Diana Walsh Pasulka

Early life and background

Diana Walsh Pasulka grew up in California in a religiously mixed household — a Jewish mother and an Irish Catholic father — in an otherwise secular home. She would later become a practicing Roman Catholic as an adult, a biographical detail that matters for understanding her scholarly trajectory: long before she wrote about UFOs, she was a specialist in Catholic devotional culture, particularly the doctrine of purgatory and the mechanisms by which institutions authorize belief in the invisible and the miraculous. She earned a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, an M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. That formation in religious studies — rather than in astronomy, physics, or folklore — is the lens through which she would eventually approach UFO belief: not as a question of what is objectively true in the sky, but as a question of how communities construct authority, evidence, and meaning around the unexplainable.

Academic career

Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), where she chaired the Department of Philosophy and Religion from 2015 to 2019. Her early scholarship, collected in Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), examined how the Catholic Church historically managed belief in an unseen intermediate afterlife — a study in institutional epistemology that anticipates her later interest in UFO belief as a comparable system of unofficial doctrine, testimony, and relic. She went on to co-edit two anthologies exploring religion's collision with modern technology: Posthumanism: The Future of Homo Sapiens (2018, with Michael Bess) and Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Simone Natale). Both volumes rehearse the theme that would define her public career: that digital and scientific technologies do not displace religious impulses so much as give them new vessels.

Pasulka has also maintained an active relationship with the Vatican's archival apparatus. She has worked with the Vatican Apostolic Archive (the institution once known as the Vatican Secret Archive) on a translation project involving the canonization records of St. Joseph of Copertino, a seventeenth-century Italian friar venerated — and later designated the patron saint of aviators — for his reputed levitations. Between 2014 and 2018 she conducted archival and field research that fed directly into her next and most consequential book, examining how the Church's historical machinery for authenticating the miraculous compares to the informal, tech-industry-driven machinery now authenticating UFO testimony.

American Cosmic and the Silicon Valley ethnography

Pasulka's defining work is American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019), the product of a six-year ethnographic study of an unlikely population: credentialed, high-status scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs — many based in or around Silicon Valley — who privately hold serious beliefs about extraterrestrial intelligence and UFO phenomena while maintaining outwardly rational, secular professional lives. The book's argument cuts against a longstanding assumption in both popular culture and academia: that UFO belief is the province of the marginal, the credulous, or the poorly educated. Pasulka instead documented physicists, aerospace and biotech figures, and technology executives who treat the subject with the same seriousness they bring to their professional work, and who often keep that belief carefully hidden from colleagues and the public.

The book is built around two central, pseudonymous informants. "Tyler D.," a biotech and aerospace insider, believes he receives ideas — including some of his most commercially successful inventions — through communication with a nonhuman, off-world intelligence. "James" is a visual artist whose reported contact experience upended his prior life and redirected his creative work entirely toward nonhuman and extraterrestrial imagery. The book's most vivid and most debated episode has Tyler blindfolding Pasulka and a fellow scholar and driving them into the New Mexico desert to an undisclosed site he treats as a kind of shrine — a place where, he claims, a UFO once crashed and where relic-like material evidence can still be recovered. Pasulka describes witnessing the extraction of an artifact that she says was subjected to scientific study and found to resist conventional explanation.

From these encounters Pasulka builds a broader thesis: that belief in extraterrestrial intelligence is coalescing into a genuine, emergent quasi-religion — one poised to inherit functions that institutional religion has historically performed, among them explaining humanity's cosmic place, offering contact with a higher intelligence, and providing a framework of ultimate meaning. She argues that this shift has been enabled by a confluence of forces: the cultural saturation of science-fiction media (she gives particular weight to The X-Files), the confirmed existence of thousands of exoplanets, declining institutional trust in organized religion, and the charismatic authority that Silicon Valley wealth and technical expertise now command in American culture. In her framing, elite tech figures function as a new priestly class, and their private conviction lends UFO belief a cultural legitimacy it lacked when it was associated mainly with contactees and saucer clubs.

Reception and criticism

American Cosmic was reviewed widely and, on balance, favorably as a serious scholarly intervention in a subject usually left to journalists or advocates. Foreword Reviews called it "a superb investigation into the birth and rise of a new religion," and Vox's Sean Illing highlighted its use of UFO belief as a window onto broader questions of cultural authority and meaning-making. The book's central move — treating UFO belief as a legitimate object of religious-studies analysis rather than a symptom to be explained away — was widely credited with helping open space for more academically serious engagement with UAP topics during the disclosure era.

The book also drew sharp criticism, most notably from Emily Harnett's essay "Close Encounters of the Digital Kind" in The Baffler. Harnett argued that Pasulka's evident awe toward her wealthy informants compromises the ethnographic distance the book claims: in her reading, the account of Tyler D. becomes "less...an ethnography of UFO culture than a hagiography of a millionaire." Harnett was particularly skeptical of the book's sympathetic treatment of Tyler's belief that his profitable inventions were transmitted to him by an off-world intelligence, suggesting his behavior — including obsessive surveillance habits Pasulka frames as the mark of a wounded visionary — could as easily be read as narcissism, and pointedly noted that "the Venn Diagram of 'millionaires and billionaires' and 'cranks and weirdos' is probably just a circle." Harnett's deeper objection was structural: that the book never seriously interrogates why Silicon Valley in particular incubates such belief systems, or what it means that tech wealth can effectively launder fringe conviction into publishable, prestige-adjacent scholarship. The Los Angeles Review of Books offered a similarly probing, if less polemical, engagement with the desert pilgrimage scene and the question of what kind of evidentiary weight a scholar of religion should assign to a blindfolded drive into the desert and an artifact she cannot independently verify. Taken together, the critical response does not dispute that Pasulka accurately reports what her subjects believe; it disputes how much epistemic credit the book extends to those beliefs, and whether wealth and credentials are doing unearned persuasive work in the narrative.

Encounters and the phenomenology of contact

In 2023 Pasulka published Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (St. Martin's Essentials), narrated in audiobook form by Pasulka herself. Where American Cosmic focused on belief formation, Encounters shifts toward the phenomenology of reported contact itself — the structure and texture of encounter narratives among scientists, military personnel, and ordinary experiencers, several drawn again from technology and aerospace fields. One review described it as "the most serious academic engagement with the experiencer phenomenon currently in print," praising its refusal either to dismiss experiencers as delusional or to credulously validate the literal content of their claims. The book extends Pasulka's methodological signature: treating first-person testimony about nonhuman contact as legitimate ethnographic data, worthy of careful description, even while withholding judgment on its ultimate metaphysical status.

The Others and the AI turn

Pasulka's most recent book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny (St. Martin's), was published in July 2026 and became a New York Times bestseller. It extends her framework beyond extraterrestrial belief to encompass artificial intelligence and life-extension research, arguing that contemporary fascination with AI and UAP experiencer phenomena share a common root: a resurgent desire for contact with — and transcendence through — nonhuman intelligence. The book draws on the writings of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke as intellectual forerunners who anticipated a convergence of technology, consciousness, and the nonhuman. It positions Silicon Valley's parallel investments in AI and longevity research as continuous with, rather than separate from, the UFO belief systems she chronicled in American Cosmic — both framed as competing bids to answer the same underlying anxieties about human significance in a universe that may not be uniquely human after all.

Media work and cultural impact

Pasulka has become one of the most visible academic faces of UFO studies in the mainstream disclosure-era conversation. She served as consulting producer on Netflix's Emmy-nominated docuseries Encounters (2023), lending scholarly framing to a mass-audience treatment of high-profile sighting cases. She has also worked as Chief Religious Consultant for The Conjuring film franchise, applying her expertise in Catholic ritual and belief to a very different, horror-fiction register, and appeared as an expert voice in a J.J. Abrams-produced UFO docuseries. She is a frequent guest on outlets like Coast to Coast AM and has been profiled or quoted in the New York Times, Vox, and other national outlets — a media footprint that has made her, alongside a small handful of credentialed academics, a recognizable translator of UFO discourse for audiences skeptical of both tabloid sensationalism and reflexive scientific dismissal.

Legacy and significance

Pasulka's importance to the field lies less in any specific factual claim about UFOs than in the interpretive frame she has popularized: that the persistence and shape of UFO belief is best studied as a religious-studies problem, revealing how contemporary societies — including their most educated and powerful members — construct systems of meaning, authority, and evidence around experiences that fall outside institutional science and institutional religion alike. Her critics argue that this frame, in practice, can shade into uncritical amplification of wealthy informants' self-mythologizing, and that a genuinely rigorous ethnography would interrogate rather than narrate the plausibility of a Silicon Valley figure's claim to alien-transmitted insight. Both readings can be true at once: Pasulka has done more than almost any other tenured academic to make UFO belief a subject fit for serious scholarly and mainstream cultural attention, while leaving open — deliberately, by her own account — the question of whether that attention has been extended too generously to her own sources.