Diana Pasulka — “American Cosmic” launch interview (UFO News Network, Jan 27 2019)

Speaker: Diana Walsh Pasulka (Prof. of Religious Studies, UNC Wilmington), interviewed at the launch of American Cosmic. ~1h37m.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/DJILca3RK7Y
Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py).
Primary for pasulka-ufo-religion-scholar. Her scholarly framing (Catholic-history → UFO-belief bridge; “the Invisibles”/anonymous scientists; the Vallée Silicon Valley tour) and, in her own words, the scholar/participant tension: she set out to treat UFO-tech-from-crash-sites as “the modern myth,” then found “this myth is actually real. So I didn’t quite know how to articulate that.”
NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; “Valet”=Jacques Vallée. Verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.

I’ll stick with it. And good afternoon from Philadelphia. Frank here. James here from Westchester, New York. And here we are with UFO News Network Sunday on a Sunday today. We almost got this going on time, but we got a little bit backed up and nine after four. That’s not too bad. Nine minutes late and we’re ready to go. James, why don’t you bring in our special guest for today? Absolutely. It’s our pleasure and honor to have on Dr. Diana Walsh-Pasulka, University of North Carolina, Wellington, and the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. She’s the author of American Cosmic UFOs, Religion and Technology. And she has quite an amazing story. Some people on the show listening might be familiar with her for visiting an infamous UFO crash site and talking about a group called Fight Club, aka the Invisible College. So welcome to the show, Diana. Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. So I just wanted to get this out of the way quick before we got into the deeper things. You know, a lot of people are going to notice that recently you kind of disappeared off social media. Do you want to you want to just talk about that real quick? Yeah, sure. OK, so so going into writing the book, I’ve people in the book called The Invisibles, and they’re anonymous. They have pseudonyms. And you know, I’ve I’ve been writing this book for a long time. And I went through various stages of knowing that it’s not a typical academic book. I am an academic. And the only kinds of things I’ve ever published were academic things. And so I’d never had people whose identities I had to keep secret. And so various times I said, you know, I’m writing this book. And they’re like, yeah, we know that. And so as as I got more into the book and the research, what happened was I had there was an exchange of rules. And so there’s a lot of rules, right, the Fight Club rule. And then the rule for academics is you basically talk about what you study. And so with this type of study, I realized I couldn’t talk about everything. So I did have two Facebook pages and I wasn’t on Twitter. And so my one Facebook page was doing really well. And I had all kinds of people on it, like you, ufologists, academics, you know, my aunt and uncle, my cousin, you know, stuff like that. And you know, and so at one point I thought, you know what, I’m I’m going to have to cut this down. I’m going to have to stop this one. So what I’m going to do is stop this one and and keep my other one where I have friends and family, because it’s a lot of stuff’s happening with the book and it’s going through an editing process. And I can’t say too much about what I’m doing. So I cut I stopped that Facebook page. And then what happened was all the ufologists found me at the other friends and family Facebook page. And you know what, I consider them my friends and family, too. So I added them in and then that got, you know, that started getting also kind of like out of control. You know, my dean is on there and he’s seen me talking about, you know, UFOs and stuff like that. And I’m thinking, OK, again, you know, what am I going to do about this? And and then once the book came out and it’s actually not out, I mean, the Kindle version is out, but it’s been taking a long time. I guess what happened was that pre-sales sold out or or they didn’t have enough copies. The warehouse didn’t. So so the date book kept changing. And so I was you know, I was in a community of where I knew I was going to have to get off social media. I didn’t know when it was. And I you know, I warn people on social media, I say I’m going to have to get off some at some point and then stay on for a couple of months. And I don’t think anybody actually believed me. But after the Kindle version came out, it was then time for me to go off of social media. But what I think is really interesting is this. This is the takeaway I got from it. The book is really about a certain group of people called what who I call the invisibles. And the invisibles are people who are not on social media, yet they create technologies that impact our everyday lives. So when I got off social media, people were like, whoa, she doesn’t even exist anymore. Is she even alive? You know, and I was like, you know, this is this is it, because you can’t Google a lot of these people who do the thing, you know, who make real changes in our lives, like, you know, figureheads that we know that, you know, say Zuckerberg or people like that. You know, these people we know they’re on social media, we can Google them and all that kind of stuff. You know, I’m a college professor. You know, my students are 20. And you know, I’ll tell them about somebody who’s really, really cool. And they’ll say, what’s that person’s name? I’m going to Google them. And I say, yo, yeah, you’re not going to find that person. And they look at me like I’m crazy. Like I’ve said something that how can you they don’t even compute what that means. So there are people that exist that are making our infrastructure that we don’t know exist because we cannot Google them. All right. So, you know, being off social media kind of showed that to me. I was like, wow, I still exist. My book is out there. But yeah, I did have to go on social media. I’ll go back on at some point. It’ll probably be something that my press manages. I don’t know. I mean, seriously, a book about UFOs and religion. It’s not just like UFOs, but it’s also religion. It causes a lot of controversy. So so that’s the deal about that. So really quick, how did you get into all this in the first place? I mean, how does a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina end up down the rabbit hole? How did that happen? Yeah. So if you look at my record of publication, you’ll see that I’ve written a lot. I mean, seriously, I’ve never written a book that, you know, this was originally an academic book and somehow it made it boom mainstream. Not intentionally. But what happened was that I was with a colleague and I had written this book about, you know, my specialty is Catholic history. And so I had written this book about this doctrine of called purgatory, which is about souls who aren’t good enough to get into heaven. And it’s a Catholic doctrine. And Catholics practiced it for thousands or 1500 years and stopped practicing it after the 1960s. And I wanted to know why. So I spent a good portion of my life figuring that out. And that was about 10 years of research. And during that time, I looked at a lot of archives and archival anecdotes, reports, chronicles of Catholics from 1200, 1400 on up to the present time. And what I found was a lot of aerial phenomena and a lot of beings of light and really strange, you know, scenarios of people encountering these beings. And I kept a list of these. And they didn’t only one of these made it into my purgatory book, but I shared it after I read the book. I shared it with a colleague because I wanted to do something with this, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do. And he said, oh, hey, by the way, this looks like Steven Spielberg films, you know, like UFOs and stuff. And I looked at him because at that point, UFOs was about the first I hadn’t even seen close encounters of the third kind. And, you know, I just wasn’t a UFO type of person and I thought he was crazy. And then, of course, coincidentally, a UFO conference pops up the next week and Chris Bledsoe is there. And so I go and I listen to Chris Bledsoe and I hear what looks to be like my, you know, this list I’m keeping. And so I start looking. So that’s really how it started. It started by connecting the historical record with the present record of UFO sightings. And that’s basically how I met Jacques Vallée. So Jacques Vallée, I started to read Passport to Magonia and it looked very similar to my own purgatory book. So I I looked up his address on his Web site as a P.O. box and I wrote him a letter, an old fashioned letter, and I sent it to him and I said, you know, I’m really fascinated by your work. I, you know, I grew up in California and I have a lot of friends who still live there. Actually my family lives there. And can I come and and so talk to you, have coffee or something. So he actually invited me to his house to meet his wife and they had, you know, dinner and everything. And so that’s how it all started from there. And then I slowly started to meet people in the community. And my mind was blown on many occasions. There were some times when I wanted to depart from from the research because it was just so strange and not what typically what an academic does or gets involved in, let alone a mom of five kids. Right. So the whole thing was really bizarre. Did you approach Bledsoe at the conference or did you just kind of sit back and take it all in? OK, so I went to the conference with my husband, Dan, and we were both at the conference and my husband, Dan, was was blown away by Chris and just was so excited and I was very reserved. So at that conference, I actually didn’t talk to Chris, but my husband did. So my husband went up to him and Chris, you know, Chris is this kind of star and he’s got a very, very humble persona. And all these people were like thronged around him. So I I wasn’t going to fight him off and talk to him. But I did. Actually, he did come to another UFO conference down in Wilmington, where I live. And I talked to him then. And we had quite an amazing talk. And we’ve been friends ever since. So I got to see up close, you know, an experiencer, what happens to their family, the various stages of belief that he went through. I mean, you know, it’s not an easy thing to be, you know, because he was you know, he’s a Baptist. And then this happened to him and his whole congregation turned against him and thought it was demonic. And, you know, he went through quite a bit. So I got to see that that it happened in real time. So you had mentioned thinking about shucking the whole thing at one point. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure. This is when I realized that there were a lot of I mean, I’m just going to say it straight up. There are a lot of government affiliations within the community of UFO believers, ufologists, experiencers. And I was invited to a conference and I went and it was filled with a lot of, you know, people who names you’d recognize and that type of thing. And it was kind of a special conference. It was it was funded by a millionaire. And there were I mean, at that conference, I could sense an undercurrent of people gathering information. And I wasn’t I didn’t trust a lot of people. I was with Chris Bledsoe and his wife, Yvonne, and I stuck with them. And I met Grant Cameron at that conference and I pretty much stuck around them. And and I was I said, I mean, you know, in this field, you have to have what Jacques Vallée calls discernment. And that’s really to discern who you can trust and who you can’t. And very quickly, I felt that I couldn’t trust a lot of people. And in fact, I felt even in danger. So I got back from that conference. And after that, I thought about it and I thought, you know, I I’ve never felt this in my research before. I’ve never felt this feeling of dark foreboding. So I decided that I had to drop it. And so I told Chris and he was, you know, he was upset because, you know, he and I had become friends, kind of like research partners even. And strangely enough, directly after that was my birthday. And, you know, by this time I was like, you know, this is about a week or two later and I’m not having the best birthday. And, you know, it’s late at night and I’m doing my work and I get this email and apparently a woman who believes that she’s dying of cancer, but she’s thankfully still alive. But she wanted to give me her this giant library of research. And I honestly thought it was Catholic research. And I said, I’d gladly accept it, you know. And it turned out to be UFO research. And it was Brenda Denzler. And she wrote The Lure of the Edge. And she has a Ph.D. for Duke University. And she just gave she didn’t know me, but she gave me this giant she said that Chapel Hill wouldn’t take it. So my husband and I went to get it. And, you know, it was filled up our whole we have a giant car filled up our whole Ford expedition. And we took it and put it in a warehouse. And now it’s at Rice University, by the way. And I had I went through the research and I was stuck again. So I got back into it. So you’ve already got a couple of magical helpers. You’ve made contact with Chris. You go out and you see Valet. What’s the next step there? What’s the next step on the path? The next step on the path. First, I get warned by Valet. So I’m at a conference and this is part, you know, I opened my book with a with a car ride with Valet and Robbie Graham. And he’s taking us through a tour of Silicon Valley. And he’s basically showing us all of these places and basically saying it here and here. And I was really getting the he wouldn’t tell me directly, but he was basically saying this is where a lot of stuff, you know, really anomalous phenomena that has to do with technology happened. And so, you know, this is the place where I grew up. So I looked around and I thought, wow, I had no idea this was happening. And and so that blew my mind. And along with that, though, came warnings from Valet and Valet would tell me, trust no one. Don’t even trust your eyes. And so, you know, I mean, so I was I started then to meet people who were like Tyler and people who I then would call the meta experiencers and the people who were around the experiencers and were biotechnologists who were believing that they were engineering technologies based on what they learned from the experiencers or based on what they learned from artifacts at crash sites. So this was something that I thought was mythology. You know, there is a mythology called Prometheus and it’s an ancient Greek myth. And it’s basically about a man, God, you know, helping humans survive by giving them technology. And I thought this is kind of like the modern myth of it. But the problem with that scenario, and I put it out there in the book, is that this myth is actually real. So I didn’t quite know how to articulate that. I can’t say that in the book and I can’t say, well, wait a minute, these technologies are actually real technologies and we actually use them. And how does that work? So whether or not the artifacts really are what they are, what these people believe them to be, for a fact, the technologies that come from this belief are real. So that was what that is, what changed everything for me, another what John Mack would call the metaphysical shock, you know, the epistemological shock where your whole, you know, framework of what you think is real kind of shifts. And so I spent, you know, so 2012 was it was a watershed year for my view of the world where everything kind of changed. I viewed my own childhood differently, you know. OK, yeah, going back to what you were saying about the meta-experiencers and the technologists, are are these technology folks, these developers, are they using these meta-experiencers as muses, to use a mythological term? Yes. So what they’re doing is they are like, say, let’s take Chris Bledsoe. So Chris Bledsoe did attract a lot of scientists and a lot of these scientists were and a lot of these scientists were experiencers themselves and some of them were not. But for sure, they wanted to know everything about what Chris knew and they would take that information back and they would maybe create a patent or something like that. And then they would create a technology from it. And Chris Bledsoe is not the only one. He’s just one of many. And so it wasn’t just the experiencers, but it was also the artifacts that were being used in this way. OK, James, what do you got here? Yeah, going back to your journey through this, you said you viewed your childhood differently. How has your view changed from when you were, I guess you can say, outside of this to the beginning of your journey in 2012 to now? How has your view of the subject changed? OK, so there were things in my childhood that I did not I never really understood, but they nonetheless happened and not just to me, but to my brother. And where I grew up, there was there was a UFO sighting and and it was and my brother saw it. And from there, odd things would happen. But I never thought twice about it, frankly. I never like my parents did. My parents are nonbelievers, but they said, oh, yeah, we saw this kind of thing. My father actually called the police thinking that they were going to do something about it. And and so then what happened was I forgot about all that stuff. And then once I started to become aware of the kinds of things that happened to people in their experiences, like every single person in the book. Right. I thought, wow, these are similar patterns. And then when I saw these patterns, I looked through this lens back. Even when Jacques took me through the places I knew as a kid, I looked at these and I thought, no way, you know, this happened in that building. And so I just I saw the I saw a new era. Basically, I saw the era of the kind of world we live in now, which is linked not only to the UFO, but also to technological, yet technological infrastructure. By the way, it’s really interesting. I’m writing two articles right now, one for Vice magazine and one for Oxford. And they’re going to put it on their blog. And it’s basically a little bit about how a lot of really smart people now, like Elon Musk, basically say digital technology is going to be our is going to be the superhuman intelligence. So if we encounter aliens, they it will be a form of super intelligent digital technology. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I know you go over technology in your book and how it’s intertwined with belief. But another thing I wanted to ask was, you know, you have this book out now and, you know, you’re you’re almost like a mini celebrity in the UFO world. But your eyes, your students know of your work and the subject. Now, obviously, it’s out in the public. Do they ever come to you and ask about UFOs? Oh, yes. All the time. So so we’ve got in the people who receive my book. First of all, there’s a lot of people that are offended by the book because they’re religious. Right. And I you know that that happened with my book about purgatory. It happens to people who write about religion. But then there are people who and then there are ufologists who are offended by it because it talks about religion. So, you know, I can’t really please everyone. But a lot of people are interested. And what’s really interesting is that people, you know, the Silicon Valley people are like the ones that are asking me to write more about it. And, you know, they’re asking me because this is their belief structure. They’re like, wow. Yeah, I knew that. But I didn’t know. I never put it into those words. Right. And so so now my students. Oh, yeah. My students, they you know, if I taught a class on UFOs, it would fill and I’d have a waiting list. I mean, we have they all want to know. Right. They all want to know. So no, no, no, no, no, no, please. Sorry. Sorry about that. Oh, yeah. I was going to say as a chairperson, I don’t teach right now, but, you know, I will teach again. But I do have students who I send off to graduate schools and they’re they’re on board. They’re totally interested. So, yeah, I find that young people are major believers. I did see in the news recently that there’s going to be a class taught. I can’t recall if it was at your college or another school in North Carolina about UFOs. They’ve actually got a class on that now. Yeah, that’s a friend of mine, David Halperin. He’s a genius. So this this guy’s a genius. He’s he knows Jacques Jacques and David go way back to the 60s in at UC Berkeley. And David, I mean, when you get these guys together, you this is history. So David Halperin is he does his specialty is Ezekiel’s wheel and he’s a Jewish study scholar and he knows, you know, the Hebrew and all the languages of the Hebrew Bible. And so he’s a believer. Well, he’s not actually a, quote unquote, believer like Jacques, a believer. But he is an expert and he’s got his own book. And I think one’s coming out and he’s got a great book on the topic. So it’s taught by him. And I take it if I don’t live, I live about two hours from Duke University. But if I could, I’d take it. OK, he’s a Duke. I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. I knew it was a college in North Carolina. I couldn’t specifically remember which one. But now were you in contact with him during these early stages of the later stages of your research or. Absolutely. So David came. David’s been at some of the conferences that I attended and several. So I know David very well. And he actually came down for an afternoon and spent an afternoon going through my inherited library by Brenda Denzler. And he took a whole car full of stuff back with him to Chapel Hill and and then ultimately donated it to Rice, too. So Rice University right now is a place that’s establishing a UFO library under Jeff Kripal. OK, and his is a name that has come up in the past or recent past and are related to this subject. And you are either planning to or have debated him. He seems to be of the opinion that increased knowledge and acceptance of this UFO thing is going to be the end of religion. And you think otherwise, is that about right? Yeah, that’s right. That was at Ohio State. And Jeff is a great friend. And he is in my field. He’s well-known and he’s really changed the field of religious studies to include the study of UFOs. And it was one of his books. By the way, you should not miss this book. It’s called Authors of the Impossible. And there’s a great chapter in there on Jacques Vallée. And it’s called The Future Mythology of Folklore, I think is what it’s called. It’s really a great chapter. And it changed my life when I read it. And Jeff has actually changed my life. So Jeff was actually a person who was asked by my press to blurb my purgatory book. And somehow we got talking about UFOs. And we realized that we knew a lot of people in common. So we started working together and we’re very good colleagues. We co-organize a lot of different organizations, not a lot of organizations, but a lot of different conferences. So with this debate, it went like this. So Jeff thinks that. You won the debate, right? Well, there’s no winning or losing. It was basically that I said that I think that belief that you could you could show that there’s this historical tradition of beings from the sky coming down and interacting with humans and that this somehow enriches human life and that this is not so far off from religion anyway. So religion is capable of absorbing. And in fact, if you look at Catholicism, there is no official position on UFOs. Right. Some Catholics believe it. Some Catholics don’t. But there’s no official position. It could possibly be out. You know, yeah, they could possibly. And if they are God created them, that that would be an official position if they had one. So Jeff thinks that if the UFO thing comes out, that it’s going to change the way it’s going to open religion up. Religion is going to have a hard people who are religious are going to have a hard time accepting other life in the universe that’s not centered on humans. I mean, I see his point, so. I would expect some folks will, but I don’t think it’ll be that many. When you were talking about if there are advanced ET’s out there or life on some other planet, excuse me, God created them. I think that already pretty well is the position of the Catholic Church at the moment. Is it not? Or am I wrong on that? Yeah, it is. I mean, you know, it’s the person who talks about it. The person who talks about it, if I probably shouldn’t say so, he’s going to get pretty angry, I think, is Brother Guy Consolmagno, and he’s the director of the Vatican Archive. And he’s a very I mean, he’s not going to come out and say anything about the topic because he just doesn’t know. But he said, you know, if there and by the way, you could read this in his book called Oh, of course, I can’t remember the name now, but oh, oh, gosh. Anyway, so there’s a picture of an ET. It looks like this is seen Chapel, you know, Adam and man kind of touching each other. But it’s an alien instead. And Guy Consolmagno wrote that with Paul Mueller, who who’s a Jesuit priest. And they do talk about extraterrestrial life and what would you know, what would the church do if that were the case? And, you know, they say, you know, it’s not such a problem as people think it is. It’s like, so there is, you know. And, you know, if there is, there is. And if there isn’t, there isn’t. But it doesn’t change fundamentally the the Catholic and Christian idea that, you know, there’s this all loving God who created the universe that God could very well have created other beings other than humans. Yeah, well, even in the late 90s and the early 2000s, you had Monsignor Valducci talking about that. You know, that’s right. Exactly. Yeah. He he was almost, you know, he gave that hierarchy is, you know, if we’re humans, we’re probably the lowest form of intelligent life and God’s universe. And, you know, there are more advanced beings and going up to angels, you know. But given given we’re talking about the Jeffrey Kripal and Steve Halpern, what what has been the. You’re at the atmosphere among your colleagues in the university since they, you know, caught on that you’re you’re involved with this subject. So it’s I mean, seriously, it’s been very positive. I’ve last year I won my college’s highest research award and I’m a full professor, so you can’t kind of go higher than that. And I’ve been you know, I’ve been asked to be promoted to an associate dean. And, you know, so it hasn’t really affected my career at all so far. Yeah, you were talking about. Go ahead, James. Sorry about that. No, I was going to say you haven’t received any pushback, really. It’s generally been a positive thing. From yeah, I mean, I’ve been asked to speak at Harvard. I’ve been asked to speak at the Commonwealth Club where presidents speak. I’ve been just, you know, I I’ve been asked to do plenary speeches. I mean, this is all within the last two months. So I’ve Publishers Weekly wants to interview me. They’ve given me a starred review. I mean, that’s, again, one of the most prestigious things that can happen to an author. So so far I have not received the John Mack treatment. Yeah. And I don’t know if you know, I don’t know if you know what that is. But oh, yeah, we don’t we know all about it. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s let’s go through that for some folks that aren’t familiar. He ran into some problems at Harvard when he was doing his research. Yeah. So John Mack was someone who seems untouchable. I mean, he won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his books. He was a research, you know. So when I I give these identifications to the types, you know, there’s like if you look at lawyers, there’s the partner and then there’s the, you know, the associate and then the junior partner and that type of thing. He was the highest up at Harvard. He was a research professor and he had won a Pulitzer Prize. And so he decided he was going to do the study on people who believed in UFOs in contact with extraterrestrials. And his research, he’s a psychiatrist. So his research revealed that they were not crazy, right, that they were just normal people who had an extraordinary phenomena happen to them. And this was just crazy for people at Harvard. So people at Harvard, the hierarchy, the deans and that type of thing, you know, investigated his research protocol, which was unheard of. And so he went through like I think it was like a year he had to hire a lawyer and he had to. Alan Dershowitz. Exactly. Yeah. And he had to defend his academic freedom to do this. And so that put a chill on the study of UFOs for academics. You know, we call it the John Mac effect. Oh, don’t study that. And still, if my students want, you know, to study that, I tell them, I say, no, no, you can’t study it now. You’ve got to wait until you’re a tenured professor and then you can study it. You know, I hate to say that, but I’m just trying to help them. I just I’m just going to throw in a little quick anecdote. I happen to know about Mac and it really got my attention when he was embarking on his studies into the experience or phenomenon, the abduction phenomenon, whatever you want to call it. One of the people he consulted was with was another guy who was at Harvard at the same time, another professor, a guy named Thomas Kuhn. Yep, exactly. Exactly. Who is the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? And that he’s the guy who coined the phrase paradigm shift. That’s right. Brilliant, brilliant guy. Brilliant guy. And the advice that he gave Mac, which Mac recounted in an interview years later, but is stuck with me, is forget about science. So you’re looking to do is to try to gain knowledge. And that has stuck with me. That’s that’s my goal now. And my own armchair studies is just try to gain knowledge about this subject. So I went off on my little tangent here. And now let’s let’s get back to the action. Sorry about that. That’s right. That actually is. Yeah, so I actually quote that very passage in the conclusion to my book where I talk about James’s research and James is a scientist who I feature in the second chapter of my book. And I go back to James in the in the conclusion because James is an incredible researcher, one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met. And, you know, to me, he is exactly that person who pushes the boundaries of science into a new paradigm. And so I use that, you know, that framework to talk about his research in the last part of the book about Thomas Kuhn’s, you know, the structure of scientific revolutions. So, yeah, this is the first time you brought up James. Why don’t you tell about tell us a little bit about your contact with him and how he helped you along? Yes. So what happened was that Jeff Kripal and I were we’re going to bring together academics and people who are interested in the topic of UFOs. And so we were doing a little research and Jacques Vallee suggested James. And so I looked him up and I saw, you know, I saw his research and I showed Jeff. And Jeff and I were like, wow, he wouldn’t even want to come because he’s just so amazing. Right. And so we asked him. And apparently this is something that he’s obsessed with. So he said, yes, you know, like right away, like, yes. And he was you know, this this guy is someone who is. An amazing scholar, let’s put it that way, an amazing scholar and for people who admire that, you know, like, OK, if you were to ask me, who would you want to meet? You know, some famous actor or, you know, somebody like that or James, I’d say James. Right. Because James is way more interesting to me than someone who plays interesting people. Right. So so I would want to meet James. And so we couldn’t believe how unpretentious he was. And in fact, when we met him, he was that he was still the same way. And so he was just really, really interested. And, you know, that’s what a true scientist has to be, really obsessed with what they’re doing. And that was him. And so he hadn’t actually met my other friend, Tyler, who I was also studying with. And Tyler remind he reminded me of Tyler in many ways because they were both obsessed, they were both scientists and they were both super successful. So I thought I’d introduce them. And so I did. And I had predicted that if I did introduce them, that within a month they’d be working together. And in fact, that’s exactly what happened. They were just, you know, they just took off doing this kind of research. That was just a common sense deduce things out prediction and not a psychic prediction. Right. Yeah, totally. These guys are so alike that, you know, they’re we we need to get them together. So that’s what happened. And what happened next, though, once they all got together? Well, what happened was that Tyler was this person who was I was I was actually, truthfully, suspicious of because, you know, it was early in the. But Diana, you’re breaking up. Oh, hello. Hello, Diana. Still on the line. Yeah, according to this. Had this happen with Kevin. This happened with Kevin last week, so let’s go ahead and make a phone call. I’m sorry, but the person you called has a voicemail box. That has not been set up yet. Oops. Hang on. Okay, Diana, you’re there. Yeah, I’m here. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you now. We lost you for a second. Sorry about that. I don’t know what happened. Yeah, I don’t either. Well, it’s a good thing I’m recording. That’s all I can say. Yes. Okay. Okay. Now, yeah, you were talking about initial contact with yourself, Tyler and James. That’s right. So so in the beginning, before I met James, actually, I had met Tyler. And Tyler was a scientist and a very successful one and had been affiliated with the space industry and worked on the Challenger. And, you know, a lot of the space shuttle launches and was a person who was one of the meta experiencers. And so I was like I said, I was a little suspicious of meeting him. But eventually, after about a year, maybe even a year and a half, I convinced my friend, Jeff Kripal, to meet him with me at a conference. And he turned out to be just the nicest guy and very charming. And and very fascinating. And asked asked me if I wanted to go to New Mexico to visit a crash site and see some of the parts or try to find some of the parts. And so at first I did, of course, but I wanted to take somebody other than myself. And so I suggested to him that. And he said, no, no. You know, it’s a secret place and you actually have to be blindfolded to go. And so I said, well, no, I’m not doing this by myself. So so I asked James and James, you know, said I’d go yesterday, you know, because he like I said, he’s obsessed with this. So James and I went and Tyler agreed to James and we went blindfolded in a car for about 45 minutes. We went to New Mexico. It was a place I’d never been. And we got there and we had metal detectors that were configured to do this specific type of thing that we were looking for. And I don’t know what that is. And we spent all day there. We had to wear special types of clothing because of rattlesnakes. And it was incredibly beautiful, but strangely beautiful and windy. And there was also stuff that looked like a deconstructed cans, you know, from like the 1950s or something. The loon one cans that had been rusted and they were everywhere. It was everywhere. And so it took us a long time, but we actually found some parts. And and James shared with us some of his research at night about what he did. And it was really terrifying and scary. And so that’s what it was really a weird experience, but it was quite impactful. And after that, then a lot of things happened directly after that. Directly after that, there was the big, you know, Leslie Cain and Ralph Blumenthal thing came out. And so there was a lot of emphasis on these artifacts, these types of artifacts. So I realized that I had been, you know, not by choice or anything or design, but I had been placed in the midst of, again, this kind of mythology. And to me, you know, it’s it’s not really mythological when you can actually see the parts. So, you know, so I’m I’m living this thing that most people see it on TV. And they’re like, oh, yeah, you know, I’m watching Project Blue Book. And I felt like, you know, wow, you know, I’m living it. So it was weird. You said when you were out there, you did hit some pay dirt. You found something. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So I can tell you a little bit about some of the parts. So one of the parts you can actually go to YouTube and type in alien debris and whatnot. And you’ll see some parts that look similar to what we found. It looks like, OK, this is sounds disgusting, but it looks like frog skin that’s metallic. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, really weird. And then there are some other parts, but I’m asked not to really describe those. So and I know there were several different parts like there were basically two different types of parts. I would I would put them in two different categories. And apparently. And so, Tyler, actually, I think I mean, I do say this in my book. When I take off my blindfold, I look around and Tyler says, I keep looking at this one area. And Tyler says, oh, you recognize that place. And I say, you know, already this is a weird situation. And I say, well, I I’ve never been here. So how can I recognize it? And he said, well, you’ve seen this on the episode in the X-Files. This is that crash site. And I was like, what? And so I, you know, I thought, OK, well, yeah, this is it. This is definitely where I’m supposed to be because I study media and religion. And, you know, that’s exactly the cross here. I’m at the crossroads of mythology being invented, not just on TV and in the movies, but in real life as well. So, you know, it was like it was a weird mixture between real life and movies and everything else that really makes, you know, that you’re not living in the same world as like people who lived in the 1980s. This is a completely different world. And you were talking earlier before we got on the air, a little bit about some of the confusion around these fragments that might be of ET origin. The when the story first came out, it was in conjunction with the story about the Pentagon study. And it had been mentioned that these materials do exist. I think a few some people got confused that these aren’t necessarily in government hands, that a lot of the stuff that is under study, a lot of these fragments are actually in private hands. So you’re not going to be able to file FOIA requests about those. But can you tell us a little bit more about that and clear some of that up for us? Yeah, sure. So this is just from my perspective. From my perspective, I read, you know, of course, when you do a study like this, and this is why it takes so long to do is you read everything you can. And so I’d read about, you know, Corso. Right. And Corso being the guy who supposedly, you know, he’s you know, the book is The Day After Roswell, I think it’s called. And so basically his his contention, true or not, is that he had these parts and he brought them to private industry. And he told them that was Chinese or Russian parts and that they needed to engineer them back and engineer them. And so now this new guy, Tyler, is like Corso. But instead of taking these parts and giving them to private industry, he finds because he’s able to find people like, you know, James, he finds people, you know, and he says these are the kinds of that he compiles a team of people who can help him engineer biotechnologies from these parts. And so that basically is what was going on. But it was not like what was happening in Corso’s time. It happened differently in this time. It’s happening in this way. And so it’s not like these, you know, say the government does the government own them. I don’t know. Right. I don’t know. But I do know that private citizens own them. And some of them. But so the parts that we have are, you know, these aren’t Bigelow’s parts or these aren’t TTS parts. I mean, they might have the same parts. I actually don’t know. I’m not a scientist and I’m not privy to any of the parts that they have at all. So I can’t I can’t say anything about them. But these are in fact, I don’t even know where these parts are. I’m a I’m a lowly religious studies scholar. I am not. I’m not a title. So I don’t have the parts. And if I did have them, I wouldn’t even know what to do with them. In your in your book, you do mention that that Tyler and James had commented on, you know, initial comments about the the artifacts. Do you want to say what they what they initially thought about the artifacts? Yes. So, OK, so both or at least Tyler believes that they are crashed, you know, craft. OK. James, being an academic scientist. Entertains that that might be true, but it might not be true. So the thing I like about James and even Jacques Vallée is that they are they don’t conclude if they don’t know. I mean, they’re just honest scientists. So James basically says, I just know that this couldn’t have been made on Earth. And not only could it not have been made on Earth, it doesn’t even look like it could have made been made in the universe. And then I didn’t even you know, how do you process something like that? So Jacques basically looks at me and says it it exists because it’s absurd. You know, that’s just that’s exactly it. So, you know, one of the things I like about Jacques Vallée’s work is that he’s so incredibly intelligent with respect to everything, not just philosophy and science. But, you know, he also basically, you know, says this is these things are like Japanese koans. You know, they’re just like we don’t know. They wake us up. And, you know, what’s the meaning of them? I don’t know. But they make sure that that we know that the world is weirder than we think. Right. So that’s, you know, a koan, a Japanese koan of Zen Buddhism is this type of thing. It’s that makes your rational mind. It fatigues your rational mind so that you can, you know, be awakened to the true strangeness of existence, which is really beautiful and strange. And a UFO sighting will do that. And apparently these parts have done that as well. OK, well, then after this, so you’re in into the desert. Where do you go from from there? What happens next? OK, so from there, from there, I write my book. So I write my book. And and I try to. it in. And, you know, it’s it’s Oxford University Press. So they’re quite academic. Well, not quite. I mean, they pretty much define academic stuff. And so my editor is, you know, she loves the book, but she’s also horrified by some of it. And she says this, you can’t say. And I say, Yeah, I’m like, well, but it did happen. And she said, But why would that happen? Because these things don’t exist or something like that. And I said, Well, look, even though you and I know, maybe it can’t happen. Let’s just go along with it. Because this is what, you know, I tried as much as I could to like keep in all the parts that needed to be kept in. And, and in the meantime, there was this billionaire who asked me if I would go study at the Vatican archive, if I would go study the secret archive, if I could go study to two saints who were said to levitate, and also to buy locate. And I said, I do that. And then as I thought about that, I thought, you know, I should actually take Tyler with me, because Tyler has expertise in this type of thing, you know, in like, things that go up in the air, right, right. And aerial phenomena and stuff like that. And I thought, you know, I bet you, it was just an intuition. So I proposed this to the funding team. And they said, great idea. And so we headed to the, to the secret archive, I could get in, I had credentials to get in, it’s not an easy place to get into. And, but Tyler did not have those credentials. However, the credentials he did have, got him in, and got him a lot of access. And plus, he was able to make a lot of connections there to people that I would never have the ability to connect with. So a postulator, he’s like a, he’s the past papal advisor, his name is Father Gumpel. And you can look him up online, actually, on Wikipedia. He’s a Jesuit. And, and some and another priest who I don’t identify by his real name, because I don’t think he would be be happy that I’m associating him with the, with the study of UFOs, frankly, he was incredibly helpful. And so we go, so we go and we look at the manuscripts, and I think I sent you some of those manuscripts and pictures of those. And you know, we get and we also got to go to the space observatory, up in Castel Gandolfo, which is about an hour and a half outside of the Vatican in this really incredible, beautiful town, which is on a volcano. And there’s this volcanic lake. And there’s this observatory and telescope and Brother Guy, who I had known, had invited me to go and look at what they had their archive there of space research. And so there was a whole section on extraterrestrial research. And so we spent, you know, what, five days or so just like basically living in that archive looking at every single thing I could possibly look at. I mean, it was just I, I’ll go back, Tyler’s already gone back. And so there was just a wealth of historical information about aerial phenomena of the past. And it was there that I also realized that one of the people that I had, that I was there to study, who’s a Spanish nun, Mary of Agra, from hundreds of years ago, she had actually was said to have by located to New Mexico. And it’s, it struck me one day as I was in the archive, and I looked up at Tyler. And I looked at him and I said, Mary of Agra, she went to this place in New Mexico. And is this the place we went? And he looked at me, and I could tell by his face that he wasn’t going to say anything, because I’m not supposed to know, you know, where we went. So I didn’t push it. But what a weird coincidence that was. And I realized then that this was the next, this was my last chapter to my book. And so my book was already turned in. So I had to email my editor and tell her, you know, sorry. So I sent her a picture of Brother Guy, you know, and his telescope. And I said, Look, look at how cool this is. And so she said, yes. So she almost sounds like a ancient antenna, huh? What’s that? She almost sounds like she was an antenna. How she was by looking at all these places. And yes, yes, yes. So I’m actually George Knapp kind of pointed that out was that sounds like, you know, he’s talking about the biomarkers of the people who can make contact, you know, and that Mary, Mary Agra may have had those or something. So I hadn’t thought about that. But maybe that’s what I was doing. And so a lot of times, I in my research, what I found with this book in particular, was that I do it, and I wouldn’t know what I was doing until about a month later. And I’d look back on it. I’d say, Wow, that’s what I did. And that’s why I did it. Yeah. So that’s really what it was like that trip, you know? Yeah. And so before you mentioned that, you know, some stuff that was edited out of the book, it’s the Oxford Press. So, you know, it’s an academic press, they have to, you know, make it acceptable for academia. What can can you talk about any of the stuff that was edited out? Or completely taken out? Or can you not comment on that? Okay, so some of this stuff, what I’m going to do is, there’s an audio version of the book, but it’s not me speaking, it’s someone else. But what I decided I’d do, and I did get permission for my press to do that, because you know, they do own half this book, is I am going to like the preface, the preface on my website is the full preface. And it talks a lot about the SRI, you know, the Stanford Research Institute, and remote viewing and stuff like that. And that was taken out of the preface that made it into the book. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to do an audio version of a lot of the stuff, and I’m going to post it somewhere. I’m not quite sure where I’m going to post it, but I will post it. And people will have that they could have it for free. So I’m going to I’m going to make an audio version. And, and that stuff. Yeah, I’m going to, in fact, even my dean asked me, he said, Can I have the edited? I mean, the unedited version of your book? It was really funny. The director’s cut. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, you’re more than welcome to host it at the UFO News Network, YouTube channel. We have no problems with that, right, James? So you’re, you’re writing the book. And you’d also expressed a little bit of frustration that there’s some of the folks that you quoted in the book, when they were showed, I guess, the galleys, the original version, they said, Well, yeah, I’m not exactly comfortable with this phrasing, or that phrasing. And you had to go back and make some changes there as well. Is that about right? Yes, but that’s okay. I mean, you know, I’m just grateful that the people who agreed to be in the book are in the book, I every single one of them is a fascinating, wonderful person who I’ve learned a lot from. So I just owe a debt to these people. I mean, seriously, I don’t James, I think you have a copy, a hard copy of the book. I don’t even have a copy of the book yet. So, yeah, as soon as I get my hard copies, you know, because I get, you know, I get, I don’t know, like 15 or 20, I am going to send them out to everybody in the book. But I haven’t even received them yet. That’s a beautiful book. It is. It’s very well done. Beautiful. And I’ve heard nothing but but great reviews from people in the field that especially the Pete, the hardcore researchers, mostly the people that are really, really deep into it, not kind of like the surface, people looking at UFO sightings, the people that are really deep into the actual phenomenon, have said excellent things about this book. Wonderful. I’m so happy. But let’s talking about those, the Invisible College or Fight Club, I do I do want to talk a little bit about that. But why? Why were you able to even include Tyler and James in a book? Right. Okay, so this is a good question. That’s like, you know, you always have to ask those questions. Yeah. Okay. So, um, I asked that question myself. And I never really got a satisfactory answer other than that. What’s what’s being said in the book is entirely it should be said, okay. So, so I think that in one way, I, listen, I spent a lot of time on Jacques Vallée here in this book. And one of the reasons I do is because he was on to the idea that the phenomena functions like a technology. And now that we actually have more, we’re more able to use instruments that allow us to identify how it’s like a technology, we’re actually able to flesh it out. So I have Tyler and I have James and I have some pretty dense scholarship chapters in there that a lot of people are going to hate, I think, if they’re just, you know, just this UFO book, but I basically show how human beings are now cyborgs and awash within this technology. And that, you know, people like Elon Musk, who are saying, you know, super intelligent digital technology is like an alien. I mean, there’s something there that most people who study, you know, most people who are looking for the little green men or little greys or whatever, they’re not getting this part. And this part is, I think, the most important. If there’s going to be, okay, the classic alien invasion, how are they going to do it? Well, heck, just like 2001, a space odyssey, it’s going to come through your screen. Have you not noticed that the monolith looks like the iPhone? And look at all of us, you know, we carry around our iPhone. It’s like it’s an extension of ourselves. And why? Because it is. Yeah. And go ahead, James. I was gonna say you had a really interesting quote, right at the beginning of the book, by David Bowie. He says, the internet is an alien life form. And you know, that’s both very true, in a sense, and very scary. Yes. And I end the book with a scary quote from Martin Heidegger. So I actually came across an interview with David Bowie the other day, where the full interview, that quote comes from this interview, but I actually had never watched the full interview. So I watched the full interview. And again, I was like, you know, David Bowie is brilliant. Of course, he’s brilliant, you know, but every time I listen to him, I’m just amazed at how brilliant he really is. So you know, here we have Elon Musk, who is brilliant, basically saying this, but heck, David Bowie said it like, 25 years ago, he said the same thing. And he was basically saying, the interviewer asked him, well, do you think that, you know, we use technology? How do we use technology? And David Bowie stopped him and said, Hey, we don’t use technology. You know, we think we use technology, but we exist in a symbiotic relationship with technology. Now I’m going to jump in and ask you to speculate a little bit. You were talking about technology, and the relationship with that and these, the phenomenon. Do you think these experiencers who are describing fairly vivid experiences, contact, whatever the case may be? Do you think those people are just actually experiencing a virtual reality experience as compared to having a sort of having the goggles on and skiing down the mountain as compared with actually skiing down the mountain? If I frame that the right way? Right. So there, there are so many different ways that people experience the phenomena. But one way that, you know, like Christopher Bledsoe, who doesn’t, you know, didn’t under, you know, when I, I never actually talked to him about this David Bowie type idea. And he said to me, well, that they look like technology, they look, you know, whatever they were, they, they didn’t look like humans, they looked human like, but they looked like technology. And I always thought that was really interesting. Oops. Hey, looks like we clicked out, but we got clicked back in. Yeah, no, yeah, you you came through loud and clear. We didn’t lose you. Oh, okay. Yeah, you’re fine. You’re fine. So, um, so I’m sorry, Frank, I think that’s, did I answer your question? Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know. I was asking you to speculate. I know that that gets a little hairy sometimes. Virtual reality. Yeah. Joseph Burks, like his idea. Yeah, yeah. Joseph Burks is fascinating. I was, I had interviewed him a few times, because he has a lot of very, very interesting ideas about, you know, when people experience these things, what are they experiencing? And I think people who are interested in phenomena, I don’t know if he’s written a book, but he should write a book just to get those ideas out there. Yeah, he, you know, I keep harassing him about that. He said, he said, you can do it. I really he’s written a book. He’s written a book’s worth of polemics. That’s for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the virtual, the virtual experience model, when it goes through different levels of basically the phenomenon of being able to produce virtual different levels of virtual experiences and realities for the experiencer. That is so advanced that it’s controlled to where you can have two people next to each other. And one person is having this amazing experience and seeing these things and getting the telepathic messages, downloads, and the person next to them doesn’t see or experience the same thing. But he, you know, he also talks about how there’s a story when an experiencer basically told the phenomenon show show Dr. Birx and he was shown directly after, you know, some of the phenomenon. But you know, some some things is is I don’t necessarily agree that it’s a complete virtual reality, because again, you have these artifacts. And those are reality, they’re real, whether they’re manufactured for a reason, or they’re donations, as I think James says in the book, or if they’re from some kind of crash, but there there is a physical component to the phenomenon as well. And radar, of course, radar is physical evidence that something is flying around too. So I think I think that’s right. It is probably a part of it. But I don’t think that the entire experiences of virtual reality. I mean, unless unless you want to get into the idea that our entire reality is a simulation. Right, right. Which, which Diana, you do, you do kind of address that in the book, which is absolutely fascinating, because that’s something that will, that’ll keep you up at night. But talking about the book, you know, you go further into the book, you talk about a really, you know, interesting concept, which people might not necessarily at the beginning think is related, but it’s completely related, especially when you talk about technology and belief is the specialist factual, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s really, I mean, this is, this is, like I said, the world in which we live now. And there’s a new genre of production for TV and film, and it’s called specialist factual. And anybody can look it up. And what it is, and by the way, it’s a little eerie, that Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer wrote, we can, we can make it for you wholesale, or something, or we can remember it for you wholesale. And it’s basically a short story that got turned into total recall. And yeah, the company that he, that total recall that created these false memories and implanted them as vacations in people’s heads, but was actually an Intel agents like that in it. And this actually tricks our brains. So this, this researcher named Jeffrey Zaks, he’s a neuroscientist, he’s written a book called your brain on film. And he basically talks about how this type of media and I actually saw this when I was doing when I was helping with conjuring the conjuring one, I saw how they edit, you know, how they edited the scenes in the last part. And, and this is done in Hollywood. So they take audiences, and they, they hook them up to peak to peak, they hook up people to these machines that allow them to know which parts of their brains are being lit up. And so they take those scenes that are ultra stimulating, almost like when you you, you know, eat something like a chocolate, something that you really, really enjoy. So when we watch these movies, our brains are lighting up. Now, we say that we know, oh, I’m going to this movie. And this movie I know is not true. We say that with one part of our brain, which is called the rational part of our brain. But there are other parts of our brain that believe it to be true. And so you know, those are the parts that make us scream. And you know, those are the parts that you know, so our brains are much more complicated than we give them credit to be. And so this type of genre, that extra factual, I mean, I talked about it, because our whole idea of the UFO is based on what people you know, what, what media companies tell us it looks like, right? Yeah, I mean, it’s all over. And what we were talking about before is people from my generation, we don’t even question the reality of extraterrestrial life. You know, we grew up with, you know, ET, the extraterrestrial and, and I mean, if you look at the cartoons, the kid cartoons, you know, for like little kids, it’s all over the place. Exactly. Yeah. So it’s, it’s not even like a taboo in that sense, for people in my generation, it’s a given. It’s a given, right. But you know, something even deeper now that you mentioned it, you’re talking about specials factual and this kind of engineered reality is a question would be like, imagine if the phenomenon is doing a special factual on us. Yeah, I think David Bowie was trying to get there, you know, yeah. But getting getting back to Fight Club. Yeah. Oh, right. Right. Two things, two things about the invisibles. One, you know, why, why is it important that they remain invisible? Okay, so this was explained to me by an invisible, and it was this, how do you think we’d get this work done? If people what we were doing? Yeah, people like us would be asking him to come on our podcast all the time. That’s right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, since I’ve been doing this, I’ve been getting a ton of emails that basically say, can you introduce me to Tyler? Oh, I’m sure. So I, you know, I’m not I’m not even answering that those emails anymore. No. And the second part of the question about the invisible is, you know, what kind of scope are we talking here? You know, we kind of know that there, some of them are scientists, but what’s what’s the spectrum of that, of their fields of work and prestige? Okay, so in my, okay, so I’ve got to take, okay, this would get this is something that I’m going to distance myself from my, my press, my academic press, and also from my university. And this is just my personal opinion. Okay. So I’m not, I’m not talking as an academic, and I’m not talking as a professor at my university. I’m talking just as a person who’s speculating. Okay. This latest research out there that James, you wrote about, you know, you know, that, okay, that part of the brain, it appears to me that these invisibles might be people that are super intuitive, and therefore, they’re receiving information that most people don’t receive, and they act on it. And therefore, they’re super high functioning people. And that these people can listen, these people, I know, for a fact, because in my, at my university, we have a lot of veterans, and that a lot of times these veterans come through sail through my program, get into places like Harvard and stuff like that. And these people have been identified by the military as having what the military calls a sixth sense, they don’t know what to call it. But they know that these people exist. And so they kind of promote them. And so these people might be partly some of the invisibles. That’s my own personal opinion. Yeah. And, you know, I don’t know how far you can go into this. But, you know, say of the group of invisibles, what kind of questions are they asking? And what do you think some of the things they speculate about? Okay, so what I found was that especially with respect to the invisible, I talked about who’s Tyler in my book, is that these people live very lonely existences, they’re tragic in a way, because, first off, say, okay, James, say you had this quality, but you didn’t have that research to tell you what what, why you’re different. Do you know how weird that would be? I can imagine. So that’s really weird. So a lot of times those people, they go through their lives, they don’t understand, they don’t think they’re particularly smart. And they end up in these situations, they know exactly what they do, but they don’t know why they know. I mean, think of how weird that would be. Yeah. Yeah. That’s why I thought I conveyed the somewhat tragedy of the, of, you know, I mean, yeah, it would be super cool to be one of these people. But it’s also weird to be one of those people, because they don’t, they’re on a quest to understand what they are, even. Yeah. And I mean, how do you explain that to anybody? It’s just, yeah, you can’t no one understands. Yeah. You can try and you know, even even no matter how credible and solid and down to earth and grounded you are. You tell a close family member about that. And if they haven’t seen it themselves, you know, even a very close friend or best friend that sees you as highly intelligent, incredible, you start telling them about that. And you see their eyes wondering, like, is this person? They all you know, they’re probably there’s it just it cracks their reality. Yes. And they push it away. Yeah. They don’t know how to do to take that information and what to do with it. So the you know, there’s like a defense mechanism that goes off and they just did disidentify with what you’re saying. Yeah, but so you know, you you were studying these kind of things and Catholicism, where the saints were having experiences, which if you know, a UFO researcher looked at it, they would look at it as like a UFO experience, a contact experience. How did you go from looking at those kind of religious experiences about, you know, these saints being visited to kind of like the modern thing with orbs and modern visitations and what we would interpret as UFOs or extraterrestrial or the phenomenon? Yes, good idea. Okay, good question. So I’ve actually written an article about this. And it’s, it’s free for anyone who wants to go online at on academia.edu. And it basically takes Teresa of Avila. And it, you know, she’s the one who has this ecstatic experience, represented by Bernini, the artist in a statue in Rome, called the ecstasy of St. Teresa. And so she actually describes that experience, which looks, by the way, nothing like what this sculpture shows. She describes it in her autobiography. And so I take her I do an analysis. And I I take her experience. And I take Carlos Edward Carlos’s experience. And he’s somebody who has a chapter in john max, giant New York Times bestselling book, abduction, human encounters with aliens. And Carlos and she have a very, very similar experience. And so what I do is I say, as an academic, a responsible person, can we be and you know, these are two people from totally different time periods, totally different cultures, can we say that there are, you know, these are the same experience? Can we say that? Well, no, we can’t say that. But what we can see is the processes in which once these people have these experiences, their experiences then get filtered through different types of media in her day, it wasn’t the type of media we have today. But you know, like what happened to Carlos was he had these experiences, and he thought they were somewhat angelic experiences. But then john mac called them abductions. And he had a huge, you know, Carlos had a huge problem with that. And so he, he was actually a professor of art. And so he would fight john mac. And he said, No, you can’t call it that. So you have to understand what we call things. And then what you know, a book that comes out that makes the New York Times bestselling list, that’s going to define this experience for everyone, then, you know, whereas the actual experiencer says, it wasn’t in any way an abduction, but then we call it that. See? Yeah, exactly. So these are the kinds of things that these experiences go through. I think that, I mean, I personally think that people are going to still I mean, the reason I started to study this was I realized that the things I studied in the past are still happening to people, people are still having very profound experiences with things that come down from the sky. Orbs, you know, whatever you want to call them. Yeah, yeah. Also, the, the, the fight club. What’s their importance? Going forward in the involvement with these with these kind of issues? Okay, so when, when Jacques wrote in the 1970s, he wrote a book called the Invisible College. And the Invisible College, I think it was Hynek, Alan Hynek, who actually coined that phrase, but it comes from a very old college. I think Frank Francis Bacon, I could be wrong there. But, but someone from that early modern period, expression goes back a ways. Yep. Yeah. So basically, it was scientists who back in the day, if they did really, you know, paradigm shifting science, they would have had their heads cut off. Okay. So basically, what Jacques and Hynek were basically suggesting with the term, the Invisible College is that you’ve got to do this science, but you’ve got to do it in secret. It’s got to be something that you don’t because you could ruin your career, like John Mack, right? Okay, so, so they called it the Invisible College by the time and by the way, this was at the end of the car ride, when in the beginning of the book in the preface, Jacques gives me this book, right? And he goes, read this. And I’m like, Okay, so I read it. And I realized later in my research that the Invisible College has actually turned into Fight Club. So Fight Club, which was a movie from the 1990s, in which there’s this guy who’s actually invisible, but we don’t know it, right. And so he, but the rule of this Fight Club, which is a bunch of people like who, who band together, and they’re all over the United States, they don’t talk about what they do. And so what I found was that these researchers, their code was the exact opposite of the code that academics have, which is what you know, you talk about what you do. Well, they don’t talk about it, they can’t talk about it. If they talk about it, they lose their jobs. So they don’t talk about it. So that’s why I called it the Fight Club instead of the Invisible College. Real quick, let me ask you, the UFO subject has gotten heightened attention over the last year or so for all sorts of reasons. Some academics are coming out and talking about a little bit more openly, even some physical scientists. And what is the opinion from the Fight Club? As far as all that goes, do they, are they going to have to make some adjustments to conceal their identities a little bit more thoroughly? Are they making any plans? What are they doing about all this? And what do they think about it? Okay, so for some of the invisibles, that’s the plan. It’s all going as it’s supposed to go. Okay, okay. Do they see this, you know, we have a tip coming out and not loss app and, and that whole kind of thing. Do they see this information coming out to the public as a good thing? Yeah, the reason they see it as a good thing is because you know, they believe in it. They believe this is the case. They want the people to know they don’t want to shock them too much. And do they realize that some of them might get outed that some folks might figure out who some of these people are? They might realize that. Yeah. Now, James put together one meme from your book, related to Tyler’s protocol, where he’s, there might be some folks at home who get interested in this to the point where they might want to try a little bit themselves. They might be in a creative field where they’re looking for ideas, that type of thing. And he talks about, let’s see, tuning the body and the DNA getting a good night’s sleep, alcohol consumption, zero coffee, which I don’t know about that. But that might be asking a little bit. Have you given up coffee as a result of this advice? Okay, yeah. Okay, so this is interesting. So in about two thirds, you know, here I am at 2 to 12, I take on the study, then I recognize in almost to 14, that, you know, 2014, that almost all of the very, very successful biotechnologists and invisibles that I meet, like super successful people are all doing this protocol. And so I think to myself, you know, I’ve got five kids, you know, that many years ago, they were really young, they were like, James, they were like, your kids ages, right? So like, I’m going crazy, you know, I’m like, I’m going crazy. You know, I’m like, you know, I’m a mom, I’m like, do writing these books. And I’m frazzled. So I said to myself, you know what, I think I’m going to try this protocol. I and I have to tell you that it worked. I quit coffee. Yeah, that was the hardest thing I ever did. Yeah, I quit drinking wine. I started doing weight exercise and a little bit of carbohydrate. I mean, not carbohydrate, a little bit of aerobic activity. I went outside, like they said, and got sun, you know, which I never really do. And I started to get sleep. And I started to sleep in which, by the way, when you’re a mom of five kids is almost impossible to do. And my productivity. Search Award last year, my productivity just went through the roof. I couldn’t stop doing stuff. It was just like, I couldn’t stop doing stuff. And I just had just gobs of energy. And I thought, Whoa, this really works. And then slowly, I think it was when I got to Italy, the coffee was so delicious. I mean, I was like, coffee, we drink in the United States coffee. I was like, Oh, I can’t not drink this. So and even Tyler had to drink the coffee. It was like, Oh, what is so beautiful and wonderful in my life. So the Italian coffee got me back on the coffee, but I pretty much still do this protocol. Yeah, you know, it almost sounds like partially as an aesthetic, you know, a withdrawal from some of the like the I mean, even less like electronics and stuff like that. And, you know, no caffeine and no alcohol. It’s like a clearing of the body a little bit. You know, that sounds something almost from like a spiritual tradition. It really does. That’s why I recognized it. I recognized it right away as as it’s almost like a spiritual protocol, basically, like a monk and you know, nuns do this. Yeah. Another thing that another thing that Tyler says to do, which I know is going to be very unpopular for all of your audience, as it is for me, too, is basically he says that social media and a lot of what we and you know, look at on our screen creates a negative response in your brain. Well, you know, we get addicted to it through dopamine. And that that’s actually counter. I mean, you could go on it to do your work. But if you’re on it all the time, it’s gonna mess with your antenna is what he says. It’s true, because I took the other day on my weekend, I took two days off from electronics, like I just disconnected and spent the whole time with the family and I felt completely different. My mind was much clearer. There were less, you know, in like, Buddhism and meditation, you’d call them like less fragmenting of thoughts. Yes, yes, it’s completely, you know. But getting back to the Vatican, did you guys, in a sense, find we were looking for there? Did you find anything interesting? Or of note? Yes, we did. We actually are working on a project right now where I’m the head. I’m the head person on this project where we did obtain the which, by the way, I had to sign my life over for these, I obtained the manuscripts of St. Joseph of Cupertino’s canonization records, which are there. They’re probably there. I don’t know, I think, gosh, maybe 5000 pages worth. And yeah, it’s really a lot of stuff. And it’s all like, written in Latin and 17th century Italian. So we’re what we’re doing is we’re doing a transcription of some of the more interesting things that he did. And we’ll probably do the same thing with Mary of Agra. And we’re also maybe making some books on the Templars, because while we were there, some some stuff happened with them, too. I know it sounds all Da Vinci code. We didn’t. I’m serious. It happened that way. So, so yeah, we do. And Tyler works with some of the people who are helping developed countries with their space programs. So, so we made a lot of connections there. I mean, you know, a lot of people, good, good people there. And we’ve been invited back. So that’s an ongoing thing. So what’s gonna come out of the project? You said books and anything else? And yeah, so, I mean, right now, the big project is basically to do the transcriptions of some of the documents for people who are interested in what looks like people who have these biomarkers right from history. And, and once we do that, and by the way, this is all going to be on a password on a on a site that’s not open to the public. And so that was one of the, you know, because the Vatican is not a democracy. So we’ve had some issues with that some of the funders are American, and the Vatican is not American, right. And so I’m an American and so but I’m also Catholic, and I go there and so they trust me and they say, we’ll allow you to have this, but it can’t be public knowledge. And so I go back to the funders and I say, yeah, we can have this and we can transcribe it, but it can only be people who I allow in to see the documents. And they got really angry. And I said, you know, that sounds like American entitlement here, you know, they don’t have to let us even look at these documents. These are their, you know, so there’s a lot of like cultural, what I would call tension that we have, you know, like, we just assume things should be a certain way. But things aren’t always the way that they are. I mean, that’s what I also found with my academic friends who say, wait a minute, these invisibles, they need to tell us this stuff. And invisible said, it’s on a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know it. I mean, you know, we’re talking about different cultures here. And these cultures have their own codes of ethics. And, you know, a lot of people demand to know this or that. And I was stuck in the middle of a lot of this type of, you know, a lot of these arguments, basically, and I had to be kind of like a diplomat to say, well, let’s take a look at their argument and why they say this. And by the way, you’re not going to know. I mean, are they ever planning to put some of this out there? Or that I mean, the main idea is to stay invisible and do this work, you know, and, you know, as far as they can see. Strangely enough, it’s out there. I think a lot of it is out there in the forms of what they believe. Now we’re talking about what they believe they believe to be technologies. And then a lot of it, a lot of the content information is coming out through I think, media culture, pop culture, it could very well be my book, I don’t know, like, I honestly, I don’t know why, why I was privy to some information, and I put it in the book. And now you’re all going to read it and be privy to it, too. I honestly don’t know why. Will I ever know why? I don’t know. So I mean, I’m stuck in the same position that you are all in. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m not an invisible. Yeah. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s just a fascinating thing to contemplate. Everybody wants to know, you know, how much do they know? Compared to us in the outside world? You know, does it seem like they really have a handle on? I can, I can answer that. I can say that they are, it’s such a compartmentalized situation that a lot of them have no clue what the other people are doing. Yeah, that’s as much as I can say, because it’s, you know, some, I got kind of a meta view, because I knew so many of them, and I knew what they were doing. And I was like, wow, if they only knew what they were doing. And, you know, they, they are doing things that the other people don’t know. And so, and but they can’t, they’re trained this way from a very young age, too, by the way. And sometimes couples are recruited. And when you get couples that get recruited into it, then, you know, they, they, they have their own special kind of code where they work together. I mean, it’s a really weird culture that I don’t want to be a part of in any way I just wrote about it. But it’s something that I honestly did not know existed before this book. Where do you think we’re going to be with all this in about a year’s time? I think we’re gonna have I think 2019, just like everybody predicts is going to be a wild ride for people who are interested in this. And even people who are not. I remember when the Blumenthal and Kane article came out last year. I mean, that came out like a thunderbolt. And then, you know, people that I didn’t know that were never really interested in in the topic, were calling me like people from Harvard, how can we get in on this? Can you know, what can we do? And I was like, it’s a little too late for you now, you know. And so it’s like, it was uncool last year, and now it’s cool. So yeah, I think it’s just I honestly think it’s going to go exponential here. Yeah, I mean, it looks like it there’s more and more coming out. And, you know, there’s there’s talk of more stuff coming out, you know, in March, and they have these different films being done, that’s going to include, you know, certain revelations of different realities of the subject, you know, material stuff. And, you know, these videos, everybody’s talking about. And I think, you know, it’s almost been like a cultural shock. In the last year, you know, even our show just came along. And just see, you know, Danny Silva, and Twitter user, Jay, they’ve, they’ve come on the scene. And it’s really been drawing people out like a beacon. Now. I mean, it’s like, somebody turned the light on and everybody’s going for now. It’s it’s pretty incredible. I agree. I totally agree. And I like the people that are here now, because there’s a whole group of new young people who don’t have animosity, you know, like, there’s a lot of animosity associated with kind of older UFO, you know, like the 1980s, 1990s, ufology, even the early 2000s. And now it seems like after, you know, 2010, it’s gotten really, like, friendly, more friendly, you know, people are more open to hearing first, there’s, there’s less of the stigma between, you know, let’s study nuts and bolts. And let’s study or let’s study the spiritual part of it. But, you know, those were completely at at odds, but now they’re not. And people are much more able to kind of talk about both sides of it and not get angry at each other. Yeah, the consciousness aspect of it, which, you know, really seems to be at the core of it, you speak to any experiencer, and then you can’t really separate that aspect of it from the phenomenon. Exactly. Well, the nice thing about the experiencer end of things, it’s not difficult at all to find people to talk about that we could get experiences on here, probably every week, if we wanted to, just you just have to ask them basically, and they’ll come on and tell you all about it. Exactly. It’s more of a more of an egalitarian kind of thing. It really is. Yeah. It seems like everybody who’s had an experience, everybody we know, has had an experience. Plenty of them are willing to talk about it openly. So that’s, we’re okay with that. That keeps us going, gives us stuff to talk about. So we’re all right with it. I think it’s great. I like the way in which I like the direction in which it’s going. Definitely. Yeah. Did you have anything else for Frank? I know. I think you covered everything really well. I got the questions answered. I wanted to have answered. Is there anything that we didn’t touch on that you want to share with us, Dr. Pazolka? No, just my, if you’re interested, now that I’m not on social media, you can go to my website, and I’m going to start listing stuff that I’m doing there, like interviews that come out, things like that, developments. And that’s AmericanCosmic.com. And if anybody wants to, you know, get the book now, it’s actually out on Kindle. And unfortunately, I don’t think it’s coming out in hard, or I guess it is in hard copy, because James has one. But yeah, so it’s AmericanCosmic.com. And I hope that they enjoy it. And I hope they enjoy it. I know. I know. I’m looking forward to it. I was hoping to get the hard copy myself, but that didn’t turn up. But, you know, I’m going to read it as soon as I get a chance. When did, when do you know yet have a specific date on when the hard copy is going to be available? People like to order and get it right away. Right. So I think that what the problem is, is that it keeps getting the warehouse keeps getting depleted. So I think, James, you do have a copy, right? I do. I got it like two days ago. Danny Silva got a copy, too. Okay, so people are getting the hard copies now. Okay. I think, yeah, I think at least the people because I know, you know, both Danny and I ordered a long like months ago. Um, and isn’t isn’t it coming out on hard copy via Amazon and in the middle of February as well? Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think if you order from Oxford Press. Yeah, yeah, that seems to be about it. So if you get it from Oxford, it comes directly from that warehouse, and you might get it sooner. And I actually have a code that I can give you after this show. And if you want to post it, it’s a 30% off code. Oh, yeah, yeah, that’ll be nice. Okay. You know, we’ve used on the Oxford site. Okay, so go to Oxford. Got it. Yes. Well, I’ll give you that. I’ll give you that later tonight. Okay. Yeah, we can post a premium for our listeners. Yeah. And I got the book in like two days when I got an email saying, Oh, we’re sending out your book. I got it in like two days. Wow, that’s great. Yeah, I mean, I’m on the East Coast. But you know, Danny was in Texas and saying he got it the same day. The warehouse is actually only an hour for me. It’s in North Carolina. So that’s so funny. Yeah. I need to I need to get another copy. I need to get a signed copy. When you come to North Carolina, I’ll come out and sign it for you. Oh, that’s a great idea. Alright, so let’s we’re gonna wrap things up. Thanks again to Dr. Diana Pasulka, author of American Cosmic. Get it, read it, enjoy it. And maybe pick up a few tips on how to improve your own life following Tyler’s health regimen there and I give up that coffee. And we’re gonna wrap things up. I’m sure that we’re not going to do anything next Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday. So but we’ve got some other shows. You know, that I think that’s the new religion, not UFOs. I think it’s football, to be honest. I know we’ve got a lot. We’ve got a UFOs, OVNIs in South America, Super Show coming up later this month. We’ve got some other things. Nothing pinned down. But after next Sunday, we’ll definitely have some more shows. James, as always a great pleasure. You know, we’ve had a pretty good run here since November with some fantastic shows. So let’s keep that going. And again, Dr. Pasulka, thanks so much for joining us. It was fantastic. It was great time. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot to have you on. And Danny, say hello. Oh, absolutely. I say hi to them too. They’re great. And have a good week, everybody. And let’s root for those Rams against New England because I’m tired of them winning Super Bowls. So goodbye, everybody. Bye now.

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Diana Pasulka — “American Cosmic” launch interview (UFO News Network, Jan 27 2019)

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