Diana Pasulka

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a religious-studies scholar at the University of North Carolina Wilmington whose work connects Catholic devotional history, media studies, digital culture, and contemporary UFO and UAP belief.¹²³⁴⁵ Her relevance to disclosure studies comes from that disciplinary position: she treats nonhuman-intelligence narratives as evidence of belief, authority, experience, media formation, and technological imagination rather than as settled public proof of extraterrestrial visitation.⁴⁵⁶

  Academic Religious Studies

UNCW lists Pasulka as a professor in its Department of Philosophy and Religion.¹ Syracuse University lists her as a 2003 religion alumna and records Heaven Can Wait and American Cosmic among her nonfiction books.² Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture, published by Oxford University Press in 2014, examines Catholic debates over the location, materiality, and representation of purgatory.³

Pasulka's early scholarly frame matters because it places anomalous experience inside the academic study of religion rather than inside a simple true-or-false evidentiary dispute.³⁴⁵

  Technology, Media, and Belief

Pasulka's 2016 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion argued that films and digital media about the religious supernatural can function as social technologies that shape spectatorship and belief.⁴ Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural, which she co-edited with Simone Natale and Oxford University Press published in 2019, argues that digital media should be analyzed with the beliefs, rituals, values, and practices that prepare people to use and trust it.⁵

That media-and-technology framework later became central to her UFO work.⁷⁸ In a 2016 OUPblog conversation with Jacques Vallee, Pasulka connected historical religious-studies methods with digital searches for patterns in anomalous aerial reports, while emphasizing that researchers still have to identify primary sources, preserve context, test correlations, and rule out misleading patterns.⁷

  American Cosmic

American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.²⁸ A library catalog summary describes the book as an examination of mechanisms behind belief in extraterrestrial life, based on a six-year ethnographic study of scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence.⁸ The book's dossier value is not that it proves the origin of UFOs, but that it documents how media, scientific authority, secrecy, personal experience, and material claims can produce religious effects around nonhuman-intelligence narratives.⁴⁷⁸⁶

Pasulka's official site says her work for American Cosmic included research between 2014 and 2018 in New Mexico, Rome, the Vatican Archive, and the Vatican Observatory, plus a trip to an alleged New Mexico UFO crash site with two scientists.⁹ Those episodes are important as ethnographic reports about elite belief and interpretation, but they remain limited as public evidence because the claims about materials, provenance, and nonhuman origin are not independently resolved in the dossier record.⁸⁹⁶

  Encounters

Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences was published by St. Martin's Essentials on November 7, 2023.¹⁰ Macmillan describes the book as a profile-driven exploration of researchers and innovators working on questions of nonhuman life, UFOs, angels, AI, dreams, and other phenomena at the edges of ordinary categories.¹⁰ The continuity with American Cosmic is methodological: Pasulka follows reported encounters, altered states, and technology-linked interpretations as human data before making final claims about what the experiences are.⁸¹⁰⁶

  Evidentiary Limits

Pasulka has repeatedly framed her work as religious-studies analysis rather than confession, advocacy, or direct proof.⁷⁶ In a 2026 interview with El Pais, she said she had always worked in religious studies as an academic discipline, that her work was not confessional or testimonial, and that reported contact experiences can be studied without proving or disproving the reported source.⁶ She also told El Pais that researchers should be careful with opinions and conclusions because new data can change them.⁶

That boundary is the key to reading her dossier carefully.⁶ Pasulka is significant because she documents how UFO and UAP narratives acquire religious force among experiencers, scientists, aerospace insiders, government-linked figures, digital media systems, and Catholic or esoteric interpretive frames.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰⁶ She is not, on the public record alone, a final evidentiary authority on recovered materials, crash retrievals, or nonhuman origin claims.⁸⁹⁶

  References

  References

1. uncw.edu ↩ ↩²

2. artsandsciences.syracuse.edu ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Oxford Academic: Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. academic.oup.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Oxford Academic: Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. El Pais English: Diana Walsh Pasulka, specialist in religions ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

7. blog.oup.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

8. IUCAT: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

9. dwpasulka.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. Macmillan: Encounters ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴