I put down Encounters, something that occurred to me or a feeling I was left with was like couching your work in terms of the UFO phenomenon. I feel like it does your work short shrift like it takes up too much of the mental space around your work because it's so sensational and interesting that that aspect of it. I'm more interested in the idea of nonhuman intelligence, which is really what you're talking about in the book. And you're striving to talk more about in the book. But I'm curious about the role of media and, more importantly, the why. 

I was talking to my significant other the other day about this. And as it turns out, she's reading a book that is unrelated but related. It has a lot to do with the idea of — and I don't know if they use the term in the book — but of the noosphere, like this idea that there's a field and an ongoing communication between all the different intelligences on Earth, plants, animals, inanimate objects. And I was telling her about your book, and we were talking about it, and where I get tripped up is who cares about shaping this belief and why? Who cares about breaking our connection with the larger world and perhaps with other entities? , I struggle to believe that there's some point where you're either a billionaire or a government figure or a filmmaker where you get pulled into this room. You're told this is actually the larger work of overculture, and this is what we're going to do. There was a time in my life when I was convinced that's how the world worked. So I go back and forth. I don't know what to make of the idea of puppet masters. It's not a specific question, but I suspect you know what I'm getting at.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Yeah. And the danger, of course, is that if we go there, if we talk about it, people will say, you are a conspiracy theorist, right?

Plato was the first conspiracy theorist, at least in the Western tradition. He said, there's this cave; we all live in it, and the information we get are these shadows on the wall. And that's media, basically. So after I wrote American Cosmic, of course, I had been exposed to the specific mechanisms of shifting the narrative of UFOs, right?

It is definitely not a conspiracy to say that there was this program called Project Blue Book. Allen Hynek directed that, and part of the reason why he has this dual kind of characterization in public is that he was engaged in discrediting people, even physicists and scientists, who believed in, saw, and studied UFOs.

And that was part of Project Blue Book's job. So, it had various goals, and that was one of the goals. And they also utilized media to do that. When I began my study, one of the first things I did was go to the Air Force digital collections. And also I had a friend who worked there. I wanted to get in and look at some of the stuff that they had there. And they said, what is she doing her work on? And he said, UFOs. And they said, certainly not. No. And so I was like, okay, that's fine. I'll try to get access another way.

LP: So I didn't mean UFOs. I meant something else! (laughter)

Diana Pasulka: That's when I realized I better not say this. That's when I went to the Vatican, I told Tyler, I said, don't tell them we're in any way affiliated with working on UFOs or don't tell them you're part of the Space Force, right? Or else we won't be able to get in. 

I kept seeing photographs. So, they have a lot of photographs of the early space program and of a lot of the early people who worked on the rocket calculations and things like that. Wernher von Braun was there, but so was Walt Disney. And so Walt Disney was in so many of these photographs. And I thought that was fascinating. I'm still fairly naive about this. And so I thought it was interesting, but I took note. Okay, Walt Disney has something to do with this. And later, I found out why. It's because there's a collaboration on what can be known about UFOs publicly. And because the media is our way of gaining knowledge about things, it was partially controlled that way.

And it was Blue Book. By the way, Alan Hynek changed his mind about UFOs toward the end of his life. So that's why, whereas before you could say, oh, he's a bad guy, but now he's a good guy because he recognized, yeah, there is something here, and we do have to study this. So he broke away from his previous position, and he was a patriot. He was basically doing the work that he thought he was trying to protect our country, national interests, and the American people. To call him a bad guy is not to actually see the nuances of what he had to do. 

So there we're asking this question about the Allegory of the Cave because the Allegory of the Cave, of course, is a section in Plato's Republic, and it's a dialogue between Plato's brother and Socrates, who is his teacher.

I believe that your listeners are most likely aware of what it is: Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I won't go into what happens, but it's been repurposed a lot for movies today. The Matrix is based on the idea that we live in a simulated reality, and we have no clue that we do. And there are these bad actors who are forcing us to live in this reality and utilizing us while doing so. Okay, so this is the idea. Well, after American Cosmic, I was very shocked at the extent and the organization of this group to basically show us what they wanted us to see about UFOs. They were very effective at it. I became fairly, well, shocked is one word, depressed is another word.

I guess I became somewhat depressed because I thought, if UFOs are like this, certainly everything is then, right? A lot of things that we see will be like this as well. That's when I decided to look at the various ways in which these texts from culture go way back, like Plato's Republic, which asks the question, can there be a just society? Can there be a democracy, basically? And it ends with this allegory of the cave. It never really answers that question, but it ends with this as an answer. And so I start to look then, I re-look at certain texts like I look at the parables of Jesus and I look at the New Testament. I started to see things differently than before. I started to see that there were people who were basically using code to talk to other people and saying, look, this is what it's like. And this is how you have to survive it. There were almost structural keys if we had an industrial society on any level, where there's a society, a hierarchical society, that was large enough. Almost the structure involved in it has to do with deception, some deception, in order to keep everything going. I've been studying for a long time, so I re-looked at a lot of the works of René Girard and Plato, and then I looked at 1984 and the more recent literature that was dystopian. What I found was that there was a difference. When you look at the more recent literature, there's no out for us. It is just the way it is. This is how it is. And this is how, yes, it's depressing, but this is what it's like. Whereas the former literature, the older literature, So I spent some time in Encounters exploring that and talking about specific examples of when I met people who were the puppet masters, who were actually, their job was to actually create the media, control the media that we were being exposed to about UFOs.

And by the way, my philosophy friends didn't like this reading. I would insist, I would say, "Let's look at the Allegory of the Cave again, and let's pay attention to the puppet master. Plato just didn't put them in there. He put them in there on purpose." And they said, "No, no, that's just a rhetorical device, Diana. Like, what are you doing?" But I found some philosophers who actually did read it like me, and I met them, and we discussed it.

LP: So you're very cautious, I don't want to say cautious, but you're doing more of the work of presenting information, and you're not necessarily saying, "Therefore, here's my cosmological conclusion." And that's fine. Like I told you, it's not your role, or you're not prepared to do that. I'm not asking you to do that, although I'm happy to have that conversation. The way I read the total, not only of your two previous books, but also my work in the last specifically 30 years of reading about this stuff and reading about folklore and religious tradition and spiritual traditions is that it appears that there are many Writers and traditions and philosophies talking about an age-old struggle between forces that are some combination of human or nonhuman, potentially with some contact between the two, and some obscuring about what the real nature of reality is for most of us.

But one can transcend that by having what might be called ritualistic or spiritual practices that allow you to reconnect with an earlier intuition and sense of connectedness. I'm trying to stay as non-dogmatic and broad in my language as possible. That is the general story of the human condition that all of these people, including yourself, are talking about.

Diana Pasulka: It seems to be, I agree, And each of the people I feature in the most recent book tell that story and do that work in their ways in which either through their lives or actually do the work like Dr. Iya Whiteley, who trains astronauts and pilots. I attended the Sol organization, the Sol Foundation's inaugural conference at Stanford last weekend. And it was amazing. She gave a presentation, and she talked about her work with astronauts and pilots and training them, especially astronauts, to be in extreme environments. I also like what she did, and I feature her in my book. She discussed her work on pre-verbal, and I know it sounds like an oxymoron pre-verbal language. She says that we all have a set, it's almost like a language, okay, but it's not verbal, but we utilize it in environments when you do something, but, and then you realize what you did, and you say, Oh, how did I know to do that? Things like that. 

A friend of mine was in a car, and we were driving. She just rolled up her window, and then a rock came and hit the window right after she did that. On some level, she knew that was happening. Whether she saw it out of her vision and her body responded to it. 

So what Dr. Whiteley does is she helps people, even surgeons, because she was so successful at doing this with pilots and with astronauts that the medical community reached out to her and said, can you train our surgeons? So, she's developing this type of connection of information. We do have a connection to information that we forget. And so her work is very important, especially to help people who are surgeons. They're working on our bodies, right? Our lives. And literally, all of the communities that she's talking about impact our lives.

Okay, so she's talking about pilots who we fly with, right? And she's talking about astronauts who have billion-dollar satellites in space, all of these people, surgeons. So her work is very important. And yes, that's what she's doing. She's reconnecting people to this information source that we never talk about. We're generally not taught about this. Now, another part of your question is this seems to be the human condition. I've read up on Indigenous authors, and I highly recommend Tyson Yunkaporta's book Sand Talk. He's Indigenous Australian, and he presents his worldview in this book, and it's fascinating.

What I recognized was that the tradition of which you and I are part, the Western tradition, and absolutely my book is about our condition, our human condition. And when I go back to the Allegory of the Cave, when I go back to, say, the New Testament, the Gospels of Jesus, and those kinds of works, which talk to us about how to survive in basically governments of injustice, right? "This is a very unjust place, but we live here anyway. How do we deal with that?" This may be just a template of ours, the Western tradition, which I suggest is probably global. But it may not be for certain communities like Indigenous Australians. They don't need that kind of book, right? But we certainly need that kind of book, like Plato's Republic.

We need that in order to teach us about how best to flourish in these kinds of societies. So, it's not universal. It might be global, and it might be specifically for places like ours. I'm not entirely set on that yet.

LP: In your opinion, did people like Plato and Aristotle intuit this, uncover it, or were they part of a tradition where they were taught it?

Diana Pasulka: You can see the shift in traditions in Plato's dialogues. And he ascribes this older tradition, an older lineage, which is an oral tradition to Socrates. Now, of course, Socrates never wrote anything, and in fact, Socrates is not an advocate of writing because he believes that this older tradition will be lost. He even spent some time talking about this pre-verbal tradition that you and I just discussed that Dr. Whiteley has access to. He talks about it in terms of, and he even thinks that the Athenians who he's talking to are going to laugh at him for talking about it because he actually makes a joke about it. He says, "Some people think that the trees have a language." And he says, "You might find that funny." He's talking to the younger Athenians, but he says, "But the technology of writing (which was a new technology for them), it's going to take you apart. It's going to sever your relationship with this older tradition." It's clear as day. That's again why the Dialogues are so important for our history: you can identify the severing that we experienced.

LP: It definitely paints things like the mystery traditions in a new context, right? It becomes not just like these fun philosophical parlor games, and it's actually an important means of transmission, like continuity.

Diana Pasulka: Yes. Absolutely. Yes. It is. I do spend a lot of time talking about the oral tradition and what's lost. We're so text-based. That's changing, but what's lost when things get completely digitized or even in books? 

Here's an example of something that I learned at the Sol Conference. It was in a talk by Rear Admiral Tim Gaudelet. He is in the Navy, or he was, so he's retired Navy, and he's an Admiral. And so my father used to, who's passed on, used to tell us this story about when he was in the Coast Guard, he told the kids, right? He said, "We were in the Coast Guard, and we were on the Bittersweet, the ship called the Bittersweet. And we were out in the middle of the ocean. We were stopped." He was the sonar man, by the way. And so he could see me at the bottom of the ocean, a gigantic object that had moved under the ship. And thus, the ship stopped. Any electricity in the ship stopped also. They couldn't move for hours and hours. They were terrified. The sonar was still working, though, so he could report it, and it was scary and terrible. And he told this story a lot, and my brothers and I remember it. I only thought about it when Tim gave his lecture at Sol, and he basically said, this is what happens when these objects come under our naval ships.

And he went through the whole thing, detail after detail, and I couldn't believe it. But that was an oral tradition that my dad passed on to me, right? And I remembered it, and here it was confirmed by data that the Navy had. But I told my brothers and my brothers said, "Oh, that was just a story Dad told." And I said, "Just because it was an oral tradition doesn't mean that it was inaccurate. It was probably more accurate than a written tradition, and I just got it verified that this was, this actually happens to people still today."

LP: It's so funny because there are moments in the book, like when you gave an example about the car window and the rock, and something said to roll up to the car window. A psychologist would say you're just overlaying that meaning retroactively, and there's something to say from science on all these things. And up until very recently, that's how I would have reacted. And what I've come to realize in the last couple of years is that There's a limit to rationality. We all want to be rational, or we don't want to be irrational. We don't want to lose our tethering in reality. But that doesn't mean that the reality we're sharing is the real world. That's why it's also difficult to navigate, right? There are literally centuries of this sort of overlay and this conditioning.

And it's all so complicated because it's mixed signals. None of it should get thrown out, and none of it should be the whole story. And that's a really difficult ground to stand on, right? You don't want to dismiss science, but you don't want to make it a religion.

Diana Pasulka: yeah, that's the method that we use in religious studies. You just described it very well. So it's this knife's edge, right? So we don't conclude, but we also don't dismiss.

LP: It's essentially the work of, you're trying to have non-dualistic thinking.

Diana Pasulka: That's right. It's not either or. It's and, but.

LP: It's funny because I had a guest on about a month or two ago who was writing a book about one of my favorite Authors and pop philosophers, a guy named Robert Anton Wilson. Are you familiar with him?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, I am. Yeah. He's fascinating.

LP: It doesn't surprise me that you'd be familiar with him. It wouldn't have surprised me if you weren't, though, because a lot of people dismiss him. But he wrote a little book that I love called Cosmic Trigger. Cosmic Trigger talks about a lot of these themes, about the history of the little green man and who he is.

The book also tells the story of Jack Parsons and his connection to … the occult? That would be too small a way to say it.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, he's interesting! (laughter)

LP: We could do an hour on Parsons, and maybe we will someday. There's this throwaway section of the book that never made sense to me until I read Encounters; he talks about being at a party in the mid-70s, And there's a bunch of SRI people there. And he runs into Jacques. And they have an interaction. Wilson's very aware of the fact that they're from very different worlds but also that they're studying the same things.

Diana Pasulka: Fascinating.

LP: Ever since I read that little anecdote 30 years ago for the first time, it's driven me nuts. It's driven me nuts. I never had a chance to talk to Wilson. It was the first time I realized, oh, these people move between worlds. And it's something we all do. We think that our musicians live in a musician's world, directors live in a director's world, and politicians live in a politician's world. The Sol Foundation is proving that these are people coming at the same thing from different points of view. And when they meet, that's where the interesting things really happen. And I think you did a wonderful service of connecting Vallée, the materialist, to Vallée, the spiritualist, if you will. It paints such a fuller picture of him for me.

This other author has a Wilson biography coming out. It's going to be the first definitive biography of Robert Anton Wilson. He had talked to Vallée for the book. They had some interaction. I always suspected that Jacques must have had some kind of practice. 

I'm not up on all his forbidden science books. I have yet to read the two more recent ones. I wasn't aware that he had been talking about his involvement in having a practice, but I'm just so convinced that when he's gone, there is a reassessment of him. I can't believe there hasn't been a biography of him. He owns the market on information about himself, and by putting out his memoirs and his journals, he's definitely establishing a canon. Still, it's going to be fascinating to see how he's assessed because he's a much more important figure than most people are even aware of. A disservice is done because people associate him with UFOs as opposed to the broader topic we're really talking about here. He's such an important character.

Diana Pasulka: He really is. When I first delved into his work, I read Passport to Magonia, and it really reminded me of my book about Purgatory. We were doing something very similar. Then, I recognized that he had a Ph.D. in information science from Northwestern. And he was an astronomer. And back in that time, this was like just ten years ago. Now, he has a lot of his information and data and topic articles on academia.edu for free. But back then, I had to microfiche a lot of his work, and I'd ask him for it, too. And he said, "Hmm, I don't know where I put that."

And what struck me at the beginning of meeting him was that he was a venture capitalist technologist who was interested in UFOs. And I thought, wait a minute, there's a direct correlation here. Like he, he worked on ARPANET, right? Which was the free internet. Now, what's going on? That, you can't separate that.

And that's why I focus on nonhuman intelligence. And a lot of that story right now is the story of AI, too. I was beginning to understand, and I knew it, but I didn't know what those connections were until I delved into all of Jacques's work and talked to Jacques and the people around Jacques.

But, at the Sol Foundation, Dr. Gary Nolan introduces Jacques, and it's overwhelming. Okay, so there's an overwhelming feeling of something in the conference room. You could feel it, the historicity. And I'm sure Gary had a lot more to say, but he basically couldn't say it because he was emotional. He said, "I owe," and then stopped and said, "No, we all owe a debt to Jacques Vallée."

LP: I feel in a very specific way personally that he saved my thinking about a lot of these topics and helped me reframe them in a way that got me out of the rabbit hole because there was a time when I was very preoccupied with this topic in a way that was very unhealthy because it was leading to all the things you see when people go down this corridor without any discipline. It's very tormenting.

Diana Pasulka: Yes, it is. Yes. It does do that to people. Yeah. He's helpful that way. A lot of people, me too, actually. Yeah.

LP: Yeah. One other quick thing. When I saw the announcement about it, the Sol Foundation seemed like it was the emergence of the Invisible College.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, the visible part of the Invisible College, absolutely. I think it is.

LP: It's going to be fascinating to see what comes of that organization. Yeah, Diana, thank you. I've got two pages of notes here of things I didn't even talk to you about, but I'm sure everyone who books time with you feels the same way. I really appreciate your work, and I've enjoyed your books. I don't read many books on these topics anymore because I find it so hard to weed through the information. It's just also. That cross purposes, but I very much enjoy your work, so thank you so much for making time to do this.

Diana Pasulka: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on your show. I really appreciate it.