New Realities recorded February 24, 2024
Summary
Diana Pasulka, author of “American Cosmic” and “Encounters,” discusses her research on the intersection of religion and the UFO phenomenon. She explains how the narrative surrounding UFOs has evolved from a marginalized topic to one with spiritual implications, challenging traditional religious views and fostering new forms of belief among those who have had encounters.
Transcript
Welcome. I have a very special guest. Someone I’m really excited about talking to you today, Diana Pasulka. She is the author of two fantastic books on the UFO phenomenon, American Cosmic, and her latest book, Encounters. Thanks Diana for being here.
Diana Pasulka
Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me.
Alan Steinfeld
You know, I appreciate your intelligence and your research and your approach to the book. Because you lay out in encounters, it’s not a direct talking about the UFO phenomenon, but you talk about it, around it, and through it. Is that… Was that your strategy?
Diana Pasulka
Yes. Okay. So, two things I study, religion, and then the UFO phenomena, which I started to study in late, well, actually 2012, early 2012. And each of those what I’ve noticed is that people have a stereotype idea of what they are, but once you start to scratch the surface, you recognize that there’s so much more going on. And so my job is to teach religion to undergraduates at a university, but I have been talking to people of the whole spectrum of people about UFOs. And what I noticed and what I’ve done into, you know, when I studied UFOs, I had a very clear idea of what they were, and it was all misinformation from the media. And so once I started to get rid of all that misinformation, I started to say, wait a minute, it’s an event. These things are really events, and they’re transformative events for people regardless if they have any woo-woo stuff associated with them or not. And so I started to look at people, you know, obviously people who are experiencers in every kind of way, not just full-on experiencers who feel like they’ve been experienced, like things coming into their room, but also pilots who see things in the sky and that’s it. And they say, okay, it’s changed my reality because I know that thing is not ours, right? Not of earth. So, you know, so the myriad ways people experience these kinds of things historically too. So I’ve been looking at that. So it’s not a straightforward answer what is a UFO or UAP. There, you know, so that’s what I did. I basically said, well, once people have this experience, these are the effects. And that was my strategy.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Well, the subtext I got from your book is that there’s a huge change and you use the word religious. And then I want to ask you about religious versus spiritual, but there’s something shifting within the psyche of the general public that I think is the underlying feature of this book encounters. What is that thing that you think is shifting in our world views and our understanding of spirit and soul and consciousness? I know it’s a big question, but what’s changing you feel?
Diana Pasulka
It’s a big question, but we need to talk about it, and I think everybody kind of already feels it happening. You know, we are global, and now we’re connected. We still have nation-states, but really we don’t have borders because of the Internet. Okay, so this changes everything. It changes the way we do commerce. It changes the way we think, and it definitely changes our quote-unquote religions. So a lot of people are born into their religion and learn it from their parents and pass it down and that type of thing. But then when they get to a certain age, they question, what is it, you know, should I keep this tradition or, you know, they have these questions. And right now what’s happening is that there is a spirituality quasi religion. I call it a new form of religion in which people are reassessing what’s good from their religious traditions, and they’re getting rid of what they think is old and archaic. And that catapults them into a situation where they get rid of the mediator, like they get rid of a priest or they get rid of that, you know, and they start to question and they start to go into communities of people who are what we call seekers. And these people are actually having these experiences. A lot of people who have these experiences of UFOs are catapulted out of their own traditional religions, or they get strengthened within their traditional religions, but in very different ways.
Alan Steinfeld
My problem with some of that is I was catapulted into this whole field new age. It was called in the beginning of the 80s. So this is different than religion because religion to me is based on belief and this is not about belief in a sense. Do you know Budd Hopkins famous line? It’s really funny, but someone asked about people, UFOs, it seems like cults or religion. Budd says to the guy, this is the opposite of a religion. A religion is, or cult is, all belief and no miracles. This is all miracles and no belief. That’s what makes us different. But why don’t we just call it a spiritual phenomena. And the idea about spirit for me is understanding there’s a science to incarnation, there’s a science to consciousness. So if we call it religion, then we sort of take that science possibility away. Does that make sense?
Diana Pasulka
It totally makes sense. And of course I understand where you’re coming from. The situation though, and this is what makes my job somewhat difficult is because it’s a niche field, which means that it’s small, and when we talk about religion, we generally talk about it to undergraduates, right? So young people who have never thought about religion before. But I think most people have inherited an idea of religion that’s Western, is Western-centric. In this case, they see it as antithetical to science. And they also see it as monotheistic. And they also see it as devoid of miracles, which by the way almost every religion is a miraculous phenomena in the beginning. So nothing to take away from your argument, but what I’m saying is that it’s a very Protestant view of religion. Because if you go to, what about Marian apparitions? You know, here you have all miracles and you have the Catholic Church basically trying to make them go away. Right. Right? So when a miracle happens in the Catholic Church, they’re very uncomfortable with it. They’re like, okay, what do we do about this? You know, and a lot of times they suppress the narratives. So in traditional religions that you and I are familiar with say Protestantism, Catholicism, there’s a push to get rid of the miraculous. And so my suggestion is that the UFO phenomena is the miraculous, just like Bud Hopkins said. However, right now in our modern context, we view these miraculous events as coming from a technologically advanced being, way more advanced than us. The pilots that we’ve talked to can say, oh, this is definitely way more advanced than what I’ve ever seen. Okay, we don’t have fighter jets like this. So what I’m saying is that when I say it’s a new form of religion because it takes the miraculous and it puts it in the guise that we can accept, like it puts it in a new framework. And we accept it as intelligent people. We’re like, that actually makes sense.
Alan Steinfeld
Absolutely. No, I totally get the Marian apparitions. For me, my personal cosmology includes all of that, all the so-called miracles. But I think, you know, I was just at the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Have you been there to see it?
Diana Pasulka
Yeah. It’s amazing.
Alan Steinfeld
It is. There’s a vibration and a feeling and a calmness that emanates. And you know there’s no paint that’s on there. It’s just been in a way manifest. So those are real for me. I mean and I’ve even had my own glimpse of a sort of Marian apparition. And I’ve talked to Ingo Swann when he was alive about some of that stuff that he knew. But for me, I don’t call it necessarily a religion. It’s a higher form of something, like the UFO thing. We can’t expect to really understand it the levels, but I want to make a cosmology that makes all these things a reality that people can contemplate and include without categorizing it, I guess I’m saying, you know?
Diana Pasulka
I fully agree with you. Yeah. So that’s why I included so many different perspectives in encounters. And each person has a different religiosity, you could say. And I end with a former atheist who has this incredibly amazing and well-recorded UFO experience. When he’s a kid, right, in the 1960s, completely changes his reality. He goes through atheism until he actually meets Fulton Sheen, right? Who is this, you know, very talk about Catholic Church suppressing narratives. They really try to suppress Fulton Sheen’s TV show, Life is Worth Living. You know, he was monitored by the FBI. Okay. So this is full machine. He was a miracle in and of himself. I mean, he was a miraculous man with a lot of charisma. And so he turned this atheist into a believer, but he doesn’t have a religion. And that’s where I leave it. And so I hoped that Len Philpu is his name, I hoped that his experience would be like the send-off in my encounters book of like, listen, this is what’s happening. People are being converted, but to what?
Alan Steinfeld
I love all that because to what is great doesn’t have to be to a something because it’s not defined. You can’t recognize something you haven’t cognized first, right? That’s the nature of reality. We’re wiping the slate clean of the past and the belief and facing the reality of a presence, whatever that is. And that in a way is miraculous. But personally, you call yourself a Catholic, right? And I’m just curious, if you don’t want to be personal, but why? Did you have an awakened conversion? And are you now seeing that maybe perhaps that might be an old world view or not. I don’t know.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, that’s a really great question. And I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me that. And I think it’s a good question because I know lots of people think it in their head, like, why is she Catholic? And that’s a really good question. So I’ll tell, I’m going to answer it. Okay. So this is how I describe it. I was just describing it to somebody yesterday, actually. I’m not going to say that that’s, you know, like a lot of Christians say, but I don’t think Catholics actually say this. And by the way, a lot of people don’t understand what Catholicism is or Christianity for that matter, like they just haven’t read the actual texts, you know, and they have stereotypes about what it is. Jesus talked to marginalized people. He talked to women. He talked to lepers. You know, he told people not to follow the rules, that the rules were actually made for them, not them for the rules. So he was basically really enlightened. And here he’s talking to all these people. And it’s a revolutionary movement that he starts. And then it gets taken into the Roman Empire and made into a state religion. And what they do with it is they suppress all of its amazing revolutionary elements. So I want people to know that my understanding of the Catholic Church is that. Okay. Is that it is that narrative of suppression. However, it also created a lot of the institutions that we find ourselves in and it still maintains that there’s an idea of the presence of divine and sacred. Okay. Whereas the Protestant Reformation tries to get rid of that idea of the presence. Okay. And so I had my first, what you would call kind of experiences that I needed to study religion. I had a conversion experience at 11 to Christianity. And then I started to read the texts. And in graduate school, when I started studying all this, the texts, the Bible, didn’t make sense. And I said, I can’t understand what this means. And I have a feeling that it’s been cooked, right? The books have been cooked. And I was right. Okay. So part of the reason that when I got into studying UFOs, I was able to understand the history of disinformation is because of redaction criticism, which is what we do in religious studies is we say, like Elaine Pagels wrote The Gnostic Gospels. And so what she did when she did that, which was in the 70s, she had to learn the languages first by the way, what she uncovered a whole tradition that had been completely suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church of gnosticism. All right. I feel like there are gnostic Christians because Jesus’ teachings live on and they live on through people. And so that’s why I’m Catholic is because I stick to the tradition in the sense that I do the practices. Do I necessarily believe that Catholicism is the only way? No. Right? No, I don’t. But I do believe that practice is super important. And if we don’t do the practices, practices enable us to make these connections to divine, sacred, whatever you want to call those things. And so those practices are best when they’re done with people. And so I have a lot of friends who I met during the course of my studies who are sisters, nuns, monks, brothers. This is my community. So that’s why I’m Catholic. It’s a very personal choice.
Alan Steinfeld
No, I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, it sounds like you’ve had a real experience of the divine, and this is, I mean, you don’t have to tell us that, but it sounds like that’s the thing that connects you to this bigger faith. But it seems to me in all awakenings, it’s a personal sort of identification with the divine. And we can call it Jesus or this, but it’s that divinity that we know is real that I mean, for me, I take it out of a religious forum and just have that connection. And what I’m trying to do is create a bigger cosmology that includes UFOs and miracles and Marian apparitions and incarnation, you in that body, us in these bodies. It’s a science, but we generally are not looking in those directions. So but I think your contribution is valuable because you’re connecting people to a kind of awareness of divinity, which is obviously who we are. Does that make sense?
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, I think we are. Yeah, yeah, no, I think we are. And I appreciate your emphasis on knowing. Right? So I think that there’s a gnosticism that runs through almost all traditional religions. Okay. So you see it in Buddhism. You see it in Hinduism. You see it in Judaism, Christianity, right? There’s this knowing that becomes, because we didn’t have global societies back then. We had just local and regional societies. This is how religions were the ways in which they kept that connection alive. Okay. A lot of those very intense connections though are revolutionary. And so institutions and governments suppress those. It’s just what you see. In the history of religions, there’s a lot, you can see that. Once you study it for any time like a year, you’re studying religions, you’ve got to say, wow, there were some very egalitarian amazing people that were doing this and they got wiped out by people in the name of religion. That’s a fact.
Alan Steinfeld
Like the Cathars. I mean, who knows what was going on with the Cathars.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah. Exactly.
Alan Steinfeld
And they’re still gnostic Christians in Egypt. But that’s my point, the gnosis kind of supersedes religiosity to me because it’s direct knowing.
Diana Pasulka
Yes. Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I totally agree. How do you bridge the two from identifying within the religion and also being in a way agnostic in a sense, a knower? How do you bridge those two?
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, yeah. So once you have an agnostic experience, it determines what directions you take, right? And you kind of, you know, in communication with that, whatever it is, your sacred, whatever you want to call it. What do you do? Well, you, who said it? Gosh, was it Francis of Assisi? You bloom where you’re planted. is what you do. And then see what happens. And sometimes what happens is that, well, I mean, of course you know this, because I’m sure it’s happened to you. Once these things happen in a life, there’s a lot of pushback from conservative, you know, people.
Alan Steinfeld
From your family.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, yeah, from your family a lot of times. My family’s fine with what I do, so. So I don’t get pushed back from my family, but obviously a lot of people do. So I think the UFO, when I look at people who are Catholic or Christian and they’ve had experiences of UFOs, it definitely cracks open their religion. And then they they get all kinds of pushback from their denominational churches, but in the end, it seems to me what they do is they reinterpret their whole tradition from the UFO narrative and they say, got it, got it. Now I understand. And they become much more religious in a sense. When I say religious, they become much more dedicated and committed to living a radical life of this type of gnosis.
Alan Steinfeld
But do you think we’re moving to a narrative, like we’re in a liminal space now, a space in between worlds, in between epochs, we’re right at the cusp of government revealing its secrets. I mean, of course they have, Grusch comes out and says, yeah, they have craft and biologics and bodies and that’s, that’s such a huge worldview people have ignored it, but the government is saying this. So how do we integrate all of this into a bigger worldview that includes religion, all that, and makes it, in a way, okay to push this narrative of knowing to a bigger public?
Diana Pasulka
So this is also such a great question. I’ve had some people, it might have been you, Alan, who said this to me just recently in email exchanges, I think. You wrote these books many years ago, but now I understand them in a completely different way. Okay. So they do this creative work that actually is from their future. And then when they get to that stage in their life, they’re like, oh my goodness, how did I know that then? Right. And this is what I think of about, okay, so when I look at Friedrich Nietzsche who hated religion, right, but loved spirituality, he never set it like that. But if I could paraphrase him, thus spoke Zarathustra is like quite a holy text in a way. It’s his channel. It is, yes. It absolutely is because he’s going beyond the Jewish and Christian tradition to what he thought was the beginning, right? And he’s literally writing in religious scripture, right? Because he’s, you know, he’s okay. But he would hate for me to say that, by the way, I just want to acknowledge that. Okay, so Nietzsche though was writing to a very particular audience and he called this audience the future philosophers. Now, he died, I think in 1900, but I could, don’t quote me on that. So who are the future philosophers? Well, guess what, they’re us, right? And so he’s writing for us, who then pick up his book and totally get it and love it. And then what happens is that we do our work. And you know, so you ask, what can we do to make this, you know, this kind of thing? I think we’ve done it, and I think we’re doing it. And I don’t think that, I think we are speaking to future philosophers too, Alan. Like you wrote a book for future, you know, audiences that are happening, that’s happening now. That happened to American Cosmic. When I wrote it, I said to Tyler, who’s in the book, I said, I feel like I’m from the future. But I didn’t recognize that the future was going to happen in 2021. So it happened, and now like, you know, so that’s what I’m trying to say is like, this, you know, what do we do now? I think we’ve done it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, we’re still doing it. We’re in the middle, you know, where we have to just stick to it. But are we also, I don’t know, agents for the phenomenon, the intelligence, whatever you want, I feel like these downloads were just given to me. It’s so exciting that I feel like we’re agents of that intelligence. Do you feel that way?
Diana Pasulka
Okay. So this is a good question. All of the people in my book tell me that they feel on fire with something that they, it’s almost like a mission that they have, right? And especially people who are affiliated with the military that I talk to. By the way, think of this, agnostic military people. They actually exist. Okay. And what happens is they learn everything they can from the military, then they have this kind of transformative UFO experience. And then they’re like, oh, my mission is totally different now. But they use all the tools that they learned in military training for this mission. Of, you know, like Jose is a good example of helping young people, right, go through, you know, social media and, you know, that kind of environment. And, and how to, how to help their mental health through this and their spiritual crisis and things like that. So, so yeah, so I think that, that, you know, to answer your question, I think that a lot of people are having that feeling I don’t know what it means.
Alan Steinfeld
You have that passion, I think. Yeah, I’ve had yeah, I have had a passion. I’ve had a passion for studying this field, like I didn’t define it as UFOlogy or anything back in the day, I thought of it as like spirituality, religious, like experience and things like that. But maybe you’ve been prepared through your religious studies to be the perfect person to kind of then bridge that understanding into this next level of consideration. Is that possible?
Diana Pasulka
So, well, this is what I think. I think that one of the skills that I’ve developed is to identify people who are um in science and who have had these download experiences that you’re having, right? That you have. And to say, we need to pay attention to their work. Like, you know, Garry Nolan, or Tyler D, Dr. Vallée, and also Eoightley, Dr. Eoightley, who’s really interesting. She’s, yeah, so, you know, so these people are thinking in different ways, and they’re super successful scientists. Uh, so in a sense that they’re spiritual, you know, they’re spiritual and they’re scientific. And the ways in which they do their science, they do it, they do their science in a spiritual way. So that kind of answers a question about, you know, where, you know, how does religion and science, well, it’s a spiritual, it’s a spirituality, um, that they definitely have. They see the world in absolutely spiritual terms. It just feels like you’re, you know, I mean you know you’re on the team there, so it’s like there you go. I’m not sure if I’m on the team, I was, felt like I was translating what they were doing so that people could understand them, because I’d meet them and I’d say I think people really need to know that this person exists. And so I’d write them into my book and, you know, of course with their permission. And, um, and then I, you know, and I was right. People really did want to know what these people thought.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. And the way you lay them out, all these people in your book, whatever, six or seven people, is in a way of these nexus points that then the reader connects, oh, this is the next level. You know, the artificial, the animal intent talking to dolphins and then talking to computers and then this, you know, what is the phenomenon. I just like the way you kind of organize your material because it does, it makes a reader think. But you also say there’s a group of people who have managed the public narrative of the UFO. So there’s these people managing the narrative and there’s other people with this compulsion to talk about it and speak about it. And so who are these people? I mean, you don’t have to name names, but why are they choosing to manage it?
Diana Pasulka
Okay, so Alan, this is where we get back to the whole thing about religion, because you’re like, we shouldn’t call it a religion. This map. Well, we should never call these things religion, right? But we do, and the reason we do is because you can see it in the traditional religions, when these gnostic elements spring up that are revolutionary, another element comes down and tries to narrativize it, you know, and to, you know, so we see that here. And that’s the one thing that I was trying to explain in, um, you know, when I was doing some work in the 2000, 2001, was I began to see the military, you know, say, okay, we’ve got this, you know, we’ve got this truth, we can explain it to you and everything. And I thought, wait a minute, people have already been explaining this. Like I don’t think you really need to explain it to us, but that’s what they’re doing. So we see that now a lot of people who know nothing about UFOs, they’ll go on, you know, the internet or social media, and they’ll see that the government has it all figured out, right? They’re like trying to tell us what it is and everything. And so that’s another element to the development of a religion.
Alan Steinfeld
You’re saying there’s a push. Yeah, not just a push back, but the group that thinks of themselves as the people that should run things. And now they’re basically saying, we have the answer, it’s here. You have to listen to us. But why do they feel the need to confine it when it’s unfinable the phenomenon itself.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, this is such a great question, and I have the same question. And I and why do they have to do it so brutally? Like why do they have to hurt people or, you know, suppress their voices and you know why does it have to be this thing? And I ask that, and I guess my answer… I don’t have an answer but I have a position, okay? And I can tell you what my position is right now on it. And I do articulate that in Encounters. Basically, when I started to see the extent of the organized narrativizing of this new kind of like movement, um, and which is not new by the way, but which, you know, which people are now in mass having. Um, I started to go back to the allegory of the cave by Plato. And even like Jesus’s gospels, which I looked at again, and I thought, because I looked at them so many times, of course. And I reread them. I’m like, okay, got it. So there’s some kind of like structural element here that at least people in Western traditions, and probably in Eastern traditions, though I don’t really see it in indigenous communities. So it’s not universal, but it’s definitely within the tradition that you and I share, of government and social structures and culture, there’s a structural element where you see this kind of pushback. So I don’t have an answer for it other than that we shouldn’t really change how we are, but there’s that. It is there. I’m not gonna deny it’s there. No, but it’s about control, I mean, and going back to the, Jesus didn’t consider himself a Christian, you know. I mean, these are factions coming in afterwards that. Yes. And I think, you know, you say somewhere in the book there’s elements above the secret government, which I think implied to me an interface between the ETs or the phenomenon themselves and people controlling the narrative. Is that what you, and somehow there’s some of these people are carrying out the orders of this bigger phenomenon? Do you imply that sort of?
Diana Pasulka
Well, listen, the only thing that I could say about the control mechanism is that there are people doing it, we know that, and that I’ve met people who do it. Now, how they’re, how they do this, why they do this, I describe some of their motives in the book. You know, um, some of their motives are that they have a view of humanity that’s dim. You know, they think that humans and maybe they’re right, by the way, in, in some form. They say humans are going, they don’t care, you know, they’re going to, they’re, you know, they’re going to kill you or something or, you know, if you have these ideas that we should all work together and have a great, you know, world, which we could do of course. Um, there’s a good portion of the humans that are not going to go with you and they’re going to use you for their work and you know these things are going to happen to you. And if you don’t see that, you’re really naive. Right? So I met them and they had good arguments. Right? And I listened to them and they by the way, they happen to be super educated people too. Um, so yeah, so that was an element. I don’t know other than their own belief systems, if I mean they obviously feel that they are doing some type of God’s work. That’s all I can say.
Alan Steinfeld
Or maybe they’re just so into power. That’s what I think. They are the matrix. They want to control the matrix. They don’t want anything to get out of line. Then there’s the phenomenon itself. Whitley thinks that the phenomenon doesn’t want the secret out all at once. They want to shock people. I just interviewed him the other day. He said, “People need to be shocked when this thing comes online.” He says, “That’s the only way we’re going to gather the importance of this object at the end of time or whatever.” I don’t agree with that. I think what seems to be happening, because of people like Elizondo, and of course Garry Nolan is major in pushing the envelope, you were at the Sol Foundation meeting where they talked about devastating disclosure and smooth disclosure. How do we start to push for this integration of disclosure in your opinion?
Diana Pasulka
Okay, so contrary to what a lot of people think, I haven’t, nor have I ever been a disclosure person. Like, you know, I’m an advocate for disclosure or anything like that. There are a lot of communities, like I in my book I talk about indigenous communities, you know, I start the book with people who say, you know, a Lakota woman who says, contrary to what you believe, we’ve been in contact, right? So Suzanne Kite. I do believe that what we’re talking about is a disclosure that’s been formulated in order to keep people thinking that we don’t have disclosure.
Alan Steinfeld
I think we’re getting close to something. I mean, if we push for congressional hearings and eventually somebody comes forward and says, “Yes, I’m the one who we have the technology, we have the bodies.” I think the best thing to do for the public is to roll it out and, this is just my fantasy, and have the human population look at the situation together and see, what’s going on here? What can we make of this as intelligent people, academics, you know, whatever, what’s going on here? And of course, that’s going to change a lot of worldviews. But I think, you know, call it disclosure or not, I think it’s a narrative that could happen and change the world.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, that would be pretty amazing. And also the technology, obviously, they’re not filling up their gas tanks to get here, right? So if they have a technology that gets the world off fossil fuel and stops the pollution, don’t you think that is a benefit to humanity, and that that’s what’s behind disclosure? I think, yeah, I think that, you know, one thing that happened to me too when I was about 18, I was taking a class, I was taking physics in college. And my physics professor said, this is a long time ago. And my physics professor said, oh, we have electric cars. And we could, you know, we could do this and, you know, we could get off a fossil fuels and all, you know, all these things, my physics professor. And I, and to me I was like, what? Is that true? So I did a lot of research, and I was like, and this is way before the internet, okay? I did all this research and I came to the conclusion that this guy was right. And I thought, that means all of our problems have nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with character. And that’s, that’s something that I was a huge revelation to me, because here I was thinking, if we could just get this technology, and if we could just, you know, I was in a tech type of environment. And I was on the route to do this, like create this technology or do this, and I was taking physics engineering physics. And I was like, okay, I’m going to do this. But then when he said that, it got me completely off that track because I thought, he’s right.
Alan Steinfeld
So when you said character, do you mean greed? The greediness. Yeah. Character values. Yeah. Like, you know, what kind of human beings, we can’t get along. You know, we’re constantly fighting, we can’t even stay married. For the most part, you know what I’m saying? Like, you know, we cycle through, we cycle through friend communities and stuff like that. We just can’t, we’re not good at taking care of each other. So these are the things that I’ve decided I’d focus on is those kinds of things. You know, do we have communities where we can care. Well, that’s part of why I’m Catholic by the way. Because, and I’m going to give some personal information here. Again at the same time I was 18, my parents went to Esalen. Right? Esalen is the new age commune. Right? And I’m from California by the way. So they’re they’re very, even though my mother was Jewish, and my father, his parents are Catholic, and they had this when they were, well actually my mother came from a very secular Jewish standpoint, my father was, you know went to Catholic school, but they were very new age. Right. They were successful new age people. And so they sent me to a Catholic school. And so I went to this Catholic school and I actually saw these nuns who were, who were doing liberation theology. They were going to Central America and helping people who were being disappeared and killed and children and things like that. So as a young person, I saw the difference between what I felt was very capitalist kind of, you know narcissistic view- not to say my parents are bad, but they weren’t doing what these nuns were doing. And that made a huge impact on me. And I was like, okay, then I’m gonna be like these nuns. Like I just think that this is a better way to be honestly for our world and for me, because um they were happier than my parents were. My parents were getting divorced. My parents were having issues, you know? And they were caught up in these kinds of things that I thought, I learned from that experience. I hope you see that, you know, that that is part of what kept me Catholic was that the values that that sister Rose, they had, you know, were values that I felt we’re going to help me in life.
Alan Steinfeld
No, I appreciate you saying that and I appreciate how how important that was for you at that moment to see to go over the, go beyond the materialization of American culture and see there’s people making a difference. And why that would affect someone so sincere like yourself. You know, because you are, you’re sincere in the book. I mean, you really in a way, love these people that you’re writing about. I can feel that. You have this real, you know, deep feeling and honor for these people. I mean, that’s sort of a message that comes through, you respect them, honor their intelligence and their experience, and you’re doing that same missionary work in that way. And the other thing though getting back to the UFO phenomenon you say quote Jacques Vallée in the book a couple of times and I know Jacques he actually wrote me a nice letter about my book so he says the this disclosure’s going to be released through intermediaries. The government intermediaries. Yeah, yeah. And so is that what’s happening now? You don’t have to tell us how much Jacques knows, but obviously he’s been inside it from since the late fifties. What do you expect is coming down the line here?
Diana Pasulka
Okay, that’s a great question. One of the things I said in American Cosmic I still believe and that’s that the people who we identify as on the inside, they’re they’re kind of on the inside. They’re more on the periphery. And that includes me. So we’re not there’s not a lot of people talking or are known. Even David Grusch, who has a lot of information, and a lot of quote unquote insider information. You know, um he’s still on the periphery. Because he’s given this information from people, supposedly on the inside. Okay? And the and I have met people who I suspect are on the inside, and they are so tight lipped. Like they are so incredibly careful. And you can, the way that you can, and I talk about ways to gather information from what I’ve learned about my own field, you know, that a lot of information is oral tradition. And I think that’s the case with insider knowledge about UFOs. It’s not written down. And, you know, classified information isn’t people. And that’s why these people won’t say, and we won’t know. Because once that those identities are out. Do you know how many people will be around them and you know using different technologies to gather that information? I mean it would, it just makes a person’s life horrible, right? So, um, so yeah, so I think that the people then the information we will have, um, I don’t, I mean honestly, I don’t think there’s going to be like the kind of disclosure that you’re hoping for. And the kind of disclosure that, you know, if a, if it, if a disclosure is going to happen like you suggest, um, you know where there’s full transparency like this, it’s gonna, it’s going to be on accident. Yeah. It’s gonna be an accident from humans because humans wouldn’t do that, I don’t think.
Alan Steinfeld
The thing you lay out about networks and AI, and how do you think AI can be sentient in the way that some people are thinking about it, and be a kind of intelligence of the phenomenon itself?
Diana Pasulka
Yes. So I don’t quite, I don’t know. Okay. So, um, I definitely know that lots of people in AI think so. And think that we already have an AI sentient, we already have a sentient AI. Okay. Um, I learned this at the Sol Foundation. I met some people who do believe that. And, um, I personally have don’t know this. Um, I’m interested to see how, I think it’s not a coincidence that we have a lot of, you know, a lot of what would you call it, um, political discussion of UAPs and UFOs at the very same time that we’re having what’s called an artificial intelligence revolution. Where, you know, artificial intelligence calls it essentially changing everything, you know, changing everything. And so I think that that’s not a coincidence. I don’t quite know yet how the relationship is. Um, one person, Simone in my book suggests that yes, you know, there’s going to be, uh, the consciousness that has unveiled itself to humans through religion is now going to unveil itself within AI, and that yes, we best be prepared for this, because this will be shocking, and it is already shocking, and she thinks that it’s good. She thinks that is a really positive development.
Alan Steinfeld
Some people think it’s not so good, it frightens them, and they think it’s a takeover. But maybe because we’ve been so warlike we need something like this you know, we need something to kind of raise us up like the phenomenon like the UFO phenomenons like AI like something that gets us out of the kind of mess that we’ve made for 5000 years, but everyone uses their term Supernatural, Paranormal to describe aspects of the phenomenon that can’t be explained. But isn’t there a better way we can integrate those experiences by, instead of those labels, which make it woo, where it’s a science, it’s something that we don’t understand.
Diana Pasulka
I think totally. Yeah. I’m in an absolute agreement with you about that. There’s a lot of young people right now that I’ve been talking to who basically are trying to reformat the language because you know they take something like precognition or what you know mind reading or something like that and they they rework the terms because they know that it has a lot of connotations. And by the way the whole history of the UFO has been that too. You know it used to be a flying saucer and then they’re like, “Let’s try to de-woo-ify this, right? Let’s make it the UFO.” And then the UFO retains a lot of this baggage and they’re like, “We need to change it again.” You know, so, the whole history of the UFO has been a history of trying to do that. Uh, yes, I totally think that. So let’s take, um, like reading one’s mind or, you know, something that we talk about and we think, okay, that’s woo, right? But and I’ve, I’ve published articles about this technology that we actually have now and we’ve had it for many years. Not a lot, but we’ve had it, where scientists will be able and are able right now to use computers to read what’s going on in our brains, right? Because our brains function with brain waves, right? And so they’re able to, you know, take MRIs of a person’s brain, and have that person think about say a Van Gogh painting, and then the computer will generate that painting, you know, and they’ll say, “Wow, this is exactly what you were looking at.” And you know, so what is that? Well that’s a way to access our brains that, you know, and we and that doesn’t involve talking. Okay. So we have to, I do think that. I think that a lot of what we’re, you know even when you go back and you look at the Marian apparitions, those apparitions are doing things that we can probably now maybe replicate through certain types of technologies, even though that would be a blasphemous thing to say, you know, because it’s a miraculous thing in the Catholic Church, which I understand. And there are things which we will never be able to replicate. But reading one’s mind seems like it’s going to be replicated.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I don’t think anything, I mean I think miracles are a science we have yet to understand, so. Even when I talked to Hal Puthoff, he talked about the levitating people and he said, “You know, their hair was also levitating, which shows they were in a quantum field.” That’s what he said in… Yeah, I believe that too. But there’s so many, we’re at the verge of understanding, I think, this next level. I think this is why the UFO, according to Jung and others, is appearing now because we’re ready to shift this level of consciousness. And I’m really happy you brought in the Aboriginal ideas at the end, and the Dreamtime thing. That’s why I in a way disagree that AI can be conscious, because what we have as human consciousness, and I learned this from the Aborigines, is the ability to tap into Dreamtime. And how it was explained to me was, if you’re falling asleep, it was a practice, and you watch your thoughts until they’re no longer your own awareness of thought, but things start to stream into your mind that’s not normally in your everyday consciousness. And this Aborigine elder said, then you’re in the Dreamtime when it’s no longer under your… but you’re witnessing, you’re the witness of that. And it’s sort of the unknown, it’s the imagination. William Blake said, “The imagination is the true human being.” So I don’t think AI has the facility or capability of accessing this infinite unknown awareness that we really are. Does that make sense?
Diana Pasulka
Yeah. I understand that position. I don’t agree with it, but yeah, I understand it. Oh really? No, tell me what you think. I doesn’t even have to agree, I’m interested in what you think about that. Yeah, so I would have agreed with you like three years ago, but I’ve been like, you know, changed by interactions with people in the communities. A lot of people in those communities don’t even like to call it AI as you know, I’m sure. Right. They don’t, they say it’s not artificial, like, you know, we create like paintings, but they’re not artificial. We don’t say that’s an artificial representation, you know. Um, okay, so there’s quantum computing. And I think quantum computing is where we get to this field that is beyond space time, right? Now, listen, this is way outside of my, you know, everyone has to understand that, like don’t quote me as saying these ridiculous things about something of which I have no clue. Um, but I have, it’s changed how I think and that’s what I’m explaining to you is that through the interactions with people who do know about this, and who recognize that something like quantum computing is accessing information that appears to be beyond space time because of like superposition and that type of thing. I mean, think about that. That has such wide implications and also the whole idea of our, you know, progressing through time which we know now is not linear, right? It’s you know okay, so what if, you know cause a lot of people come back to me and say, but we’ve created this and I’ll say but then who created us and you know so if we look at this linear time frame it these kinds of questions become nonsensical and we have to drop them and we’re going to have different questions. I guess that’s my point, is at some point our questions are going to be meaningless because they’re situated within a a way of thinking that, you know like let’s put it this way, you you just spoke about, I’m assuming indigenous aborig- okay so yeah indigenous people in Australia have this amazing ontology that seems to be when I say ontology, I mean like, you know, epistemology, worldview, right, that seems to be you know from my perspective as an outsider, they seem to have this down, this idea of the quantum field, right, and they have their ways of talking about it. So it seems to me that for us, if we’re interested, when I say us, I’m talking about like non-indigenous people who’ve had, you know, less, you know, not embedded in those lifeways and I think that they can actually help people. Um, you know, Jose in my book, he talks about how to help young people deal with, you know, the influx of all this information, you know, that they’re getting and, you know, he’s, he’s suggesting very specific ways of dealing with that, you know, well, go outside, you know, and you know, get off the that network and try to understand that there’s this organic network. And so I’m doing that in my way, like I have ways of like teaching how to do that too.
Alan Steinfeld
You’re still pursuing the UFO study, I mean, it’s still of interest, it’s still a fascination?
Diana Pasulka
Um, yeah, of course. But differently than I did before. So I won’t, I most likely won’t write a book about UFOs. Gosh, I I say that, I said that last time too. But, you know, so I, you know, I am, I am writing a book right now, but it’s a book that I’m co-authoring with Simone, and, and it’s about the protocols.
Alan Steinfeld
I think it’s important you wrote this and congratulations. I mean Netflix loved American Cosmic. And I guess you’re a consultant on Netflix ’cause they use to seeing… And that was pretty amazing, wasn’t it for that to happen?
Diana Pasulka
I think so. Yeah. I mean it was such a strange thing to be a part of. Um, but they listen to what, to my consulting so I consulted for them and they listen and I was really happy about it. And by the way, the confluence of encounters and them calling it encounters happened accidentally. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but it was completely on accident.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, I thought they took your book and… Oh I see. Well that’s, maybe there’s no coincidence. Right. That’s just, kind of.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah. Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
It just catapulted you even into a bigger framework because what you’re writing in this book is a really good unfolding of the phenomena for people for people who don’t know what to make of it and you’re reframing it out of the woo and back into like the intelligence, integrative human being. I think this is the call for Encounters.
Diana Pasulka
Thank you. That’s a nice way to put it. I appreciate that.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. Thank you. I’ve been talking to Diana Pasulka, our new book Encounters. I hope to have you back on the program. Thank you for watching everyone at New Realities.