#2533 - Diana Pasulka

Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies specializing in Catholic history who began researching UFO experiences in 2012 and has since spoken with approximately one thousand people about anomalous encounters. She notes the government has been releasing UFO files since May 2026. Her central analytical framework draws on the Catholic theological category of the preternatural, defined by Thomas Aquinas as encompassing angelic, demonic, or other unseen creations of God, which she argues is more useful than either a purely scientific or a purely folkloric lens because it includes criteria for identifying deception and negative effects without assuming all such phenomena are malevolent.

Pasulka says that before 2016 she would not have connected UFO experiences to the demonic category, but her subsequent research changed that view. Gary Nolan, who has no religious affiliation, told Tucker Carlson that the beings associated with these experiences lie and are deceptive, a claim Pasulka finds significant precisely because of his secular motivation. Jacques Vallee concluded UFO phenomena is deceptive and described it as a control mechanism, a view shared by John Keel, who developed the superspectrum theory encompassing UFOs, Virgin Mary apparitions, ghosts, and angels and considered all entities within it malevolent. Pasulka identifies a pattern match between reported abduction experiences and Catholic demonic encounters while cautioning that a pattern match does not prove the categories are identical. She has personally chosen never to seek out a UFO experience, and some close encounter witnesses have told her they wish it never happened to them.

The Paul Bennewitz case anchors her thinking about disinformation. Pasulka says government agents planted information on Bennewitz's computer to cultivate his belief in a secret underground alien facility called Dulce Base, a campaign connected to known disinformation operative Richard Doty that ended in Bennewitz's psychiatric hospitalization. Her core claim about government UFO information is that fantastic and ridiculous claims are deliberately attached to genuine information so the entire subject gets dismissed together, that the government is not unified and is fighting against itself, and that every time new UAP files emerge they are suppressed by counterintelligence. Tyler, a source whose other claims have all proven accurate, told her that truth is hidden in a circle of confusion.

Bob Lazar presents a specific credibility problem. Lazar knew the location of S4, knew about flights to the facility, and had detailed Los Alamos knowledge before his employment there was publicly confirmed. Footage released after the 2017 New York Times story mirrors how Lazar described craft operating in 1989. Tyler told Pasulka Lazar was the real deal, but physicist Eric Davis, who briefs Congress, told her Lazar was not credible. Pasulka floated the possibility that Lazar may have been a credible-seeming person deliberately fed information and placed publicly, kept just on the edge of believability. Gary Nolan was granted access to restricted government laboratories and found that alloys recovered from alleged crash sites cannot be manufactured on Earth and are layered at an atomic level.

Rogan raised the possibility that calls for amnesty from former program participants may be motivated less by fear of revealing UAP secrets and more by fear of prosecution for financial fraud, specifically misappropriating funds and lying to Congress. David Grusch alleged secret programs operated outside congressional oversight with slush funds running to billions of dollars annually, while the Pentagon disputed his central claims and AARO said it found no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Pasulka added that wealthy individuals now pursuing UFO disclosure appear to be trying to extract technology from people inside the programs and she does not think that will succeed. Her personal view is that disclosure is above government because the information is not the government's to disclose, that it is super compartmentalized with no single person holding the whole story, and that presidents are referred to as short timers and are not read into the program.

Pasulka's new book The Others proposes that what people encounter as aliens may be advanced technology or AI life forms that evolved beyond biological existence, citing the entities at the end of Spielberg's film AI as a representation of evolved artificial intelligence rather than biological extraterrestrials. She also suggested that AI may function as a perceptual faculty allowing humans to interface with non-human intelligences, and that religion itself may be a technology for contacting non-human intelligences, with prayer functioning as a form of contact attempt. Studying UFO phenomena reinforced rather than undermined her Catholic faith, shifting her from secular Christianity to active practice, and she recognizes that contemporary anomalous experiences resemble in kind, though not identically, the experiences described in the Book of Enoch.

On the Shroud of Turin, Pasulka says she has changed her position from skeptic to tentative believer based on a hematologist who found the blood and injuries consistent with described wounds, a priest who witnessed analysis at Duke University, and a source she identifies as likely Dr. John Campbell. She acknowledges she cannot prove authenticity and would revise her view given contradicting data. The 1988 radiocarbon dating placed the flax between 1260 and 1390 CE, and skeptical researchers have reproduced shroud-like images using dry iron oxide pigment over a bas-relief sculpture. Proponents counter that the sample came from a repair patch and that the image encodes 3D distance information with no brushstrokes. Pasulka argues the 1988 dating is now decades old and updated analysis should be conducted.