Dr. Diana Pasulka | American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, & Technology

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00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. I'm Greg Carlwood These are the Higher Side Chats. Alright, higher side chatters from sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood here to help you make a little more sense out of this weird world which is never an easy task with so many things open to interpretation high strangeness can oftentimes be pretty hard to define we can also get caught up in traps of terminology and category that can greatly affect how experiences are understood and take us off the course of true understanding

01:51 Are visitations from unknown beings angelic communication or alien encounters? Are orbs of light messages from God, signals from our space brothers? Were the strange experiences that anointed certain religious figures with sainthood what we'd call paranormal today and what sort of beliefs do the billionaires in tech who really influence our everyday lives actually have behind the curtain. When you're wrestling with such big questions, it helps to have a complete data set. But we're still sorting out exactly where to draw the line. Add in the facts that many people who have ET encounters go through a spiritual transformation and some of the world's most advanced telescopes are produced by the Catholic Church and it starts to feel like one big bowl of Mulligatawny. Well today's guest is an accomplished professor stitching together these very worlds of religion UFOs and has been examining the overlap as well as the religiosity of ufology

02:42 Her name is Dr. Diana Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion She has a great new book out published by Oxford University Press called American Cosmic UFOs religion and technology which details her wild six-year ride researching these hidden things from the inner circles of Silicon Valley to beyond the gates of Vatican archives It's one of the most interesting books I've read in a while and I'm psyched to dive into it. The doctor of dogma, the professor of paranormal thread connecting and Ufology Fight Club chronicler Dr. Diana, welcome to The Higher Side! Thank you. I really like that introduction. Nice, well i try and thank you so much for being here! You obviously have accomplished a lot and I'm fortunate to have some of your time. You're probably the only person I know of to penetrate both the inner circles of the Silicon Valley tech elite and Vatican archives very cool

03:35 And for listeners who are on the outside, who are pretty intrigued by secrets it's hard to find a more impressive set of experiences than what you write about in this book especially because it is so recent. And of course the obvious first question is how someone like yourself whose really dedicated your career path to religious studies ends up interested in UFOs? We all know that sometimes we don't fully choose the path, the path can choose us. And I guess that's kind of in play here because this sci-fi twist in your journey sort of started with an investigation of purgatory is that right? That is right. Yes, so it is odd for me I have to admit that the research in the book was as odd for me as It appears for others So let me assure you that that is the case and if you had told me ten years ago That I'd be publishing a book like this little alone talking about UFOs and this phenomena I would have laughed okay? And probably kicked you out of my house. Mm-hmm. How did this happen?

04:35 I grew up actually around Silicon Valley and so, I already knew that there was a tech revolution. I was going to grad school during the 1990's so that's when the big dot-com boom was happening. So it was happening everywhere around me while I was studying religious studies at University of California and I'd been interested in technology only because i could tell that it was changing the very fabric of our society, in ways which people who are born after 2000 don't understand. So you know there's a German term for it, the zeitgeist and basically means really intense spirit at the time and so I could feel that

05:22 When I graduated with a PhD and I was an assistant professor in my field, you publish or perish. So I was publishing about Catholic culture which is the field that i'm most acquainted with and I was doing a lot of work on basically what you would call aerial phenomena transformative experiences with respect to orbs, aerial phenomena beings of light things like that. And I was writing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory and you know I was going back hundreds of years to look at archival resources or sources is what we would call them

06:01 read them and I had a list of these things. And so you know, I did write my book about purgatory and it was published by Oxford and it was you know very decent good academic book. I got tenure and you know as academics generally have their next book already planned. So I had my next book already planned. I was going to write about this Catholic bishop the first Catholic Bishop here in the States he was from Ireland pretty cool guy. I thought you know somebody needs to People have written about him, but there needs to be a new book about him. John England was his name? Well I was doing research for that. I kept going back because i'm so intrigued by this list of reports of Catholics from hundreds of years ago up till the present really of Aero phenomena and their different interpretations of it And I was looking at that and I think you know I want to do something with this But I'm not quite sure how to even think about it

06:53 So I was having coffee with a colleague and i presented it to the colleague and I said, what do you think of this stuff? And he looked over you know, he went ah You know kind of thing. And he said oh this looks like steven spielberg stuff and I said why are you talking about He said, you know It looks like ufo's and really I just almost like spat my coffee out at him, you know Like get out that's ridiculous but Coincidentally, there was a UFO conference. I'd never been to one and never even thought I would go to one but thought about what he said and I looked at it and I thought oh yeah that does kind of look like that so I went the UFO conference and there I listened to Chris Bledsoe who is an experiencer your audience might be familiar with his story He actually lives in North Carolina pretty close to me And I heard his story and a couple other stories by people who have had these experiences

07:43 And I realized that the patterns were so similar, that I just decided to start to study this. That's how it all began in 2012 Yeah, I love it. And the book you mentioned that you grew up around Silicon Valley but the book opens with kind of a private tour of Silicon Valley hosted by Jacques Vallée legend in the field that alone is pretty impressive right? Yeah it was really cool yeah that all happened again by accident I was at a conference in California and Robbie Graham you might be familiar with his work he wrote Silver Screen Saucers

08:21 And he actually was a PhD student at that time. He was in film and he was a journalist, and he's interested in UFOs and things like that. So he was also invited to this conference so we were both there and some of the only ones who were really interested in the UFO topic and Jacques was there, you know, he is the name in UFOs! Robby and I actually didn't have a ride back to San Francisco from the area that we were in, Jacques offered to give us a ride. And we both kind of like high-fived each other you know yeah so Jacques decided that he was going to give us a tour of Silicon Valley and kind of talked to us about everything about the secrets of Silicon Valley and and i have to say it blew my mind you know and this is the place where I grew up all the places he took

09:14 These were places from my childhood and he talked about these places like somebody, you know He created these places really? You know this is where I work This is where I did this and this is where sri was at stanford research institute And he would hint at the secrets of silicon valley So he dropped robbie off At his hotel and then he dropped me off and he gave me a couple books that he said, you know you know, I want you to read these books. And of course heck yeah! I read those books so i read all of Jacques's... You know? I'd already read most of what he had written already but he gave me some other books that weren't published and stuff that he wanted me to look at and ever since that time I've actually been working with Jacques. So I developed a working relationship with him and we see each other you know a couple times a year and now we work together and he's brilliant whether

10:04 what I found when i started to do the history of the space program and the history of ufology and that type of thing. And, to tell you the truth, the history technology what I found was Jacques was in all of that from 1970's on so you can actually access Jacques early work a lot of it is online free And you know he's got stuff from the 1970s there about human computer interfaces and stuff like that. I mean, so now... He actually just read a paper that I had written and he commented to me on it. He said, oh good work Diana! You know we were already doing this in the 1970s? And i said no no i know that and he says the only reason we couldn't actually get it done was because we knew how to do it they didn't have the correct technology to do it yet so he was the forerunner of a lot of stuff that's happening now but because people don't pay attention to history no one really knows that

11:00 So I opened my book with Jacques for that reason, to kind of place him within that history so people who are interested both in technology but also in UFOs and paranormal would understand his place. And not just Jacques but a lot of people that I end up calling the invisibles, a lot of them they won't come out you know? They did as much as Jacques did and they're as interesting but they want to live a more quiet life I guess you could call it Right and that leads us right into what to me is one of the most interesting aspects of the book why it's so unique as you write about, the quote unquote invisible college or to use another term let's become a silicon valley fight club of academic scientists in.

11:45 The millionaires, maybe billionaire class who's out there studying ufology in secret. But some are privy to classified information and cross paths with the military and deep corporate nexus. And this is super provocative to me we have heard about it in past decades with SRI and the Stargate project that kind of thing but I don't know anybody who has written about These latest glimpses into what it has become. That's very cool Yes, so it took me a while first of all You have to understand there were a couple of times in the research when I decided this research was too weird for me you know if you look at my history you look at my publications and just

12:26 a regular historian of religion. Like there's nothing weird about what I've done, right? So i'm very normal and then you get to past 2012 and I start to write some pretty crazy stuff And I was thinking to myself do I really want to do this first of all, the things I was learning about were personally mind-blowing. And so I had to get used to that. Secondly you know if i hadn't already been a full professor and I was still on the road to getting tenure and that type thing, I wouldn't have touched this research no not at all. So I felt pretty confident that you know I'd won some research awards, I'd won a lot of grants, I was like I think I'm safe, I think I could do this and not get fired kind of thing. So I kept doing

13:10 doing. I mean as you yourself feel, there's an innate attraction once you start to recognize that the world isn't as he thought it was how can you not want to study it? Well how could I not want to know these things so I had to know these things I had to learn more about them and what I found with that you know Jacques and his friend Hynek who now is you know, everybody can look at the quote-unquote Project Blue Book historical documentary on TV. There were these programs and they existed and so there was this thing called the Invisible College and the Invisible College is I believe Hynek actually coined the term from a term that I think Francis Bacon originated now I could be wrong about that but it originated back when science was something that the Catholic Church would kill you for

14:01 Okay, so you know I know that something that you know today. That's not true but back in the day it was very true if you're doing really far out science and your science was something that challenge the status quo, you could very well be killed for that. So there was this thing called the Invisible College and so Hynek basically said you know what we're doing that now! So Jacques and Hynek were part of the Invisible College and there's a book by Jacques called The Invisible College. I realized that i was meeting people in the Invisible College but It sure was different than when Jacques wrote about it in the 1970s. In fact, it was no longer the invisible college because what happened to it was that the people

14:45 I don't know why this is the case, but i can tell you it's the case. What happened was that a lot of the people within it couldn't even talk to each other about what little part of it they were studying so it became what I called because I thought this was very similar to Fight Club right? The fight club is a movie in the 1990s and it's also book and it's about this group of men who create this this fight club, but they don't talk about it because you know it's subversive and well really this is what I was looking at. I was looking at something that looked like Fight Club so that's what I called it. I said the Invisible College has actually morphed into in the 2000s into Fight Club so that's what I decided to call it and I think a more accurate term of what's going on now in that sector

15:37 Yeah i think that's so fascinating your main points of contact with the invisibles with this secret group working on the ufo thing are these two guys that are not miss you column tyler and james tyler of course goes with that bike club motif but learning about these guys, even just the little bit you were able to say. I'm sure there's so much you can't say but even just that was fascinating what can you tell people about these two guys Tyler and James? Sure! So i do talk about two representatives who open the book we go to a place in New Mexico

16:16 that's not Roswell, but is supposedly allegedly a place where you know they believe that UFOs crashed in the 1940s 1947. And so we go there and what intrigues me about each of these guys is that well they're both scientists and they're both incredibly successful scientists okay one is affiliated with university and the other one is affiliated with lots of other space program and stuff like that. And they're both incredibly intelligent, and I'm going to stop reading the reviews of my book but i've actually read some of the reviews and you know some of them like there's one in psychology today that says the book is good it's a good book and I follow it except that she seems awestruck by these scientists

17:03 And I'm thinking, well you know what? I think anybody would be. Yeah and it's true each of them in their own way i mean each of them is probably one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my entire life you know and I do meet a lot of smart people So yeah, these guys are brilliant. Was I awestruck by them? I was! They didn't lead normal lives no and if you read about them you'll see that they just do not lead normal lives they're not like me okay I'd not met people like that when i was doing straight up catholic history work okay so I was awestruck in that there were other people like this too I thought wow I didn't know that these people existed

17:44 So I think that part of the book for me, and I do think that comes out in a lot of people take exception to that is like you know well she seems so incredibly Impressed with these people well of course I'm impressed with these people you know one of them can quote unquote uber a jet if he wants to do that and how many people do you know that can be that. You know so yeah it's really impressive in the what they believe has to do with the inspiration they get from what they think are alien artifacts and stuff like that. So if the story sounds absolutely weird, it is absolutely weird but it's true! And so why did I come through in the first couple chapters of...I think just my

18:32 I called it mind-blowing earlier and i would have to say that you know there's another word for it which is more you know an academic. It's, my epistemological shock yeah I was shocked on so many different levels but let's just call it being mind blown My mind was being blown. Yeah, I'm a normal person and here i am introduced to a world that's not normal at all and it is filled with millionaires and billionaires and it is filled with people who have these belief systems And I do tell them that I'm writing about them and they say we know that what I can say Is that? They don't talk about it

19:08 They do the research, the research is going to probably come out as peer reviewed articles and stuff like that. It won't look like there will be no. This is the smoking gun of UFO proof. I don't think it's going to come out like that, to tell you the truth. It's just going to come out as real boring stuff that when you read it...I won't be able to understand because I've read some of the patents and I don't understand them. I'm a smart person but not a scientist." So that's really how it's gonna happen Greg and I think these people are doing this work Well said yeah it is just really amazing that you got to spend any time at all within a circle like this. And some of the breadcrumbs that tyler and james drop that you were able to include are pretty impressive,

19:55 They give these little insights into their work and their world that I am always thirsty for. For example, Tyler describes getting brought in so to speak and it sort of stemmed from an idea for an experiment that he had that he says came from a memory of some kind. Definitely in the wheelhouse of things I've heard before when it comes to certain ideas just coming to people at the right place and time They sometimes feel like they were given these ideas, but once he's in the secret program He says that his desk was next to a square room that was covered in concrete and metal. He goes on saying There was something in there that either emitted frequencies or signals And they didn't want those to escape Or they didn't want signals to get in I never knew which it was a mysterious place and we weren't allowed to talk about it

20:47 And later he adds that, And those are just a couple of the reveals that sort of dance around the things that we think are happening, but we just can't seem to confirm them all that often. I just can't get over it! But you mentioned that car ride with Tyler and James? That seemed pretty intense. You had to be blindfolded for the car ride... To be taken to this secret location somewhere in the New Mexico desert in a no-fly zone. There are insightful layers of detail there too but ultimately you found

21:39 Something alien use the term artifact can you elaborate on that experience a little bit and maybe describe what you found out there for the people. Sure, we found artifacts. And first of all I resisted going there for a while because you know it's kind of odd to be asked to go there and I was like why does this person want me to go there? Tyler asked me to go because Tyler believes that the historical information that I had and by the way he's not the only scientist that had Approached me and asked me about some of my work in like I did some work on angels and in the past and sources about angel. So, I had been approached by people associated with.

22:25 let's just call them groups that study UFOs, okay? So these are private groups actually associated with billionaires. They have their own scientists and their scientists reach out to me and ask me for information. And I said my information is online. I don't hide anything you know you can read it and ask me questions about it that's fine. And so it wasn't the first time I was approached but what happened here was He asked me to go, he said I think that you need to see some of the physical evidence for this instead of just kind of the historical abstract stuff that you write about. And of course I was intrigued but I was also not really willing to go to this place where I had to be blindfolded You know? I don't think I'm going to do that and so at the time I said can i bring someone with

23:14 And he said, no you got to go by yourself. And I was like well then i'm not going to go and he goes okay well who do you want to bring? And I asked...I don't know if you're aware of Jeff Kripal and his work the academic at Rice University so he's a colleague of mine and we worked together on various things and I said yes listen you really want to go to this place with me it's really going to be cool in this and that and we have to wear blindfolds! Diana, that's just like outside of my comfort zone. I don't think I want to do that." And so again, I was like you know what? He's right! Like he is too weird and then I had been introduced to James and James again was an academic so I felt comfortable. Don't ask me why. I know academics. I've been one for a long time but I felt comfortable with James

23:57 and he's obsessed with the study. So I asked him, and I said will you go? And he said, I'd go tomorrow! I'd go like in 10 minutes. And so iIsaid okay right. So I submitted his name to Tyler and I said what about this guy? And I knew Tyler was going to say yes. The reason I knew that he would was because of all the scientists in the world, I thought that if anyone could figure out the artifacts that it would be James. Now remember though I'm not necessarily believing any of this stuff, right? That they believe. But what I am doing is learning about it and so you know, I am maintaining a skepticism which they both understand and so Tyler eventually said yes! So we all fly out there, we all meet up and stay at this place

24:47 The next day we're told to wear special clothes because there are rattlesnakes out there so we wear like leather boots and you know it's cold but it's also really sunny, so we're going to get burned probably by the sun. So I'm wearing a hat and we look kind of ridiculous and we go out there Tyler has metal detectors that are special metal detectors, I guess. And they're configured to certain types of things and so we use those and we spend all day out there and we do find some artifacts out there now. We're not born yesterday although some people might think that. So James and I confer with each other occasionally were like okay are we being set up you know what's going on or these being planted over here? You know some of the artifacts were so far below

25:34 below the surface of this really strange rubble stuff out in the middle of nowhere that I can't imagine why someone would plant them out there for us to find, but maybe somebody did. So anyway so he found some and then later on Tyler and i found some and I could tell from the part what they look like and it's disgusting to take a tree that looks kind of weird but it looks like frog skin that metallic. Yeah, that's strange. Yep but some of the other parts they did not look like that they looked different and it's hard to explain what they were made out of

26:14 They looked like they were threaded with something that I wasn't quite sure what they were threaded with. You know, some kind of very small intense thread? So anyway they we're taken back and they've been continuously looked at by scientists from all over the place. Wow! By the way, some people have asked me are these the artifacts that you know some companies out there have and that are talked about? And I don't know. These are not those artifacts they might be the same type of artifacts honestly don't know but these artifacts are in the possession of other scientists not me, not James and not Tyler but there are people that you know James looked at them did some analysis and then they left and went somewhere else

27:00 So I don't know who has them now. Right on, very exciting but of course you mentioned aesthetically one of these things looks like metallic frog skin and i have heard descriptions of things of this nature as being a mix of mechanical and biological is the metallic frog skin description just aesthetic or would you say that it did seem like some of these things had a mix of mechanical and biological components? That's a good question. So some of the work that I've done and one of the papers that I wrote, Jacques said oh this is good but we were doing this already in the 70s kind of thing and I was like...I'm basically talking about biotechnology and the kinds of ways in which the human being is interfacing more and more with technology. We can't escape it. We're immersed in

27:59 A lot of people that aren't me but you know came before me have said that when and if we do meet ET, that it will be techno right? It's going to be the technology. They're not going to be carbon-based they're gonna be techno and so I don't know Gregg. So I mean that's a big question what is this stuff? I think that as a professor of humanities and related studies say what it is. I honestly don't know, but do I have an opinion about it? It's hard for me even to form an opinion about what the heck...what the heck it is! I can only report like they said in the book with the scientists that about it and they were confused. It was probably the biggest question mark they ever had in their lives and that's why they're obsessed with it you know

28:47 Think about it too, you know we're researchers right? So we each have our own specialty and this for me this kind of what I call this new form of religiosity. This is the biggest question mark i've encountered in my research so I can't let it go. They're not going to let it go you know so they're gonna continue to try to figure out Mm-hmm. It is fascinating and in terms of the place itself You mentioned you had to be blindfolded for the car ride But then there's also this passing remark in the book about this secret crash site Location also being the same site where an X files scene was filmed, is that right? I Don't know if it's really weird X file scene was filmed but

29:30 But I can tell you this and it is in the book, it's in the first part of the book where basically take off to blindfold. So we get there at a really weird awkward car ride. Well frankly I've not been blindfolded before so I can honestly say that I didn't do well blindfolded. That was all nervous until we get there and we take off the blindfold James and I do and I look around And it's really beautiful and eerie looking. And I'm looking around, and I keep looking at this one kind of Mesa area. And Tyler looks at me and notices that I keep looking over there he says oh yeah do you recognize that place?

30:08 What are you talking about? I've never been here before. And he laughed and he goes, yeah but no, you recognize it. So i look at it again and go No! He said well its one of the scenes in The X-Files. And I looked at it and was like It does look like that scene. Looks like that crash scene where the saucer crashes into a little hill. And he said oh they may have had an insider on their team or something like that on their production team And so at that point, I mean a weird story just got supercharged weird. It just got so weird for me that I felt like I wasn't even in real life you know?

30:47 where am I now? And so, I just thought more and more about it. And I thought you know wow this is really Jungian like in terms of Carl Jung. I feel like i am at ground zero of mythology of our age. Like a new form of religion because the whole mythology of Roswell the whole mythology of New Mexico and this new form of religiosity which these people believe that So from then on, my research made a lot more sense to me because at first it didn't. I was thinking that these people just look at these things as relics just like Catholics have relics in every religion there are sacred items like sacred books, sacred things that people touch their crosses or crucifixes right? We call these things relic and I thought we're going to a place where they're relics but

31:40 I recognize that this had to do with the media. You know, this had to do with not just a relic but the actual place itself Everybody knew about this place because of the X-Files, right? So I thought wow this brings it up to the Kubrick level You know 2001 Space Odyssey where this kind of belief system is coming through through screens Through TV through media and now I get it. You know This is way more interesting than I thought it was so that's when for me It became Really bizarre. It was bizarre enough already, but this became really weird for me at that point. Yeah it takes it to a new level you mentioned 2001 of course what does the monolith look like but a smartphone screen? Maybe that is an alien interface of some kind and...it is really strange!

32:33 I love that little detail because i've had guests who talk about how it seems that certain sci-fi writers maybe were more connected than you might have thought at first and that these. Inner circles actually contain some hollywood threads and it isn't just, Some of this really far outside by stuff it's not just ideas that they came up with creatively sometimes it is a seeded message of some kind for some reason maybe we don't know exactly why but i find that really interesting and also kinda connects to the fact that is a strange book too. Come out of oxford university press the one you wrote and other academics have tried to go down this road like a john mac they haven't had very good experiences but in the past few years it does seem to be maybe something changing we had that pentagon disclosure that money was put into ufo research in the last decade, we had that big two stars academy thing which kind of felt like a rollout of sorts i'm curious did tyler james ever comment on.

33:36 The veil being lifted or even this to the stars academy project or any of this kind of thing that maybe. We're entering a new era where some other stuff will start to come out okay so that's really good question i'm not gonna talk about that, you started academy i will say that many times i have questioned if it was somehow all being done, you know kind of doors were opening for me to easily write. And I did question that. I do know that this is an academic book and Oxford would not have accepted it had it not been. And my editor and I went back and forth a lot about how do we say this or how do we present this? They are top-notch academic and

34:31 sometimes during interviews if I have an opinion that it would not be accepted by either Oxford or my university, then I would say that. I distance myself and say this is just my opinion as a person and not as an academic so I knew I needed to write the book from the perspective of my field which has not done the whole belief right? However, that said the very book itself and the very mythology of entering it, and the very fact that it's immersed within screen cultures and that screen cultures actually permeate our brains and our bodies in ways in which I do detail in the book, makes this a different book. It makes this whole era a different era so I could write this book and also acknowledge those parts in the book where I say

35:25 How do I write this as an outsider? And I just basically said it's impossible for me to do that because i'm not an outsider. I mean, I've been raised on Star Wars you know and all of us That are living today have been raised with media that have in many ways influence the ways in which we believe in extraterrestrials and UFOs. And because of that, we do have to talk about this you know this is something now that can be reviewed in psychology today and that will get the attention well I mean let's put it this way after Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenspiel wrote their New York Times article in December 2017 I got phone calls from people from Harvard who were basically asking me

36:16 about the research and study of UFOs, and how can we include this in the curriculum at Harvard? So there. And John Mack was the guy who was investigated by Harvard in the 1980's so the landscape has completely changed. I do believe part of it is because of that digital infrastructure on which we live and that most of us like I said were weaned off Star Wars and that we've come of age now, we are now professionals And plus you've got NASA scientists basically coming along, like Ellen Stofan who's I think she still the head chief scientist of NASA. They may have changed that but she was a year ago and so she comes along and says we're going to find extraterrestrial life and it's going to be really soon within next 10-20 years. We have the equipment, we know where to look and she's not necessarily talking about intelligent extraterrestrials life. She's probably talking about microbes and stuff

37:10 But the ways in which we interpret that as people who've been brought up with Star Wars and such is that, oh yeah we're going to find you know ET has either been here or here. You know we interpret that in many ways and most of those ways are primed by media Mm-hmm. I totally agree with you and as you said all this ufology stuff was pretty new to you and outside of your typical research territory But not by much because the study of religion can get pretty weird Can you elaborate on that a little bit? And where your knowledge of Catholic history might overlap with what's considered paranormal today because there are some great examples out there

37:50 Absolutely. In the field of religious studies, and this is an interdisciplinary field and a lot of people aren't even aware that people do this so in a lot of universities there are departments of people who study religion and these departments are filled with all kinds of different we you know in my department let's take my department as an example we have archaeologists We have people who study languages like ancient languages, Greek Latin. There's a linguist and we also have people like me you know historians who they have a tradition that they study and then we teach about religion. We don't advocate religion. We don't say you need to be Jewish or you need to be Christian or something like that. We teach about religion

38:31 So that's what we do in my field. Now, that said, what do we study? Well you know, we study stuff that looks to be from a rationalist perspective kind of strange right? Take Christianity for example this is the guy who was born of a virgin He's the son of a god and he can walk on water and do all these kinds of things, you know. To a person who is non-Christian say from another country that looks kind of odd or you study bodhisattvas who can fly or things like this so we do study things that would appear in a rationalist universe to be not rationalists right? So it's not that weird that people in my field would study the beliefs

39:12 in aerial phenomena or UFOs. So to answer your question, that is what we study and I know there was another part of your question and can you restate it so i can answer that part because that was interesting? Oh just um what some of the examples might be that you find in religious studies that might be considered paranormal if they occurred like today absolutely yeah okay so this is what happened to me when I first realized that I made a realization at one point when i was studying the UFO phenomena and thought, you know what? I actually think that I've been studying this my whole life. Because I thought it was studying religious studies but actually I've been studying this stuff so in my book on purgatory

39:54 I did this analysis of basically a history of purgatory, which if your listeners don't know is a Catholic doctrine that is about souls. And when you die your soul in Christian theology...you can go to hell or your soul can go to heaven but in Catholic theology which is also Christian, your soul can go to purgatory which is the place between It could be bad or it could be good, but it's definitely not heaven. Like your soul is not good enough to get into heaven." Well what I found out was that purgatory began as a place so there were some places on earth that were called Purgatory and that the doctrine of Purgatory kind of arose from a lot of these places and in fact there's still this place in Ireland if any of your listeners have been to Ireland it's called Loch Derb. It's an island out on this loch.

40:44 called Wachter again, there was a purgatory cave out there and people would go to the Purgatory Cave and go into it. And it would be good for their souls. So that surprised me so that was very odd and they would meet demons and all kinds of things in this Purgatory Cave Another thing is that once I started to realize that there were some correlations between what people thought today and what people saw back in the day, I went back to the original forces of some of the more interesting Catholic sightings like the Marian apparition. And also went back to Teresa Avila who was a 16th century Spanish nun who basically

41:23 had an experience that is if any of your listeners have been to Rome they may have seen a Statue by Bernini of her it's called the ecstasy of st. Teresa By the way, she's also called a doctor for the church so she's quite a well-known saint in the Catholic tradition and she has an experience and The experience if you see it So it's depicted in art If your listeners have their computers or phones in front of them, they can google St. Teresa's ecstasy and they'll see this encounter that looks like she's encountering this kind of angel, this cherubic looking angel but I decided to go back to the original source of that and read it and i read it and it looks like it could have been in John Mack's book called Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens

42:13 I had reread it and thought, oh my goodness. This is really a weird experience that she had She didn't even know if it was an angel or what she didn't know what it was So she called her she said I'm not sure What kind of Angel this is? This is the short Angel And it's all on fire It looks like and then it has this dart and examines her right with his dark And so you know that looks like this classic abduction experience that we call that today yeah, so I went back and I looked at these kinds of sources and we read them with the new lens that I had. And I thought, wow! This is really surprising borderline blasphemous right? So you know...I wouldn't tell my super Catholic family but they're going to read about it anyway. Yeah, I love that St. Teresa example that was the exact one I was hoping you would cite because

43:01 we have this ecstasy of saint theresa statue and it just doesn't really look anything like what the original account says and that's what's really important about the work you do as you go back in your look at the original first mention here like hey, this isn't exactly how its represented and maybe this is something different now that you have this new context. You can put all those pieces together i jus think thats really fascinating because these are clues as to what is really going on in ufology, perhaps. Yeah it's gonna make a lot of people very unhappy and upset right? Because they have their interpretation of the experience you know and they want to believe the Bernini version right? And here I come along and i say well...and I hate to say it but people in religious studies this happens to us all the time we get on an airplane and people ask what we do We never say I study religion that's the worst thing you could tell somebody because then

43:56 you know, they tell you something and you know well that's just an interpretation. Have you read the original source in Latin? You know I mean if you do then your interpretation changes so we're used to our work having haters i guess you could call it right So once I started to do this I was like oh great If I thought my purgatory book, which by the way not a lot of people read academic books. It's not general reading but for some reason a lot of people are picking up my UFO book and they're going to read it and i think people who get it you know and are already somewhat conditioned to understand this they're gonna like it but i think a lot of traditional people that are going to read it they're going to not like it in fact i read one review of it that basically said

44:43 This will expand your mind, but it hurts. It's not an easy expansion." Man reading reviews can be a trying experience for sure but that is a good detail I like that one But its a slippery slope be careful there No I will So i want to get into the vatican side of things a little bit because that's another huge takeaway from the personal journey, your book almost didn't make it in from what i understand but you went off to do some unrelated research that ended up being maybe more related than you might have thought right.

45:19 Absolutely. This is where you want your job to be interesting and I have to say that mine never fails to surprise me, so I finished my book and I turned it into my editor and it was already late and had already had to go through all kinds of editing because people are in the book that need to look at it make sure that its okay. So it's being edited I've been asked to go to the Vatican and it was funded by a billionaire who wants to learn about these saints who are said to have bi-located, and also to levitate.

45:56 and I'm supposed to look at these manuscripts, find them. And basically just look at them and kind of do an observation of them and do a first-look kind of thing so it's kinda like reconnaissance mission that I am on. Getting into the Vatican is hard enough especially the secret archives you've gotta have correct credentials when you get there its long ways from where I'm at So when you get there you want to make sure they have what's their Because they have a huge library and it takes them a long time to find this stuff. So I spent about a year in contact with the Vatican archivists there, in the secret archive

46:34 I've told them this is what i need to find. They're in Italian, I'm in English and I'm trying to write in Italian and stuff like that so that's what the experience was so far. So then I realized that it might be interesting since now I have this new idea about Catholic history to take Tyler with me because Tyler has no clue about the Catholic tradition yet but has a lot of information about aerial phenomena and I thought how cool would it be share with him a lot of these primary sources, I'll read them to him and just get his opinion about them. Not only that but I had been invited by Brother Guy Consolmagno who's the director of the Vatican Observatory which is in Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence about an hour-and-a-half outside Vatican. That's where they keep all the space research and that's really where I wanted go so I thought

47:27 But I could combine these things and go there, and look at the space research stuff. And then look at the stuff at the Vatican proper." So I wasn't sure that Tyler would be able to get into the archive because they won't let anybody in. We got a bunch of credentials for him. He got letters from deans of colleges but they wouldn't let him in! on my way there and he was texting me and saying they won't let me in. At some point, he decided he's going to show some kind of ID to them." And I thought well gosh if you know i don't know what kind of id is gonna show but if they know that he's affiliated with anything that has to do with aerial phenomena they'll probably get suspicious and not let meet him! So I thought don't do it don't do it you know? But then because he couldn't get in he tried for hours he finally did and apparently

48:20 was given all access to get in. I mean, it was a very odd thing and by the time I got there he'd already made some friends with some priests who knew the Vatican inside out and could take us all kinds of places that I would never have been able to go so it's just really serendipity...I don't know what you want to call it but it was really cool! So we got there, we were able to do things that we were able to do. I was And the weird thing about it too was the priest that Tyler made friends with actually had a relic of Teresa of Avila, which I was amazed by. So I took a picture of that and then we traveled up to space observatory after about a week and it occurred to me when we were in this space observatory archive that one is a saint she actually sent on a Saint her cause for canonization is actually being heard but

49:15 I'm not sure she will be canonized, but her devotees is what you want to call them. The people who want her to be canonized this has been going on for a long time hundreds of years so it doesn't look good. But anyways, so i looked at the record And she's actually part of American history. And if you go to the Southwest, you'll see churches devoted to her. She called the Lady in Blue and she lived in 1600s and she believed that she had been carried and flown on the wings of angels across space to a place in New Mexico. And there she evangelized indigenous Americans right? So I was at The Space Archive and

49:58 Wow, that's a really weird coincidence. And so I kind of looked up at Tyler and asked him did Maria actually go to the place where it because I didn't know where I had been. I was blindfolded so I didn't know and he just looked at me and got a really weird look on his face and I dropped the topic but I thought you know what this has to be my last chapter because this is just too coincidental to leave out because if you think about it here Greg And I'm not trying to be literal because there are so many layers of meaning to this. But back in the day, Spain colonized that area it didn't go well for the indigenous population it was a terrible thing for them and It was a point of contact between two cultures that was a violent contact and here we have

50:51 Another place of supposed contact which is contact between you know extraterrestrials and humans right so I'm not talking about this literally now. I'm talking about it metaphorically a lot of people believe in it literally, you know obviously Tyler does obviously Obviously, the Catholic Church does as well. And it was actually a literal contact for the Catholic Church and the indigenous Americans so it was very strange circle and I knew that this would have to end the book. So that night I got back in touch with my editor and said sorry this is really cool trip but I think I have to write about it and sent her some of the pictures that I took there she said okay go ahead write it. So I finished my last chapter there

51:35 Yeah i love those two book and stories kind of in the way that they sync up i mean, when you examine things like ancient structures or even the layout of something like washington dc it seems like certain people have put emphasis is on things like lay lines or the planets energy grid and i've always been kinda curious if there is some Component that is geographic in nature to paranormal experiences are there hot spots is it because there's more energy here or there can be some way to harness certain things of the fact that came up here. I think it just you know another clue yeah it was a clear for sure and this is why take off my academic hat and just kind of tell you a little bit about the experience for me

52:25 So when I wrote the second chapter, you know with James and about James and it's hard to write a book. And I'm struggling here and I was thinking how do I start this? And I started it by talking about the actual place that we were in New Mexico and how it definitely didn't seem like the place where I live. It almost seemed like it was conscious. And so I thought, well that's a weird thing to say about a place. But i'm going to put it in there anyway! So I put it in there and I realized that yeah that's exactly how it felt to me... That this place was not your normal place and it became its own character in a sense. Then when we were in the archives at the Catholic Gandolfo Space Observatory

53:10 I actually decided that we should probably look at some of those more physical components like latitude, longitude amount of metals in the earth and these different places. And you know we found some pretty interesting phenomena there. Well, Diane I could do it all day. This is really amazing stuff and you have just really interesting insights and a unique take on a lot of these things are there any plans to Continue this work or take it deeper? Maybe I'm not sure yet So I'm gonna find how it all shakes out because it's not your typical type of Related Studies book so I'm just going to wait for maybe six months or so or maybe a little bit longer and

53:55 I do have another book. I'd like to write it delves into the idea of what I found was that most of the people I talked with always had this thing which I call in the book, The Book Encounter or the synchronicity they're really intense meaningful coincidence and I'd like to examine that more in depth but we'll just wait and see how things go. Right? The right information crossing paths at the right time are really altering the person's life. Yes exactly So just as we're ending this up, how can people... I mean obviously you can get the book anywhere but we also have a link to give them because you do blog and kind of carry this journey forward on your website right?

54:35 I do. My website is AmericanCosmic.com and if people are interested in latest types of interviews and things like that, they can go on there and put their email address in and I'll blast out an email when I talk about things you know...I've talked about fact and fiction and film with Oxford and yeah I do have this interview. I'd blast that out so I do have things that come up that Even other people's work that relate to this topic, like Eric Bargo's Time Loops. It is super interesting. Jeff Kripal's new book Flip, I'll blast those out too! So anybody who is interested in this type of thing feel free to do that. Awesome. Are you still doing coupon codes for any kind for the book?

55:23 I do have a coupon code. Yes, I do and i don't have it in front of me right now but I certainly will give it to you You can only use it on the OUP site though the Oxford site is...you can't put it into Amazon and get the 30% off but it's a 30% off code And I can email it to you directly after this and if you want you can put it on your site and anybody Of your listeners can use it But like I said It's just for the Oxford site Awesome. Yes, I will absolutely include that because I'm sure people are really excited about getting into this book and digging deeper but thanks so much! What a ride! I really appreciate you breaking it all down for us and keep up the great work Thank you so much Gregg it was wonderful to be on your show

56:07 Sweet baby yeezes dear listeners. Man, I was so happy to have gotten this show recorded and now to put it out...I really think this is something special In fact, I heard Dr Diana on RuneSoup talking about Saints last year And I added her name to my very long list But then I saw that American Cosmic was releasing and the stars aligned That's a perfect opportunity And I just love it because i'm sure you've heard me say on a million episodes in regards to a bunch of different topics, okay so we keep hearing about what happened all these years ago but what's going on now? Well this is what's going on now and I felt like I was eavesdropping on some high-level stuff when I was reading her book. And I guess I should mention the Oxford University Press thing...I'm sure there will be questions

57:00 It's sort of why I asked her about the To The Stars Academy, which she had no comment on. It just seems like certain forces are trying to find the right ways to reach the public. Obviously Tom DeLonge wasn't it and as Diana said it's possible that she was sort of led down this path a little bit but I appreciate her willingness to pursue it and also to write about it I saw another UFO book come out last year from MIT Press. So obviously some reveals are happening, the faucet seems to have some drippage and sometimes you can't win right? Because we want more things to be revealed but the people who really know often aren't trusted. It's a bit of a catch-22 and of course anyone is going to be skeptical

57:55 a representative from a place that has kept secrets. But how do you break the cycle? Just things to think about because a lot of folks out there are talking about disclosure, soft disclosure and various threads that speak to some kind of reveal and these are things to keep in mind as that process rolls out I don't trust everything i hear i definitely take into account the source But I also understand you gotta be a little realistic about the situation. As always though, my job is just to present you with the latest and greatest, be forthright about everything I can be and you work out where it belongs in your worldview. Personally, I just think its awesome to hear anything new and talk to someone who's rubbed elbows with The Invisible College and also gotten into some privileged Vatican archives!

58:51 And there is a lot to be said about Tyler and James. Lots of things to think about and pull apart, like I don't think we even mention this on the show but Tyler doesn't drink coffee and he loves meditation has a set of protocols to keep his mind optimized little things in the book that i would read and think ah well that ties into a lot of the things we hear about And if tech billionaires who know the language of alien entities stay disciplined on these key things, maybe it's good stuff to fold into our own lives. Plus I really liked her insights into saints and miracles and just how wide a view we might have to take of biblical miracles and religious artifacts like the ecstasy of Saint Teresa example people don't often go to the source

59:40 We get our mental picture of certain stories from the art that was created to tell that story and sometimes that isn't a proper representation. Is the difference intentional? Was everyone just so Catholic in these examples, it was the only box you could put in back then? Or was it packaged in a way to prop up the Catholic Church? I don't know, but it's funny how today a movie like Titanic or American Sniper forms a distorted mental picture of the actual historic event. It is the same with the ecstasy of St Teresa statue and probably many other things in those archives

1:00:23 And if you're interested in reading the book, American Cosmic as we said in the show. We have a 30% off discount code to give ya so you can purchase the book on The Oxford site. The link will be in the show notes but I'll also tell it to you now! The code is in all caps A-A-F-L-Y G6 AA Fly G6 Just think about that song And if you liked hearing from Diana, do let her know. Her website is AmericanCosmic.com She's definitely a guest who has a lot of contacts and when they release books I'd like to know that colleagues of hers will hear that THC is a great place to go You get an informed host A high quality and engaged and girthy audience and you'll see a healthy response

1:01:21 Sometimes I need you guys to help me play the game and stay on top of the media shortlists. That's just how it goes, and i can give you better shows as a result so help me help you and we all win! I am looking forward to reading the reactions to this show there will be some cynicism and skepticism i'm sure because we're getting quite close to the inner circle on this one and not to repeat myself, but think about the position of someone who's probably in a compartmentalized program who knows a few things but not everything has their own bosses and non-disclosure agreements. I'm not saying you need to just accept everything anyone tells you, but if we're so aggressive and rigid as to not listen at all how can someone on the inside even talk to us?

1:02:12 Why even go through the trouble if they're just going to get stoned by the mob that is the alternative community? You know what I'm saying. These things have been secret for a lot longer than the careers of people who are currently involved with them, so if we can't be somewhat open and somewhat civil and make it comfortable to talk about they'll just say it's not worth the trouble And the secrecy cycle will continue We're gonna have to come to some middle ground eventually But who am I to say when those conditions are right? Anyway, this was fun. I'm not used to having a guest who actually can't talk about what they've seen and done You want to push to get more details but you don't want your guest in trouble or go overboard with it. I think we got a lot of great stuff though Tyler's work experiences Diana going to secret location that looked like place an X-Files scene was filmed at The crossover between reality secrets and Hollywood insight

1:03:11 This metallic frog skin artifact, Saints biolocating. Thought it was great and I highly recommend the book! If you only heard the first hour as always we have a second hour for PLUS members sign up at the higher side chats plus dot com you get the full archive THC music joint sessions and other bonuses In this episode with Dr. Pasolka, we talked about the Vatican's huge head start compared to Silicon Valley and the CIA's paranormal research. It's another one of those details! This came out in the Plus Show I guess but hearing that the Vatican has books on electromagnetism in their archives... That's something! We also talked about how UFOs and religious encounters might both relate to some technology that we don't know about

1:04:02 how the spikes in major UFO sightings suggest a pattern of reinforcement. I just think that whole section is mind-blowing, but then we also talked to Diana about her thoughts on the occult and the alien spirit overlap and if you listened closely she said that she put the people she was dealing with in the context of what she knows about Jack Parsons We talked about a lot of other stuff like Dr. Dean Radin's work and technologies we have today that might relate to previously found ET technology, reinterpreting the stigmata with modern knowledge... A lot of great stuff! And again just really psyched to put this out. We're not going through the motions of the same old outsider speculation. We're talking as someone with first-hand experience

1:05:00 And she's been super nice through the whole process, although I know she had a lot going on. So I definitely thank her for her time! Hope you enjoyed it and that ends the month of February! Lime disease shows UFO shows Cult of Bael shows and space weather Man... It's been a ride and I hope your strapped in for more I'll see you next time. Your move, Invisible College colleagues, saucers, secret keepers and attendants of the metallic frog skin! You're fucking... Must be those strangers that come every night Whose saucers shaped the light, put people uptight Leave blue-green footprints that glow in the dark I hope they get home Hey Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along

1:06:42 I woke up this morning feeling quite weird. My toothpaste was smeared I opened my window They'd written my name Said, so long We'll see you again Hey Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along? I won't do anything wrong Hey

1:07:47 Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me along the higher side? Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me along I won't do anything wrong Hey! Mr. Space Won't you please take me along the higher side

1:08:30 Take me along the high side