Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
For the best experience, listen with headphones. This is a bonus episode of season three of Strange Arrivals. Bonus episodes feature interviews that I conducted during my research but that I either didn't use or used sparingly in the main episodes. There were great conversations that, for one reason or another, didn't make the cut, but I think they add valuable
perspective to the ideas we explored this season. Doctor Diana Pisolka is professor of philosophy and religion at University of North Carolina, Wilmington and the author of the very interesting book American Cosmic. I interviewed her in May of twenty twenty two, just a few days before the first congressional hearing in more than fifty years, to focus on military
reports of UFOs. As you'll see, we have quite different takes on the UFO phenomenon, but I think she has a unique approach and I really enjoyed our conversation.
So I am Diana Pasolka, and I'm a professor at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington and I have been a professor there for twenty years. I have a PhD in religious studies, and my field has been in Catholic history and Catholic traditions. That's what I was trained in. Before that, I lived in California. I grew up in the California environment of eclectic spirituality. My mother is kind of like a reformed Jew, and my father was Catholic.
I went to Catholic schools. I was Catholic, really, I mean, you know, and I went to Catholic high school. And then after that I decided to attend the Jesuit School Theology, which is a tribute. It's affiliated with Berkeley's UC Berkeley's they have a partnership. It's like a divinity school. It's
called the Graduate Theological Union. And I did my master's degree with taking classes at UC Berkeley and taking classes at the Jesuit School Theology and the Jewish School Theology there, and then I went to Syracuse University to get a PhD. And so, yeah, And one other thing about the way I've been trained is I did this in the late
nineties and nineties and well actually throughout the nineties. And this was in California, where I grew up during the dot com boom, so I was fascinated with technology and how technology informs belief and especially like beliefs about God and things like that. So I've spent a lot of time, actually since I was eleven, reading everything I could about religion, religion, technology, technology, philosophy, you know, everything I could find about these these things.
So I didn't intend ever to study UFOs. I thought that they were very odd. I didn't want anything to do with them. But I ended up doing that in twenty eleven, and now I've been doing that ever since.
So twenty eleven, what was kind of your entree into the UFO world.
Yeah, it's kind of strange, but this is it. There were a few things. I was finishing a book on the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, in which it was it was a huge project. I went to archives all over and I looked at anecdotes from European Catholics, North American Catholics, Canadian Catholics, from you know, for the Europeans back to Frankly from the eleven hundreds up to the eighteen hundreds.
And what I was looking at is Catholics used to do devotions to souls in purgatory, and that all kind of stopped, and they don't do those anymore, and I wanted to know why. And so what I found was I found the reasons for that, and I wrote a book about it. But I also found that Catholics had a lot of experiences of aerial phenomena from basically a thousand years ago till now. And because they're Catholics, and you know, and their the Catholic Church takes pretty good notes,
you know, they're they're known for their record keeping. And I've been to the Vatican Library and Secret Archive and looked at a lot of the documents there. I found that there were all of these aerial phenomena incidences, and the frameworks for understanding those were basically religious, you know, like they've you know, they thought these were their souls
from purgatory. They'd see something like a disc in the sky and they'd call it an angel, or they call it a demon, or they call it a lost soul from purgatory. But they were, you know, the patterns were really the same. And at this point it never occurred to me that these were like kind of like UFOs, but they were. They were you know, unidentified objects that then were identified through Catholic frameworks. So I finished this book and I had a big log of these accounts,
and I didn't quite understand. I knew that i'd do something with them, but I wasn't quite sure what. And the Japanese tsunami happened, and that was just something that was so incredibly devastating and tragic and like just apocalyptic, right, like kind of like the end of the world for this country kind of thing that I started to think about the apocalyptic nature of things. There was also something
that happened in twenty eleven in Berkeley. This man predicted the end of the world and all of these people believed him and kind of like sold everything they had, their retirement and everything for this man. And sadly, a young person committed suicide because she believed that the end of the world was going to happen. So I was
really not happy about this. My students were wanting to know, is it going to be the end of the world, And I was like, no, no, no, you know, this has been happening for a long time, Like the end of the world has been predicted so many times. It hasn't happened, right, But I was still fascinated with apocalyptic narratives, which are end of the world type narratives, that I
started to study those. And what happened was that I found that a lot of people who had these apocalyptic narratives were also what people call experiencers, people who experience UFO events, And I thought that was confounding. So I started to get into studying communities of people who were experiencers.
And at the same time, I showed a friend of mine my log of Catholic history anecdotes, you know, of aero phenomena, and he said, this looks like UFOs, you know, And I said, you're crazy, But you know, it all came together for me one weekend when I attended a conference on UFOs and I saw, I heard experiencers talk about their experiences, and I realized, the patterns here are so similar to the patterns from eight hundred years ago, six hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, that this
is what I have to study now. And it started there.
That's interesting when you take a look at something like that as a religious studies training religious studies, so are you looking at it as there is you know, a thing that's been happening through all these years, and it's just people kind of interpret it differently based on sort of their cultural you know, their cultural moment or their beliefs, or is it that there's something in the human condition that sort of manifests like this, And so you get
these different stories coming down through the year. Because I'm sure you could go back further to Greek times or whatever, where you know, they talk about God's being in the skies and stuff like that. Like I understand that for religious studies, you're kind of setting aside whether you know the doctrine is real, you're but you're studying the doctrine itself. Is that right? Am I? Right in that?
Yeah? So the framework that I was trained in is a framework that's actually changing and has changed. And I'm one of the people that, well, I have to say I have to change it because it doesn't that method doesn't work here in this case. So the method is this is that we're told to bracket our beliefs about whatever we're studying. Say it's like apparitions of the Virgin Mary or you know, things like that, and we're told
to study communities and social effects. But the truth of the matter is kind of some we don't actually get into. We don't say, well, these people are obviously constructed in their own you know, they're embedded in their own religious frameworks, so they're not going to see this for what it actually is, which is like some kind of socio economic phenomena.
And that was how not necessarily. I feel like my department at Syracuse University was better than that, Like they understood that that there's something more than that, and I think I stumbled upon the something more, and so I had to kind of hammer out a methodology for studying this stuff because frankly, when I studied Catholic history and extraordinary types of things that happened in Catholic history, I never had the kinds of things happened to me that
happened to me when I first studied UFOs. I had people that were government affiliated come to me and want to talk to me about what I was studying. Literally, I had FBI agents wanting to talk with me, and that never happened to me when I was doing this other research. So obviously things are different in this field, right, So you've got something that people are perceiving as transcendent and they're having experiences of religion with it, right, spiritual experiences,
and you're also having government agencies fascinated with it. There there will be a hearing next Tuesday about this. This is May what May eleventh today? Yeah, so in a couple of days, and it's a hearing on the reality and security issues of aerial phenomena. Right, And that would never happen in anybody else's except for you know, if you study like other religions that are involved in there's a lot of war that goes on with you know,
different religious interpretations. So it was a different kind of way for me to study. And I'm still working that out. Actually, I'm doing a lot of publication right now where I am helping people in my field, people in anthropology, people in the social sciences, try to understand what's going on.
And this is what I have so far. Okay, how do we study something that appears to be transhistorical, Right, So we're looking at something that most people would identify with a certain time period, and most scholars identify the rise of the UFO belief and practice and things like that with the Cold War between Russia and the United States starting in the nineteen thirties and forties, mostly started in the nineteen forties, and they say, this is obviously
a Cold War kind of anxiety narrative. And at first, you know, Carl Jung, he's you know, he's kind of the famous intellectual who you know, founded different types of psychology like union and psychology. And he basically said the same thing when he first started studying flying saucers and the UFOs. Well, then what happened was similar to what happened to me, was that a few people from the government said to him military specifically, you need to come
look at some evidence, and so he did. He looked at some evidence. After that he changed his perspective and he said, I don't understand. He said, I think this is an archetype, but it actually has physical components to it. So he was also getting into this kind of you know, what are we dealing with right now? So what I'm working on now is this idea that it's this thing called a myth theme. So it's a myth theme. So it's kind of like a meme myth. And what this is is it is an idea that is way more
than a myth. Okay, So a myth is something that a myth theme is thought to be kind of the progenitor of the myth. So it's there's something that occurs, like a story that keeps occurring, but the characters are changing for different periods of time, but the story remains the same. Right that there are these non human intelligences. They interact with humans. Sometimes they give us things, like Prometheus gave us technology, you know. So this looks like
that kind of a mythme. However, in this day and age, we even have to change this idea of the mythme because mythings except for the case of Prometheus, where we actually do have fire, right, you know, and we did have fire, but we didn't have any evidence that this Greek god or Titan gave us this fire. But here in this day and age, we have some very strange
things that are happening. And so I start out with that in the book American Cosmic, I read it a couple of years ago, and this so this is what happened to me, And it's very much like a mythme. I'm just a kind of normal idiot human going about my day, right, and then I start to study something that I assume is just to myth and a lot of people tell me it's not. Well, one person in particular, who I call Tyler in my book, he works for
a space agency. He's a you know, Space Shuttle launch mission controller, and so he tries to get in touch with me through friends, and I'm thinking, you know, I'm not sure I want to complicate my life like this, but it's what I study, so it's kind of part of my job. So finally, after about a year, I say, yo, okay, yeah, let's talk. And he says this to me. He says, you think that this is completely subjective, and he goes, fair enough, but what if I told you that it's not?
And what if I give you evidence that it's not? And I said, I'm open to that. And so he suggested that we go to New Mexico to this place where there's an alleged UFO crash. It's not Roswell, and I said, I'll go, not thinking that, not understanding the circumstances of going. So apparently it's this kind of secret place under a no fly zone to wear a blindfold going to it, and so I'm like, wait a minute, I'm going to take a friend. I'm not going by myself.
And so he said, hey, I had to get permission for you to come, so it's either just you or no one else. And you know, no one else can come. And I said, no, I'm not going to go then, And so I suggested who it now is known. It's Gary Nolan. Gary Nolan is a professor at Stanford University and he's a molecular biologist and he's really a well known professor, just kind of like a superstar. And he's also interested in UFOs, but from a different perspective than me.
And so we'd become, you know, pals. And I said, I like to take Gary Nolan, and so Tyler. I knew that Tyler would say yes because I think that ultimately Tyler wanted to show us that there was actually physical evidence of anomalist debris. And so Gary went and I went, we did you know? We blindfolded, We got blindfolded.
We went to this place and we had these metal detectors and you know, so this was how American Cosmic opens up, and this was what I did, you know, and then everything happens after that, these debris get analyzed. You know a lot of things happen. I write American Cosmic I traveled to Rome to look at, you know, things that are in the Vatican Secret Archive, even having to do with New Mexico, strangely enough, things from like
the sixteen hundreds. You can say that it was a constant having my mind completely you know, regenerated, like every month or so kind of like so Tyler was right, Like I definitely shifted my perspective to realize that there had to be a new way because something really interesting is happening right now.
My conversation with Diana Pisolka will continue after the break. I asked Diana Pisolka about the upcoming congressional hearing on UFOs that was going to be held in May twenty twenty two, shortly after this interview took place.
I think that what they're going to be talking about is well, first off, do I think they're going to be talking about the right things? That's a good question. I think that there's something that's going on. If I didn't have a historical perspective on this and actually see these things in documents from two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, like I said, I would think that this is some kind of weapon that's developed, like a
stealth weapon. Okay, but I do have that historical perspective, so that complicates it for me, Like it'd be awesome just to say put it in a and say, ah, this is just another stealth weapon campaign kind of thing. You know, we shouldn't know about it because we're civilians and you know, they're just doing what they do the military.
But it's not that. Now, let's take this into context since the nineteen forties, and it's you know, it's a phenomena that's been around prior to the nineteen forties, but it gets exacerbated in the nineteen forties. Why probably because we're going all over into airspaces right where like we developed the Air Force. I mean, the Air Force comes along, and I believe it's nineteen forty seven too. I think it's also as the CIA that comes along in nineteen
forty seven. So a lot of things happened at this time is at a coincidence. So maybe before we weren't flying around like two hundred years ago, we just saw these things from the ground and had to develop an interpretive framework for that. Well, now we're seeing them from in the sky and sometimes in space. So the question then becomes, well, this narrative has to change, right, because we have more information, we have better tools to understand
this information. So we're in the very midst of reassessing what this information is. And we don't have religions to fall back on. Well, we actually do, but a lot of people are not going to fall back on those religions because we've been secular. You know, we have a very secular society that more people well I would say more people, but a lot of people who are not religious are actually believers in UFOs. Okay, so you know, there's a lot of this stuff going on.
I then asked Diana if she thought, from her perspective, the right questions would be asked during the hearing.
Yeah, okay. And I was putting this in context of, you know, we've had a perception management campaign from the nineteen well, let's see, when did it start. It started right after the nineteen forties, right, and it went off. It was Project Blue.
Book, right, right, so like forty seven, yeah, through sixty a long time whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, and the people that were involved in it, we have to forgive them now, but we shouldn't forgive them if they still do this. So the people that were involved in it, like Heineck. Alan Heineck, he was he was a debunker, so his job was to go debunk claims of UFOs and no one really bought that, right, like the American public said, Ah, no way, especially after the big Michigan UFO flat in the nineteen sixties. Okay, So Heineck comes out and he even jokes, and he says, Okay,
I actually do believe that there's something here. I don't know what it is, but we definitely need to study it. Is what he basically comes out to say. All right, So that's why we can forgive him is because he's he's you know, gone back on what he did, which is intentionally creating disinformation and discrediting witnesses uncle stuff. Now, but maybe in context back then we can understand it. Okay, So I give them a pass, but I don't give
people like Dodia pass. You know, at this point, we're mature enough to deal with it, right, and so I say that. You know, so these congressional hearings, let's put these in the context of that. The attempted dupe campaign has been going on for so many years. You know, we have lots of witness reports from civilians, respectable credible civilians and even air force personnel and people like that.
We have people like me who are you know, have studied religion and know those languages of back in the day and can translate those documents. So we do have that as well, which we didn't actually think to have back in the forties. Right, even though the Ellis were doing out at the time, they were saying, wow, you know,
look at this kind of historical consistency. So I guess my point is that let's not be afraid to open it up to better study and also to you know, these campaigns that have been going on, this misinformation campaign. So I just questioned whether it's still happening, because it happened back then, it's been happening for years and years. And in fact, my book American Cosmic kind of like broke it open too, even though I didn't need to.
I was I was hanging out with people who were part of these programs, which at the time weren't acknowledged to be programs. And then in twenty seventeen and eighteen, and by the way, my book was already written at this point, they came out and said these things are real, right, and these programs are real. And I was like, wow, I did that, but I was I didn't have any help doing it, like you know, I kind of was doing it on my own. So I had a comment
so can cous me. It's a parallel tradition of whatever kind of disclosure they're doing right now. It was like kind of a frankly, like a disclosure that was not meant to be that's American cosmic.
Yeah, it feels to me when I was reading it, like it's almost like, I guess you used the word parallel that it seems like it's a little bit and this is not this is only in a good way removed from like a lot of the stuff that you see is sort of more prominent. I think, yes, And that's one of the reasons why I thought it was really interesting is because it it doesn't engage in any
of that stuff at all. It seems to be really focused on on you know, a few individuals who are you know, thinking about this in sort of interesting ways, and then you're own thoughts And I guess you talk a lot about jock La too. And I was just trying to you know, when I was asking that question.
I was trying to think of some congressman from Nebraska or something asking a question about material reality versus spiritual reality, and like, how does that apply to the phenomenon that to me seems seems like a really interesting question and probably is getting more to it, more towards some kind of understanding than what I assume they're going to talk about, which is, you know, sort of more concrete things that they think they have around, like the Nimts or whatever.
The tic TAC video. Congressional hearings aren't really set up to deal with like the kind of really interesting stuff that you have in your book, because you know, I think a lot of their constituents would be just like, what are you talking about?
Definitely, I think that if they do talk about religion, it's going to be this way, because I've had some ask me already, you know, will disclosure that extraterrestrials exist ruined, Like, will they will completely you know, destabilize the religious traditions of the world. That's their question, that's what they want
to know. And I always answer them no, because, you know, contrary to what they think, people in religious traditions have talked about extraterrestrials for a thousand years or more, like they've been talking about, are their tribes on Venus? You know, do people live on the moon? Like what kinds of creatures are out there? They believe that their god, whoever it is, you know, in the different religious traditions, is
big enough to have created all of these things. And so the people who are actually religious have a category within which they can put extraterrestrials. And I think it's more secular people and especiallytually hardcore atheists that will like be destabilized. So if they're worried about some groups of people, those are the ones they should be worried about.
That's interesting. Why do you think it would destabilize atheists in particular?
Because people in religion, practitioners of religion already believe in things that are non human intelligences. They already had this category. They've lived with it their whole lives. Right, they go to synagogue, they go to temple, you know, they go to wherever you know, church, and there they talk about unseen realities, spiritual realities, things like that. Okay, atheists want
hardcore evidence. They want like a flying saucer to land on the White House lawn, which it almost did, by the way, in the nineteen fifty which I think is really funny, you know, it's ironic. But that kind of thing, I'm not sure they're going to get that. They're going to get some stuff, some you know, realities like you know, signatures and things like that, you know, radar signatures and
things like that, and they're going to get that. They're also going to get a lot of reliable, credible witnesses you've seen things as well, and apparently now they're going to get peer reviewed research on weird anomalist debris.
So it's funny because I like, I'm an atheist, and I would love to see the kind of evidence that I could like take to a courtroom and like make a case on, you know. And I never really thought about the idea that, like having a more sort of religious background in which you're willing to, I guess seriously consider things that don't have that kind of evidence would
better prepare you for something like this. I've always kind of thought of it as being, you know, so much, at least in my understanding, I certainly would not you know a lot more about this than I do, but sort of the centrality of man to religion and that we're man as man and God's image to the fact that there are you know, aliens with huge heads and
little bodies and stuff. It's like, does that in some way sort of undermine this idea that humans are specifically God's chosen creatures or whatever?
Sure, Oh, if I can't actually address what you just said about.
Religion, yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
Okay, So yeah, so what you just described is a very I don't want it's a very typical way of looking at religion. Right. So, you know, so atheists and people who are agnostic and you know kind of like just non religious people think of religious people as being
fairly superficial in what they believe to be their dogmas. Like, you know, man is created in the image of God and by the ways, and if you go back to Genesis, like we're talking about the Christian and Jewish tradition and even you know, the Muslim tradition, it's there are two creation stories in Genesis, and one of them is about a female and a male, but the other one is
just about human creatures. So it's like non gendered human creatures are non gender and God refers to God's self in the plural right, So once we start to and a lot of a lot of people who are religious, so they're not in actuality as we paint them, right as these people who just believe that these things are
the case, they have more nuanced ideas. And also I think that we have to be careful about using the Jewish Christian history and saying that religions have to look like them, because look at Buddhism, you know, I mean many denominations of Buddhism. They might have things called bodysphas that look like saints or gods or something, but there is no God. There's no idea of God in Buddhism. It's a it's kind of a I wouldn't call it an atheistic religion, but many people do is atheistic. So
there are different forms of religion. Even in Hinduism, you have all kinds of different things there other than what we I even hesitate to call those gods and goddesses. I call them what Hindus call them devis and devas you know, and things like that. They're just not what Westerners ascribe to typical ideas of religion.
That's interesting. What haven't we talked about do you think is really important for myself or people who listen to kind of understand.
That's a good question. So I think one of the things that I was most astonished by in my work, and I lay it all out there, which is kind of funny because I don't think it gets read. This is it. It's that what we see in the media about the phenomena is not what this phenomena is like
in reality. Okay, So if you're a field researcher and you go and you you go to people who've had these experiences or see these experiences, you go hang out and watch like the you know, and talk to people where there have been multiple witnesses and things like that, it gets I mean there. I have specific examples of how this gets changed, and I'll share with you one example. This is called you know, mofon the Mutual UFO Network.
And okay, so this is an organization that's not federal, it's privately funded, and it's like a database of where you can go and if you see a UFO or something like that, or you know, have a UFO event or experience, you can tell them what you know. There's a place where you can input your information, and if they find it interesting, they're going to come out there with field researchers and they're going to talk to you about it and get in for in data, take pictures.
If there are any like sample weird things, they're going to take those two and they're going to do an analysis of that.
Right.
Well, a lot of people that I know and I put two. I put one in my book. Maybe I put two in my book, but at least I put one in my book. Where is Ray Hernandez's account where he basically input his experience into a Moufon database. And I'm not saying all Moffon people know this or know
that they're party to this, but they are. What happens is that that experience goes into the database and Moufon had a contract with Hangar one, which is the media production company, and they take those experiences and they completely change them. And we're talking about what was a good experience becomes a really scary experience that people then consume in the media. Okay, So I want to put some information out there that people can what do you call it,
connect the dots? Okay. After Project Blue Book, Alan Heinek leaves Project blue Book and he found kufos right. The Center for the Study of UFO is very much like Moufon kind of the same template and what Moufon is in my interpretation and excuse me Moufon, And I know not all Moufon people are like, are doing this like that? I know lots of good field researchers, but these you know, this is a database that's taking all of this information and then we have to you know, why is it
being changed and then repackaged for the public consumption? I want to know, and I want to know it looks like misinformation. Are they doing it just for money? I don't think so, because I think that a really happy UFO experience event would also bring you know, people would still be interested in watching that. So the questions, I think these are the kinds of questions that they should be asking at the congressional here they won't be asking
these questions. That's why we have researchers who are now, by the way, because of the recent acknowledgment by the government in June that UFOs were you know, small percentage were unknown. Do you know how many researchers now are like. What I'm talking about is people like me, only like younger, you know, twenty years younger, and are now emboldened to
do this research. And they're all coming out with their own research and their own you know, ways of looking into this and things are going to change.
Is there funding now available for that?
There is funding available for that. Yeah, So you know there's first off, you have to understand that people who are like assistant professors, they want to get published and they have to get published in order to stay professors basically, So they're going through and there's what's called a pure review process where other academics who they don't know are looking at their work and assessing whether or not it's
well done enough to be published. And that's what's happening right now to a lot of people like me and Gary Nolan and people that kind of did this without any kind of support. You know, we did it because that's where our data took us. And you know, I was scoffed a lot, frankly in you know, before anything came out, before twenty seventeen. But I was already a full professor and chair of my department, so I wasn't worried about being scoffed at. But I didn't enjoy it,
you know. But so those young people weren't inclined to do this kind of research because they wouldn't get tenure, they would not keep their jobs and things like that. And things have changed now, So I think the whole landscape of research is going to change. So maybe in ten years at the congressional hearings, we'll be hearing from academics about it.
Strangeer Rivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Rima El Kayali, Jesse Funk, and Noemi Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manke, and supervising producer Josh Thain. Learn more about
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