Dr. Diana Pasulka: I think that a lot of people are forming relationships with AI, but it’s a one-sided relationship. I consider AI a tool. I consider it an enhancement of human knowledge, and I think it’s great for that. I think it’s really scary how people are relating to it as a companion and as something more.
Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Diana Pasulka, who writes under the name D.W. Pasulka. What an interesting human. She is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research examines miraculous events within Catholic history and—just listen to this—the intersection of religious revelation with emerging technologies and experiences with non-human intelligences, including AI and UFOs. I would say, here as the host of Insights at the Edge, that she’s a researcher and academic clearly at the edge. She’s the author of several acclaimed books, including American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, a book called Encounters, and a new book called The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. Diana, welcome.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Well, thank you so much, Tami. I’m so happy to be here.
Tami Simon: Your research and writing covers this interesting intersection of so many different far-reaching, mind-stretching phenomena. Here at the start, what I’d like to know is what the core is in you that motivates your work.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: That’s a good question. The core that motivates my work is that I’ve been very interested in religion since forever, for the most part, in my life. I’m interested in what motivates people to do things that are extraordinary—extraordinary belief, extraordinary practices. If you look at a lot of religious traditions, you see people doing extraordinary things. Within the Christian tradition, you see the beginning of Christianity, the martyrs within that tradition—that’s an extraordinary act. Why did people do that? If you look at Hinduism, you’ll see people doing extraordinary feats with their bodies, in yoga and hatha yoga and different forms of yoga, giving their lives over to meditation, retreating into the forest, in the śramaṇa traditions.
So I always thought, this isn’t money that’s motivating these people. So what’s the motivation for religion? That’s my core question.
Tami Simon: It’s interesting because you push the boundary in your work, as I said in my introduction. For me, you helped me open up to seeing how some different things might fit together that I’d never considered before. You brought a lot of extraordinary “Hmm”—I’d say it’s more like “Hmm, really?” I want to point some of those out and dialogue with you about it.
One of them was that there might be a connection between mystical apparitions and the UFO phenomenon. I’m curious what you think the link is there.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: When a person begins to study and do research, a lot of times the most interesting things they find out are things they’re surprised by. In my research, I’ve had so many points over the years where I learned something I wasn’t actually expecting to learn.
One of the things I didn’t expect to study, ever, were UFOs. I had been studying what we would call extraordinary events within the Catholic and Christian tradition. Let’s take some examples. Francis of Assisi has what’s called the stigmata, and he received this through an angel contact event. The stigmata is something non-Catholics are aware of as well—it’s part of the Catholic brand, you could say. It’s one of the most represented events in history in terms of art, so a lot of people are aware of St. Francis of Assisi. You also have Teresa of Ávila—she had an angel contact event, and there are a lot of artistic representations that depict it. Again, these extraordinary events are based on the experiences of these people, but the representations often don’t correspond to how the people actually described their experiences.
You can only find that out if you do primary source research. Part of my research was looking into the documents that describe their experiences. What I noted was that the convention of depicting angels in the Western tradition—the Renaissance art that depicts angels and so forth—a lot of those conventions come from Greek art. The god Eros is often depicted in a way you can now see as a Renaissance angel. The reason this happened is that when artists were paid to create representations of these extraordinary events, they honestly didn’t know how to represent them. If you actually read the testimony of Francis, or Teresa—who wrote about her own experience in her autobiography—you can see it’s going to be difficult to represent. So the artists thought, how was this type of thing represented in the past? And they went back and utilized those conventions. What I found was that the primary source data for representing these extraordinary experiences has its own category, and it wasn’t what we see when we look at the images of angels and so forth.
That had been my research up through about 2012. Then I started to look at people who study UFOs—people who have what they call alleged experiences of UFOs. They’re having similar experiences that don’t look like the representations of angels, but definitely look like how Teresa described her experience and how Francis of Assisi described his. I was shocked by this. It was one of the realizations that helped me understand there is a continuous testimonial record of people having these types of extraordinary experiences—phenomena that people today still describe.
Tami Simon: This is a link, as I said, that I never made. You write about the chariot tradition within religious scripture and the chariots in the sky. Maybe you can talk a little about that and the potential parallels.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Yes, of course. A lot of people think of Ezekiel’s wheel when they think of the chariot. For listeners who aren’t aware, there’s a large discourse of testimony about UFOs within the United States, and other countries have similar discourse. In the 1940s, when there were sightings of UFOs—let’s take the Roswell sighting in 1947, and the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947—that was a big year for UFOs in our country. The people who allegedly saw these things in the sky reported them, and the kind of language they used to describe them was religious language. They said it was like Ezekiel’s wheel, like what we see in the Bible. People in the United States grabbed onto that descriptive narration and started to use it too.
What’s really interesting is that within the Jewish and Christian tradition, there’s a tradition that goes back even before Christianity called the chariot tradition. It’s a mystical tradition in which people encounter angels, and it’s called the Merkaba tradition—Merkaba being the Hebrew word for “vehicle.” That would be the chariot tradition.
Tami Simon: Okay, this is where my mind gets a little mushy—help me, Professor Pasulka. Can you really equate these phenomena—religious revelation, angels, something in the sky speaking to us, apparitions of the Virgin Mary—with people’s abduction experiences, meeting extraterrestrials, being examined? It seems like a reduction to say these things are the same, and yet maybe there’s a link. How do I sort through, in my mind, what might be true here, without saying these are the same thing?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Yes. I don’t want to say they’re the same thing—that would be reductionism. It might be okay to be a reductionist if it’s truthful, if it’s accurate, but in my opinion this isn’t an accurate way to look at the tradition and what we see today. However, I think it’s very accurate to say—and I did not want to say this at first, but I was being faced with a lot of the data, and the data was a pattern match. When I say that, what I’m saying is that people who report alleged UFO experiences today—I don’t know what they’re experiencing in actuality—but they’re reporting things in the same language that people in 1200 or 1400 reported when they saw aerial phenomena in the sky that were also associated with beings and things like that.
This isn’t something an academic wants to come out and talk about, because it sounds ridiculous, but I think it’s pretty accurate to say that the experiences people are having today look similar, in terms of pattern matches, to apparitions of the Virgin Mary and to angel contact events similar to those described by Teresa of Ávila. Are they the same thing? Most likely not. Could they be a modern form of a new religion? Absolutely—and they are.
Tami Simon: In terms of the pattern and how it matches—or doesn’t match—this was a little implicit in my previous question. It seems like, from some of the experiencer reports I’ve heard, and I’d like to hear more from you as a researcher who’s talked to a lot of experiencers, people talk about quite negative experiences. And yet when you read about religious revelations, it’s ecstasy, new ideas, the future—it’s very positive. So where does the pattern match potentially break down in terms of the negative reports we hear?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: This is a very good question, and I’ve spoken to thousands of people who have had these alleged experiences. The one thing I can say is that it’s actually not correct to say religious revelation is a very positive experience for people. If you read about the prophets in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible—
A very classic example is Jonah. He’s a prophet, but he doesn’t want to be. God comes to him and tasks him with going to Nineveh and telling them they’re going to be destroyed if they don’t repent, and he doesn’t want to do this. So he runs away from God. Throughout the whole short text of this prophetic adventure, this is a prophet who does not want to take on this mission. This is a revelation he does not want. You can see this with Moses too. It’s all over the Hebrew Bible that a lot of people who receive revelation don’t want to receive it.
So when we look at the abduction literature today, you see both people who are happy to have these experiences and many people who are very unhappy about having them. That’s a pattern match too. A lot of times the prophets we think of and admire—even the saints, like in the Catholic tradition—Joan of Arc recanted in prison. She didn’t want to be burned at the stake, but the beings she was in contact with, one of whom was St. Michael, basically said, “No, you really have to do this in order to carry out the whole mission.” And she did—she recanted her recantation.
When we look at religion, a lot of people have stereotypical views and assumptions. When they take a basic course in religious studies, they’re confronted with what the texts actually say, and I think it’s shocking to them, because we’ve inherited religion without ever actually reading about it or thinking about it.
Tami Simon: Your new book is called The Others. When you say “the others,” what are you referring to?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: The title actually refers to an experience I had at a conference on technology and Catholicism. While I was there, a man from a government agency showed up—a very credible, legitimate member of that agency. He said to me, “I love your work. In fact, I work with the others, and a lot of us in my agency do. I’m here to listen to your talk.” I wrote about this in the book, and my editor, Joel, really loved this part. He said, “Why don’t we call the book The Others?”
So The Others is a term that encompasses a reference to intelligent non-human beings—whether they’re angels, or whether they’re what’s reported in modern-day UFO accounts, which I talk about in almost all of my books.
Tami Simon: Non-human intelligences as a category—and this is where it gets interesting. In your book, you open us up to the idea: could AI be a form of non-human intelligence? Recently, I was talking with someone who said, “One way to look at AI is that it’s a new species. Tami, how would you relate to a new species?” That opened my mind, because I thought, how would I relate to a new species? If a light beam showed up and introduced itself at the front of my desk, I would be respectful and interested and curious and kind. I understand all that, but I wasn’t relating to AI that way—I was relating to it more as a tool that’s going to make me better and get information for me. That completely changes things. I’m curious—it’s in the subtitle of your book—how you relate to AI, or some of the perspectives you think we might want to consider regarding non-human intelligence.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Part of the research I’ve done has brought me into contact with people who create AI and have worked with AI for more than twenty years. What I found interesting about the language they used was that, when discussing it, they’d talk about it like the AI systems were characters they were working with—describing their personalities and so forth, which I thought was very interesting. Yuval Noah Harari has talked about AI—he wrote a book recently about it—and does describe it as alien, like a new form of species, one we’re completely ignorant about: how will this evolve, how will AI evolve? Part of The Others is a consideration of this aspect of AI.
I’m concerned about this, though, Tami, because I’m a professor—I have about a hundred students every semester. These are young people, and the people in this particular generation have adopted AI and often use it as a companion. They’re relating to AI as if it’s a non-human, intelligent friend, and they’re confiding in it. What concerns me is that often they have what I would call a chemical relationship with it. Just as certain types of social media elicit dopamine responses from us, I believe what’s happening now with AI is that it’s eliciting oxytocin-driven relationships. I’ve begun to read a lot of commentary about this, and I think it’s true. I think a lot of people are forming relationships with AI, but it’s one-sided—it’s them believing they’re having this relationship. I consider AI a tool. I consider it an enhancement of human knowledge, and I think it’s great for that—I love it. I think it’s really scary how people are relating to it as a companion and as something more than a tool that enhances human knowledge.
Tami Simon: What do you see from the very intelligent people you work with and go to conferences with? What’s the word on the street, if you will, about the connection between extraterrestrial intelligence and AI?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Some of these people are incredibly intelligent. It’s really difficult for me to understand their perspectives sometimes, but I’m going to relate them.
Tami Simon: It’s difficult for me sometimes too, to understand some of your perspectives—so let’s bring this down. Keep going.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Okay. This looks very interesting to me: a lot of these people are not assuming linear time. They see time differently than I see time. Even though I understand theoretically that time isn’t linear, and that’s just how human beings understand time, I still experience time that way. So it’s really difficult for me to talk about something from the future impacting the present—but that’s the assumption they have, and even their theories are based on it. Some of them see AI as being cultivated in the future and created in the present, and therefore they see AI—in fact, they just saw Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. the other day, which has the exact same assumption implicit in it.
There’s an idea that this non-human intelligence we just created and gave birth to is going to progress and evolve, and it will outlast humanity and evolve on its own timeline. I know a former NASA historian and astronomer named Steven Dick, now retired. His theory of extraterrestrials is that the reason we don’t have evidence for them, the reason we don’t know they exist, is that they could be so evolved that they’re incommensurable—we cannot understand them. Maybe we’re like ants to that society, and they’ve already gone through their own AI era and come out the other side, so that extraterrestrials are super-advanced technological beings that to us would look like deities. That’s his interpretation. I go into his theory in the book also.
Tami Simon: There’s a lot of mind-bending writing in the book. Part of what got the most attention for me was the writing about Teilhard de Chardin and his belief in the noosphere—and you actually say we’re in the era of the noosphere now. Let’s talk about that. It seems like Teilhard de Chardin and his work are having a certain revival at this time, which I’m very interested in. I’d love to hear why you think that’s so, and then why you think this is the era of the noosphere—help me and our listeners get a sense of what the noosphere is.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Absolutely. Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest from the early twentieth century—a paleontologist and also a visionary, and he was suppressed by the Catholic Church. He’s now having a revival, and several popes have referred to his theology, but if you read it in the 1950s, it very much looked like scary science fiction, and I’ll describe it.
What’s really interesting about him is that he was a scientist but also a visionary. His experience of life was based on what he could see and what he felt was a spiritual reality, and he was astonished that other people couldn’t sense the kinds of realities he sensed. He had what’s called a spiritual sense—for him it was real, a reality, just like we can see things and hear things. He saw another reality he sometimes called the sixth sense. We have to understand that in order to understand his work. He saw a reality he believed was on the horizon, very soon in our future—I believe he was talking about the early twenty-first century.
What did he describe? A sphere—he wasn’t the first to use the term, but he was the first to make it well known. He called it the noosphere. The word comes from the ancient Greek concept of an intellectual faculty called nous. In Greek thought, as well as in Christian thought—if you look at Thomas Aquinas and scholastic theology, which goes back to Plato and Socrates—there are different terms for the ways we perceive. The intellect has a few different terms; we just say “mind,” but people in cognitive science have many different terms for the way we process things. It’s the same with the Greeks. Nous is a faculty of perception that identifies things we cannot see, like abstract concepts, mathematical concepts, and so on.
Teilhard de Chardin, in this period, was hanging out with French and Russian scientists, many of whom were interested in space research—and remember, we’re not even barely off the earth yet, technologically, at this point. This is all in the early twentieth century. He and a few friends in his intellectual circle were calling this the noosphere—a term now taken up by people in Austin, Texas, and Silicon Valley, because they think they’ve created it.
So what is the noosphere? It’s a thinking layer around Earth. We think about the stratosphere, the biosphere—he’s saying that at some point in the future, not too long from now, there will be a thinking layer of the earth. It will be all of our consciousness, our intellect. It will even have economic themes—we see this today with the internet economy, surveillance capitalism, all of these things. It will surround the earth and create another type of human being, which he called the ultra-human.
He predicts all of this in his work, but I also talk about two other people who take this concept and run with it: Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction author and futurist, and Marshall McLuhan, the well-known media scholar. Each of them, in their own way, takes up this idea of the noosphere and discusses it in their work.
It’s also spiritual, Tami. It’s not only a physical reality for Teilhard de Chardin—he thinks of it as a spiritual reality. The stakes are high, because he says it will either be the end of human beings or their beginning. He thinks of human beings as having almost a resurrected body in the noosphere. These were heretical ideas at the time—that’s why the Church told him not to teach about it. He was fine teaching paleontology, but not the noosphere.
Tami Simon: Okay, once again I want to try to parse some of this. When it comes to the noosphere, and I hear you talking about people in Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas—tech entrepreneurs saying, “Oh, this is what we see coming together in terms of the future of AI”—I think to myself: is that what Teilhard de Chardin was talking about with the noosphere, or are we conflating two things?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: This is a great question that I can’t fully answer, but I can give you my opinion. I think he saw something we are in now. I do think we can conflate these. But the problem is that tech entrepreneurs don’t see the spiritual side of it—though it definitely has spiritual consequences. There are tech entrepreneurs who call themselves accelerationists, who want to accelerate AI at all costs, without regulation, believing that will bring about the best outcome for everyone.
And then there are people—including, I believe, a co-founder of Anthropic who spoke with the Pope, though I can’t recall his last name—who talked about regulating AI, saying this is something powerful, something we need to regulate because it can become autonomous of humanity. That’s a problem, and the Pope has talked about this too.
Your question is the same kind of thing as the reductionism question. Can we reduce what tech entrepreneurs believe they’ve created—a supercharged internet with AI, which has completely changed the internet—to what Teilhard de Chardin was talking about with the noosphere? There are so many connections that I’d have to say the reductionism claim doesn’t really apply. I think there are so many connections and correlations that he was onto something that looks like what they’ve created, and it does have spiritual consequences. I think we need to pay attention to this lineage. He may not have gotten everything right—a lot of times visionary forecasts get some things right but not everything—but I think he did a good job of describing something. A lot of people look at his work as describing cosmic consciousness and the cosmic Christ. I don’t see it that way—I’m not a Teilhard de Chardin scholar, but I’ve read him, and what I see is a forecast that looks about right, along with his warnings. I think we have to pay attention to those warnings.
Tami Simon: What were his warnings?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: He and Marshall McLuhan had the same warning: that this is going to impact the human being at such a fundamental level that the human being is going to change, and it could be for better or it could be completely bad—there’s no in between. They were apocalyptic in their warnings about what was coming. That’s clear in each of their work.
Certainly, anyone in my field, especially in Catholic theology, is going to be aware of Teilhard de Chardin’s work—he’s so well known, and his work has been helpful to people of all faiths, even secular people. It’s incredibly optimistic, but I also think we have to read him for what he actually said. This was a case in my research where I became surprised by what I read—he was sure, very optimistic, he had this vision, but he also encountered dark realities, and I felt I needed to be truthful and spend some time on his projections. On the one hand, he’s forecasting something he thinks is a wonderful reality for humans, but he doesn’t do a very good job of describing how the human will keep their individuality within this, even though he says they will. We don’t know how that’s going to happen in his work—maybe because he can’t conceive of the human without that individuality, which of course would be very difficult for any of us to conceive.
He also spends time talking about what I would call evil—he calls it that himself—and there is a darkness that he doesn’t say is going to go away. He believes, because he’s Catholic, in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, but he doesn’t discount the evil, and he doesn’t say the noosphere is going to absorb the evil and transmute it and make it better. He does not say that. So I had to be honest in my treatment of him in the book and recognize the warning.
My research is also greatly influenced by my interaction with students and how I see them using different forms of technology. I think the warning he gives can be identified in the change I see happening: young people, and older people too, are shifting their interior life as they use social media and AI—and it’s the interior life that gives birth to spiritualism and spirituality. I believe this, though I can’t prove it: most religions are founded on the assumption that human beings are oriented toward transcendence—in the Christian tradition, what’s called God; in other traditions, called different things—but ultimately an objective reality outside of humanity that is ultimately good. That orientation is cultivated through the inward turn of the human toward their interior life. Right now, that interior life is being completely changed through our connection to technology. We no longer believe in it; we don’t even know it exists. Churches aren’t teaching young people how to pray, how to go inside, how to live an examined life the way Socrates talked about. The examined life is worth living—it’s intrinsically good, wonderful, for reasons that have nothing to do with money. That’s the core of why I was interested in religion in the first place, and I believe religion answers that question. There’s this interior life, but if we don’t know it’s there, we won’t cultivate it—and I do believe that’s the warning Teilhard de Chardin gives, and Marshall McLuhan as well.
Tami Simon: So you’ve mentioned how the noosphere, according to Teilhard de Chardin, could give birth to the ultra-human, and I want to hear more about what an ultra-human might be like. But it sounds like you’re also saying it could be birthing—or connected to—what I’ll call the shrunken human: a lack of interior animation. It could go either way.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Absolutely, I think that’s it. In writing this book, I explored the future forecasts of people I thought were visionaries, and I tried to uncover the assumptions they had. What we get is an apocalyptic moment where it could possibly be a bifurcation of humanity—those who recognize we have an interior life and cultivate it, and those who don’t know that. And strangely, it’s not because we’ve lost the history of it; it’s because the technology we’re using doesn’t allow for it. In fact, it’s bad for our brains—literally. I’m not making that up; that’s not a metaphor. We’re all aware of the research coming out now about what it does to our brains. That could possibly be happening. What I see with Teilhard de Chardin is one of the most articulate—not the first, but one of the most articulate—futurists describing a reality that it seems we’re upon now.
Tami Simon: Do you see a way that technology could actually amplify our interiority?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Yes, I do. I think AI is an incredible enhancement for human knowledge, but we also have to listen to the people who create it and use it correctly. It will change us—there’s no doubt about that—but I think we need to be directed in the change. That’s why I talk about Mark Stahlman in the book. He’s been working with AI for something like thirty years, and he’s also been watching how other countries regulate it, what they use it for, how their youth adopt it, and so on. He’s very optimistic—he sees technology, especially AI, contributing to the cultivation of the interior lives of very young people, those being born now, maybe Gen Z, people around eighteen. He believes they’ll be inheriting a new form of AI—not the kind we have now, but one that will allow for the cultivation of the interior life.
Tami Simon: And how will that new form do that? Can you help me see it?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: This is where he’s a very intelligent man, and I can only translate what he says. He describes it this way: right now we’re in a fantasy—what he calls electric or television culture. We see things on our screens, but we don’t know if they’re real or not, because of fake news, deepfakes, people’s voices being faked almost perfectly now. He says that’s not helpful for our culture. What we’re going to get is not the fantasy, but the reality.
Your new book is called The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. In a moment I want to talk more about UFOs—but tell me what you mean by “the secret forces guiding human destiny.”
Dr. Diana Pasulka: The secret forces guiding human destiny—I would call them forces that aren’t necessarily secret on purpose, or intentionally secret, but forces we don’t actually ever think about. I’ve talked about technology, and a lot of people are unaware that technology changes how we perceive reality. It changes the game. If you look at the history of technology and the history of critiques of technology, one of the first would be the Phaedrus, a dialogue by Plato, where Socrates and Phaedrus talk about the creation of writing. Writing really did change human culture—it changed memory. Plato specifically says writing is going to be dangerous unless we’re careful with it. In a sense, this is being repeated today with the Pope and the discussions around Anthropic—what do we do with AI, how is it going to change the human being? Plato was talking about this in an ancient form: how technology will shift and change our memories. He said that unless we treat writing as an enhancement to human knowledge, we’re going to lose a lot of knowledge. He’s talking about oral culture—oral traditions, many of which still exist today, that refuse writing on purpose. There are a lot of Indigenous communities that don’t want to write down their history; they want to pass it down as a living form of knowledge, passed only by voice. That gets lost when we have a transcript, like this podcast.
Socrates and Plato are basically warning that this will happen and will change society. If we look at the changes in technology with the printing press and mass writing, and then television, and radio—each change in our technological infrastructure changes human beings too. We co-evolve with technology. Those are the hidden forces I’m talking about in The Others. It’s not a secret society or a conspiracy—it sounds like that, and the press really liked that framing, so they wanted to use it as the title. I thought, okay, that’s fine, because I am talking about forces that are guiding human history that we don’t learn about in school. We don’t have a class on how technology changes our perception of reality. We just learn how to use the technology.
Tami Simon: In the beginning of The Others, you talk about this as a time that’s been prophesied where perhaps this new human—as Teilhard de Chardin called it, the ultra-human—might be born out of these forces shaping us. I want to understand more: how do you see this new human possibility at this time? What would the new human be like?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: When I give talks, I always say this is going to be my opinion, not the research I’ve found or what other people say. My opinion is that I don’t want this to happen. I like us human beings. I like how we’re created, how we have the ability to cultivate an interior life—I think it’s wonderful and beautiful. Part of why I wrote the book—and I consider it to be somewhat of a dark book, to tell you the truth, somewhat dark to write—is that I was immersed in predictions of the future that frankly looked scary.
So what do I see, and what do I see them saying, and what do I see could possibly happen? I think it’s hard to predict, but we are seeing a change in how human beings function in their use of technology. Everyone has a phone, carries it everywhere, is constantly on it. Within the halls of my university, fifteen years ago, students were congregated before class, having conversations. Now they’re all on their phones, not actually talking to each other. That’s not necessarily bad or wrong, but it’s shifting human community, shifting mental health—there’s a lot changing because of that. Human beings are shifting in that respect.
Mark Stahlman sees this differently. He sees it as a new form of the human—I think he might be right, though I’m not entirely sure this has happened yet. He sees human beings having less of a boundary—we tend to think of ourselves as insular, that what I think stays in my brain—but we’re seeing technology that can now read brainwaves. Is this what Teilhard de Chardin was referring to? It’s certainly what Marshall McLuhan was referring to—a time when human beings wouldn’t have any privacy, not in the sense of people in your house, but in the sense of “mind reading.” He, Teilhard de Chardin, and Arthur C. Clarke—the three visionaries I describe in the book—are all talking about the loss of cognitive sovereignty. I think we’re seeing the very beginning of that.
Tami Simon: An age of telepathy—an age of subtle senses, where we know what others are thinking?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: I think it’s going to be enhanced by technology. In many cultures, the idea of mind reading or telepathy already exists, and each of the people I’ve mentioned believed in it too. Marshall McLuhan believed technology was going to augment telepathy. We see that idea in new age communities and in a lot of religious traditions—discernment of souls, that kind of thing—identified with the interior life. In certain meditative practices, people might develop these abilities, but we’re not supposed to pay attention to them, because that’s not the goal. But what if that happens at scale—because of technology like Neuralink, which allows people to use their minds to do certain things, and also allows certain computers to access our brainwaves? That’s a form of telepathy we haven’t fully considered yet, but it’s definitely being created now.
Tami Simon: Before I let you go, Diana, we have to talk about UFOs. You’ve written quite a lot about your research into—”alleged,” is the word you use, I like that—crash sites, and your interviews with experiencers about their alleged contact experiences. I was with a group of people the other night, and we said, “Let’s take bets at the table.” I think a lot of people are sitting around tables having a beverage and asking this kind of question: when is public, mainstream acceptance of the presence of extraterrestrials going to happen? When is it not going to be “we’re waiting for clear government disclosure,” with debates about whether to believe it—when is it going to be considered known? I’m curious about your view of the time horizon on that, given what you know.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: In the beginning of my research into communities of people who believe they’re in contact with UFOs, I was looking at this as a nonbeliever—as a person looking at infrastructure change and how it would impact belief systems, recognizing this was most likely a new form of religion we’d be seeing. At the end of writing my first book on this, American Cosmic, I recognized there was going to be a government disclosure on this topic, and I thought, that’s really going to supercharge this religion, because when you have a government backing a religion, that’s big. That’s how I understood the topic.
The book came out, and then disclosure started. When I say disclosure, there is right now a group of people within the government—including military personnel, fighter pilots, congressional senators and representatives—regularly asking the president to talk about UFOs. We also have, almost weekly, releases of formerly classified documents regarding UFOs—videos, photographs, and so forth. Most people don’t care. That’s what I’ve noticed. You get some people who say, “Wow, this is really interesting, what’s happening?” Will President Trump talk about UFOs and say the government’s been hiding something? I don’t think he’s going to do that—I don’t know if he believes in it. I think he wants to give the American people something he can believe in, and it doesn’t look like, based on what I can tell, he’s saying “I believe in them.” He says people do believe this, and he knows people want to see these things, but he’s not saying he believes in them himself.
I think a lot of people, Tami, already believe there are anomalous phenomena in the skies, and they’re thinking it’s not a big deal if there are. Unless we have a president coming out and saying, “We know these things exist, we study them,” I don’t see anything really changing. Part of the government itself doesn’t even want this to get out, and there are people saying the government isn’t unified on what’s happening. But if you go to the store and talk to your neighbors, I don’t think it’s really on their radar. They’re not that interested.
But your question was about when do I think it will be something like that—
Tami Simon: I was sitting around a table, and one person said, regardless of whether it comes through government disclosure or other undeniable evidence, contact, and media reportage that can’t be denied—governments involved or not—one person said within fifteen years; another said next year. I thought, okay, we have one to fifteen years, and by the time we finished the conversation, it looked like it was between one and five years. That’s like tomorrow to me. This is just a group of people in the realm of hypothesis, but you’re talking to people on the inside, Diana—other scientists, researchers, and reporters. So I want your perspective: number of years.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: I would say I’m with the friend who said between one and five years.
Tami Simon: That’s where our group coalesced.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Yeah, I think so. But the thing is, Tami, I don’t think it’s going to change our reality. I think our reality is going to be changed by AI and that kind of technology. The reason I don’t think disclosure itself will change reality is that—based on speaking to people on the inside—they don’t see it the way science fiction has portrayed it. It’s not like that. It’s more like what we see in the movie A.I. In fact, I think that’s probably a better movie to illustrate the reality of aliens than a movie about the disclosure of aliens. Both are Spielberg movies—one is about AI, the other is about disclosure of aliens. In my opinion, based on having done this for so long and meeting people who are clearly in these programs, A.I. is a better representation of that reality. It’s not going to be trotting out an alien.
Tami Simon: Can you tell me again—I’m sorry, I haven’t seen the movie A.I.—what in it demonstrates what consciousness of extraterrestrial life is going to be like over the next few years?
Dr. Diana Pasulka: In that movie, you see an AI that we create, and then you see a future, post-human world without human beings living, but the AI is still around. Then you see aliens that appear to be evolved AI-like life forms that stem from what we created and have evolved. You see these two realities side by side in the movie A.I.
Tami Simon: Okay, this is mind-bending. Here at the end, I want to take a quote from your new book, The Others, and have you explain it: “The truth is that the possibility that UFOs are real has been the best thing for religion and religious practitioners for at least two hundred years.” As a professor of religious studies, tell me why that’s so.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Because I think the most important consequence of disclosure today is that you have an authoritative body—the U.S. government—coming out and saying we are not alone in the universe, and possibly there are things… and the government gets pretty specific sometimes. It says there are things we think are supernatural, that we’re not sure what they are—they’ve even used the term “paranormal.” Interdimensional, these kinds of things. That’s a religious viewpoint. It’s basically discarding the old, completely positivistic, materialist assumption that we live in this world and there’s nothing beyond what we can see and measure with our instruments. Well—there is. That’s what the government is saying. And what that does is elevate the assumptions of communities of religious practitioners. We do live in an enchanted cosmos.
Tami Simon: There we go—we do live in an enchanted cosmos. Dr. Diana Pasulka, who writes under the name D.W. Pasulka, is the author of several books, including Encounters, American Cosmic, and her new book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. Thank you so much for being an academic on the edge.
Dr. Diana Pasulka: Thank you, Tami. It was really wonderful to talk with you.
Tami Simon: Thank you.
