A Scholar's Deep Dive Into the Metaphysics of Religion

ELI5/TLDR

A Catholic-history professor stumbled into UFO research through old archives — orbs, levitating saints, things penetrating walls — and noticed the records sounded suspiciously like modern UFO reports. She went from atheist scoffer to “what the heck is going on” agnostic. The conversation is really about how belief gets manufactured, why “rational” people sometimes do “irrational” things and get useful results, and what Plato’s cave was actually trying to tell us. UFOs are the case study; the bigger question is how humans build worlds out of things we can’t quite see.

The Full Story

Religious studies, with a stripped-out preacher

First a small clearing of the throat: religious studies is not theology. Pasulka is not a minister; she’s an academic who looks at religion the way an archaeologist looks at pottery shards — what people did, what changed, what stuck. The field uses history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology. It does not weigh in on whether God exists. The point is to look at religion as a social technology, not to advocate for it.

She specialized in European Catholic history and, in particular, the dogma of purgatory — that holding-pen for souls between heaven and hell where you burn off your sins. Walk into a Catholic church before 1960 and there’d be a corner for praying souls out of purgatory. Walk in today and most Catholics don’t even know what the word means. So she went hunting for why a dogma can vanish.

How a purgatory book became a UFO book

While going through Catholic archives — chronicles, convent reports, mayor’s letters from centuries back — she kept finding things that didn’t fit her project. Orbs of light penetrating convent walls. Houses moving through the air. Aerial phenomena described by what we’d now call reliable witnesses: nuns, brothers, scholars, town officials. She set them aside as a “weird” file.

A friend looked at the file and said it sounded like Spielberg movies. She thought that was insane. But there happened to be a UFO conference in town, she went, listened to people describe their experiences, and the structural similarity to her Catholic reports was loud enough that she pivoted. The book that came out of it — American Cosmic — argues that belief in UFOs is forming a new religiosity (more on that word in a minute), and along the way she ended up with people from the U.S. space program, Stanford scientist Garry Nolan, and a pseudonymous insider she calls Tyler. Some of them took her to a New Mexico crash site looking for debris. She kept thinking: how do these obviously rational people believe this?

By the end she had moved from atheist-with-respect-to-UFOs to agnostic-shaped question mark.

Religion is bigger than your high school version of it

A lot of the conversation is Pasulka pushing back on a small, brittle definition of religion — the Dawkins straw man, where religion equals “Christianity with bad evidence.” Her working definition is wider: a set of beliefs and practices oriented toward something with transformative power. That tent now holds Buddhism (which has no creator god), Hinduism (which has no conversion), Star Wars Jediism (yes, real practitioners), and the Native American Church’s use of peyote.

Once the tent is that wide, “is X a religion?” stops being a yes/no question. It becomes: what kind of religious-shaped object is this?

A useful term she introduces: religiosity. A religion is discreet — Nation of Islam, Catholicism — with membership and a doctrine. A religiosity is decentralized: shared beliefs and practices that float around culture without a single institution. The “spiritual but not religious” crowd, the people who do yoga and half-believe in UFOs — that’s a religiosity. Belief in UFOs, she argues, has become exactly that. Mass-marketed through media, decentralized, and quietly transcendent.

Carl Jung saw this coming in the 1940s. He started by calling the flying saucer a new archetype. Then friends he trusted reported sightings, governments showed him radar data, and by the end he was writing letters saying the archetype seemed to also have a physical component. He didn’t know what to do with that, and Pasulka thinks neither do we.

Why does the secularization thesis keep losing?

The standard prediction — as societies get more rational, religion fades — has not held up. There are more religious people on Earth now than ever. Even in the West, where atheism is rising, the “nones” who tick “no religion” on the census are usually doing yoga, taking psychedelics, and entertaining UFO ideas. Scratch the surface and there’s a transcendence-shaped hole; they’re just filling it with non-traditional content.

So religion isn’t going away. Something about it seems necessary, and Pasulka is honest that she doesn’t know what.

Woo science (the rational kind)

This is one of the more useful frames in the conversation. The people who founded the U.S. and Russian space programs — Jack Parsons, Wernher von Braun, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — all used what she calls body techniques. Disciplined regimes, altered states, ritual, in some cases occult practice (Parsons hung out with Aleister Crowley). They got the math that put us in space.

“I’m not a scientist, but I’m saying to scientists, the data looks weird, right? It looks weird… but to a person in my field these things are actually patterns and why would you ignore those patterns if they’re giving these amazing results?”

Curt — the host — pushes back smartly. Newton did alchemy and produced calculus; Wim Hof jumps in cold water and gets insight. The fact that a practice consistently produces results doesn’t validate the story the practitioner tells about why. Pasulka agrees entirely. The pattern is real. The interpretive framework — Lakshmi whispering in Ramanujan’s ear, Crowley-style magick for Parsons — is local, cultural, and not the explanation.

Bridge: think of it like sleep. We know sleep does something to memory. People used to say it was the soul wandering, then it was Freudian repression, now it’s glymphatic drainage and consolidation. The practice always worked; the explanations keep being replaced.

Heidegger, technology, and the housing of the sacred

About a third of the way in, Heidegger shows up — partly because Pasulka likes him, mostly because Jacques Vallée, the computer scientist who became one of the foundational UFO researchers, looks to her like a walking Heideggerian essay.

Heidegger’s question: where does a culture house the sacred? For Greeks, the temple. For medieval Catholics, the cathedral. For us, he was suggesting, technology. Not as a tool but as the infrastructure that determines our relationship with the world.

“Only a god can save us now.”

That was his last published line — held back until his death. The “god” wasn’t the Christian one. It was something so far outside ordinary human experience that it would basically be a deus ex machina. Pasulka uses this to bridge to Vallée, who built information systems for a living and studied UFOs on the side, and to her own thesis: belief in UFOs is functioning as the religious infrastructure for the technological era.

Jack Parsons and the Latin nobody bothered to read

Buried in the conversation is one of the strangest details. Tyler — the space-program insider — was integral to satellite launches Pasulka attended. She noticed the launches were ritualized. Roman gods on the rockets. First-century imperial Latin (not medieval Catholic Latin) inscribed on satellites. Crews wearing the same clothes for every mission, eating the same food, staying in fixed locations. A chaplain on site. Pasulka could read the Latin; Tyler couldn’t. She asked who the inscriptions were for. He said: I imagine it’s for them. Then he stopped talking.

She doesn’t claim to know what that means. She does claim it’s a religious-shaped behavior happening inside one of the most expensive scientific enterprises on Earth, and that nobody is paying attention to it.

Disinformation, assets, and the fight club

The most operationally interesting section. Pasulka describes two patterns of “asset cultivation” — when intelligence agencies use civilians without the civilians knowing they’re being used. The first targets vulnerable people (Paul Bennewitz being the canonical example) and feeds them weird content until they appear unhinged, which produces a stigma: if crazy people believe in UFOs, I don’t want to. The second targets credible journalists with credentials (Linda Moulton Howe was an example) and feeds them scraps of misinformation that arrive as “exclusives.”

Her solution: she severed ties with most of the “invisible college” she’d been embedded with. Kept Vallée and Nolan; cut the rest. Her research was the kind that could be weaponized — historical evidence that strange aerial phenomena have been around forever — so she became careful about who was metabolizing it.

She also distinguishes between the older “invisible college” (small, secret, scientists who shared with each other) and what replaced it in the 80s/90s: a fight club of compartmentalized researchers who no longer share even with each other. Knowledge in academia spreads to compound; knowledge in fight club is hoarded to compound. Both work; they work very differently.

Plato’s cave is not an allegory

Late in the conversation Pasulka makes an argument that’s worth slowing down for. She started reading the cave passage from The Republic obsessively after American Cosmic came out, and noticed two things.

First, almost nobody asks: who tied the people up? Her philosopher friends say “it’s just an allegory,” and she says no, look — Plato uses literal imagery. People got tied up. And after working in UFO disinformation for a decade she now thinks people tie each other up all the time, intentionally feeding bad maps so the rest of us mistake shadow for thing.

Second, the part everyone forgets. The escapee comes back, fails to convince anyone, and then doesn’t just go away — Socrates says he engages in a craft. Not propositional teaching. A dialectic, a dialogue, a participation. The way you stay out of the cave is not by knowing facts about the outside; it’s by doing this thing with another person. She thinks Iris Murdoch got this right and most readers of Plato have not.

Bridge: this maps cleanly onto the propositional/participatory distinction John Vervaeke uses on Heidegger. You can know about dancing all you want; that knowledge is a different species from the knowledge that lives in your hips when you actually dance. Pasulka’s claim is that the cave passage was always pointing at the second kind, and we’ve been reading it for the first kind for two thousand years.

Epistemic shock, ontological shock, dark night

The most personal stretch of the conversation. Both host and guest have had what she calls a flip — a weekend where the world they thought they were living in stopped lining up with the one they were observing. Pasulka calls it pre-UFO Diana and post-UFO Diana. Curt obliquely refers to a similar experience and at one point says he wishes he could go back into the cave; the truth, in some doses, is too much.

The handle she offers is from a Catholic Ursuline sister: we are in the world but not of the world. You don’t restore the old map. You acknowledge you’re seeing something most people aren’t, and you find a sangha — Buddhist for community of people doing the same waking-up — to keep you stable. Without a sangha, Nietzsche-style, the experience can disintegrate you. Heidegger had Catholicism in the background and Kyoto School Zen Buddhists for friends. Pasulka has Sister Rose, a homeschool group of “uncomplicated” Catholics, and Vallée. Curt has, by his own admission, been working on this part.

Aliens are not going to break religion

A common assumption — usually voiced by congresspeople and journalists — is that confirmation of UFOs would shatter religious belief. Pasulka, who actually talks to Vatican astronomers and Catholic radio audiences, says the opposite. Religious traditions already have categories for non-human intelligence: angels, demons, devas, jinn. Atheists are the ones without slots ready. Some Vatican astronomers have publicly said extraterrestrials, if real, would simply be another part of God’s creation. The Catholic creed already includes “all that is visible and invisible.”

In the question of whether aliens are the real thing and angels were misinterpretations, or angels are real and aliens are our materialist re-skinning, Pasulka quotes her colleague Jeffrey Kripal: both are interpretations, both lean on what’s currently available to think with, and a hundred years from now someone will laugh at our framing too.

Key Takeaways

Religion in the academic sense is wider than Christianity-shaped. Anything organized around a transformative power qualifies, including Buddhism, Native American peyote tradition, and several UFO communities.
Religiosity is the useful term for decentralized, mass-mediated belief — what’s currently happening with UFOs in the culture. Not yet a religion. Already a religious phenomenon.
The secularization thesis is empirically wrong. The “nones” haven’t gone secular; they’ve gone unstructured-spiritual.
Body techniques (ritual, altered states, disciplined regimes) reliably produce creative results in fields as different as rocket science, polymerase chain reaction discovery, and Indian mathematics. The story the practitioner tells about why is local; the pattern is real and worth studying.
The U.S. space program is full of ritual nobody talks about — Roman iconography, first-century Latin, fixed crew rituals. Worth its own investigation.
Disinformation in the UFO space follows two patterns: discrediting through unstable intermediaries, and seeding journalists with controlled “leaks.” Knowing both shapes lets you smell them.
The Plato cave reading we inherited is missing its third act. The escapee doesn’t lecture and leave; he engages in a craft — a participatory dialectic with another person. Knowing about the outside is not enough; doing-with is.
Confirmation of non-human intelligence will probably not break religious traditions. They already have slots for it. It might break secular materialism harder.
After an ontological flip, you need a sangha. Without one, you become Nietzsche.

Claude’s Take

Score: 7. Three hours is a lot of conversation, and Pasulka is genuinely good company in it. She’s careful about her claims, generous about what she doesn’t know, and she pulls real material from a field most people only encounter through Netflix documentaries. The Heidegger thread, the cave reread, and the propositional/participatory distinction are the parts that earn the runtime. So is the disinformation pattern-recognition.

Now the BS filter. Pasulka is unusually self-aware for someone in this space — she keeps reminding the audience she doesn’t claim UFOs are extraterrestrial, doesn’t claim the debris is non-terrestrial, doesn’t claim Roswell is “real.” But the conversation still trades in a lot of unverifiable insider testimony. A billionaire funded my Vatican research. Tyler is in the space program. The patches have Latin on them. There are factions you don’t know about. You either trust the witness or you don’t, and there’s no way to check. The Curt-Pasulka call-and-response sometimes builds a structure of mutual confirmation — yes, that’s what I saw too — that should make a careful listener’s antenna twitch even if both speakers are sincere.

The strongest move in the whole conversation is also the safest one: the framework where you study belief in UFOs as a sociological phenomenon without committing to the metaphysics. That’s a clean, honest project. The weaker moves happen when she drifts toward implying that the consistency of insider testimony is itself evidence of something real — which is the exact pattern she earlier flagged in the purgatory museum’s burnt handprints. She catches herself once, comparing the UFO debris labs to the purgatory relic project and saying it probably won’t age well. That’s the right instinct and I wish there were more of it.

The “fight club” framing is the part that made me sit up and take notes. The claim that compartmentalized non-sharing can produce real knowledge is not crazy — corporate R&D, classified weapons programs, and intelligence agencies all run that way. Whether it produces the kind of knowledge worth having is a different question.

Curt’s interjections are the show’s secret weapon. He pushes back on the “rational woo” argument with a clean version of the Newton-and-alchemy counter, and he refuses to let the cave allegory turn into mush. The personal exchange near the end — about ontological shock, the dark night of the soul, and his own visible reluctance to go back into that territory — is the most honest thing in the recording. It’s also a reminder that this stuff isn’t a lifestyle accessory. People genuinely come apart when their world model breaks open and there’s no community to catch them.

Net: worth the time if you’re already curious about religion-as-technology, Heidegger, or the sociology of belief. Skip if you wanted UFO news. Pasulka has very deliberately not written that book.

A Scholar's Deep Dive Into the Metaphysics of Religion | Diana Pasulka