UFOs in the archives [& reality?]

Ross Douthat, What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do? NYTimes, July 24, 2025.

Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat and this is “Interesting Times.”

There have been a bunch of flying saucer crazes in American history, but the one we’re living through started in 2017, when my newspaper, The New York Times, reported on these weird encounters experienced by U.S. military pilots. Since then, we’ve had congressional hearings, would-be U.F.O. whistle-blowers and we’ve had a brief panic over mysterious objects in the sky over the state of New Jersey.

I’m not persuaded that we’re actually being visited by E.T. However, this era has left me with a lot of weird unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistle-blowers actually know — or think they know — about unidentified aerial phenomena? Does at least part of the U.S. government really, really want Americans to believe in U.F.O.s? And if so, why?

To help me search for answers, I asked Diana Walsh Pasulka to join me. She’s a religious studies professor who writes about U.F.O. experiences as a very American kind of religion, but she’s also been pulled into this weird world of apparent government believers — and she’s become something of a believer herself.

Pasulka started looking in the archives to study how Catholics thought about what happens to the soul after death.

Pasulka: So I’ve been studying religion for many years. [...] I didn’t believe in U.F.O.s. I had never seen “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I wasn’t a person who was interested in that topic. But I was interested in the ways in which people thought of transformation, spiritual transformation, but also transformation that happens on Earth through these narratives of going into another place, an “other world” journey.

Douthat: How did that pull you into studying people who claim to have had a U.F.O.-style encounter?

Pasulka: When I was doing my work for the book about the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, that brought me to a lot of archives. I’d go into the archives — and archives are places where things aren’t digitized — and I started to look into how Catholics viewed how souls ascended into Heaven or Purgatory.

What I found was a lot of documents from 1,000 years ago, 800 or 500 years ago, about recorded sightings of aerial phenomena that Catholics had from Europe.

Douthat: And these are things flying in the air?

Pasulka: Yeah, aerial phenomena. And they interpreted these in different ways.

Here’s a good example: In the 1800s, there’s this young nun and she’s living in a convent. Every night, this ball of light comes through her cell, and she’s pretty upset about this. So she tells the Mother Superior and she says: This is happening.

And the mother superior says: You’re having a bad dream. The nun is pretty certain this is happening — it happens nightly. At one point the Mother Superior says: OK, I’m going to be with you at night to see what’s going on. And they determine that this is a soul from Purgatory that needs to be prayed back into Purgatory. So the whole convent gets together and they go through a process of prayers to kick this orb or this flame of light out of her cell.

I saw these kinds of things, and I started to keep track of them. Sometimes they were interpreted as flying houses. Sometimes they were interpreted as little beings about three feet tall and shiny. I shared this with a couple of friends of mine and I said: What do you all think of this? One of them said: It looks like modern-day reports of U.F.O.s.

That shocked me. I didn’t accept it, to tell you the truth. I thought it was hogwash. I was like, no, it can’t be that.

There was a U.F.O. conference in town called MUFON — the Mutual U.F.O. Network — and I decided to check it out. When I was there, I heard people talking about their experiences encountering U.F.O.s, and it sounded very similar to the log I had of reports of Catholics in Europe talking about this.

So I started to do a lot more intensive work. I met academics who were studying this. Before I knew it, people who were a part of aerospace companies and the military began to want to correspond with me and see the data and the research that I had been doing. That’s what got me into this topic.

Douthat himself:

I read a book around the time that U.F.O.s came back into the news, which would’ve been when my own newspaper, The Times, reported on weird sightings of aerial phenomena by U.S. pilots. I had not watched “The X-Files” in the 1990s, had not been a U.F.O. person in any meaningful sense of the term, but I got sucked into reading a little bit of the literature.

One of the most persuasive books that I read was by a famous U.F.O. researcher shrouded in mystery, a guy named Jacques Vallée. He wrote books pretty early, I think, in the modern U.F.O. phenomena, where he connected this not just to past religious experiences but also to a whole realm of folklore around, let’s say, fairy abductions.

And I thought Vallée’s argument was quite persuasive, that there is this persistent phenomenon in human history that suddenly gets reinterpreted as the space age dawns, in terms of creatures from other planets, but in fact is this kind of folklore substrate that just takes different forms depending on the cultural context.

That seems to be a version of the argument you’re making in linking modern U.F.O. sightings to the experience of Catholic nuns or religious mystics in the past. So you think that whatever we call the U.F.O. phenomena doesn’t start in 1947 with Roswell or anything like that, but rather, there’s some consistent historical phenomenon that’s part of human religious sociology.

What's real?

Pasulka: As for me, I try to stay out of it. I’m not on any side. I’m watching this happen just like you are and just like other people are. I might have more insight into what’s going on because I know several of these people on both sides, both on the part where people are basically saying it’s all not real — I know those people — and I know the people who are saying that it’s real. It’s definitely something that’s not transparent.

Douthat: It’s definitely not transparent. And I think that what you just described is a good description of my own perception that there are people who work within the government, some of whom themselves believe that there is a real phenomenon, or — related to or overlapping with that — want Americans to think there’s a real phenomenon, and then there is an official government narrative that there’s some weird stuff out there, but the government doesn’t know any more than you or I do. [...]

Pasulka: OK. So part of it was that — and by the way, I don’t advocate believing this for anyone. They have to do their own research. So I’m not advocating belief in U.F.O.s or U.A.P.

But I became convinced that there was definitely something to this when I met so many people who interfaced with the phenomena through their jobs, which happened to take them high into the stratosphere, launching rockets into space so that they had a view of what was happening in space. They’ve witnessed aerial phenomena that are not ours, and they are not Russia’s or China’s.

And when you meet 10 of these people and they all have similar reports, it’s interesting. It changes one’s view. These people are not public — some of them are, but most of them are not. They don’t want to be associated with this work that they do. They don’t want people to know about it. And they’re everyday Americans.

Tricksters and hitchhikers:

Pasulka: So there are inner circles and inner inner circles.

Douthat: Always.

Pasulka: Yeah. So the people who I think have most interface with this, they don’t know what it is. That’s my opinion. But they think that it’s very important to study because it seems to be taking an interest in us.

There is another inner circle that, again, doesn’t know what it is, but is able to do some physics work and recognizes how advanced the propulsion mechanisms are, but also these people have interfaced with it enough to know that it has some trickster elements.

They have a name for it — it’s called the hitchhiker effect. The idea that when a person has an experience, it often sticks to them. It’s like a hitchhiker: It goes home with them. And say they have an experience and then they have sometimes poltergeist activity in their home — they might move and it moves with them.

This is something that, to me, seems to be straight out of religious traditions because it looks like the tricksters of religious traditions. And some of these people are able to extract themselves from this through their own religious tradition. So this is how religion then comes back in an unexpected way to me.

Later:

Pasulka: OK. So the people that I know are not being that concrete. However, they still experience the hitchhiker effect. Some of them know that if they utilize the tools of their own religion, whatever that religion is — Anglicanism or Catholicism — that it seems to help the hitchhiker effect. But they also think that there’s a real phenomenon that they would like to back-engineer and utilize.

Douthat: Real technology?

Pasulka: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Government misinformation?

Douthat: OK. I want to pursue a kind of frustrated line of inquiry here. So, just a few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a couple of stories, but the first one was the most important one that was drawing on a different set of government reports, basically, and leaks about the U.F.O. phenomena that emphasized the degree to which a lot of U.F.O. material is based on deliberate disinformation.

The running claim in the story was that repeatedly and consistently, the U.S. government has welcomed stories about U.F.O.s and mysterious aerial phenomena as a cover for various high-tech national security experiments. One example in the story was, there’s a famous case — cases, really, but one famous case — of a U.F.O. encounter involving a nuclear facility where nuclear weapons were shut down mysteriously in association with an aerial phenomenon.

The claim in the Journal story was that the U.S. government was testing the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, in fear that the Soviet Union would use this pulse against our facilities. And the pulse created a weird experience for the people in the facility. And the government was happy to have them believe it was aliens, rather than come clean about how we were testing our own defenses. That would be one example. [...]

Pasulka: I mean, the person who wrote the Wall Street Journal article, which of course I read, seems to have a conclusion, and I don’t. There’s a conclusion that, no, there’s nothing to see, and I don’t think that’s true. But the conclusion that there is something to see and it’s an alien spacecraft also doesn’t feel right to me. And also, the idea that it’s a coverup for tech absolutely could be true.

But then you have to take this into context. We had a government program called Project Blue Book, and it was run by J. Allen Hynek.

Douthat: This is in the 1950s.

Pasulka: All the way up through the 1960s. And with this program, there was a disinformation campaign by the government to identify people who were believers and spreading belief and basically stigmatizing them.

So, what's going on?

Douthat: I don’t know. That’s why I am interviewing people who have spent a long period of time talking to people who are researching this issue. But you’re saying, basically, we should expect over the next 10 years, every six months to two years, someone with a national security credential comes forward with a somewhat compelling account that can’t be verified of some kind of U.F.O. encounter that the government was studying. And this will just go on?

Pasulka: Yeah. So we should probably look away.

Douthat: And the internet will cycle. We should look away.

Pasulka: Yeah, we should look away.

Douthat: OK. Good. So this will be the last public interview ever conducted about this subject, and people will just look away for the foreseeable future.

Pasulka: No, it’s not that the — OK, so about the government’s response to it, that’s what I’m suggesting. So my last book was “Encounters.” And that book basically said: Why are we spending so much time paying attention to what the government has been telling us since the 1940s? People are actually having real experiences; let’s turn to them and talk about this.

So that’s what I would suggest. If we’re going to focus here on ——

I can see you’re very upset about that, or you’re just not happy, but why do we ——

Here we have it, NOT:

Douthat: And so in that theory you would have a kind of loop of, on the one hand, authentic experiences that map onto the great religious traditions, and at the same time some kind of government coverup or secrecy around remarkable technologies that we aren’t aware of.

Are those two things linked? Or is it just a marriage of convenience, then, that the government is happy that people have these supernatural experiences because it makes it easier to cover up the amazing technology?

Pasulka: Yeah, that’s the question I asked myself. I don’t know if they’re linked. [...] I was a secular Catholic. What these experiences did was they jolted me out of that worldview and into the Shakespearean worldview, where there are things that we don’t understand, and why don’t we understand that we don’t understand them? Instead of just doing like The Wall Street Journal did and just say: No, nothing to see here. Well, the world and the cosmos is a really beautiful place with a lot of mystery. So that’s what I would suggest.

Douthat: OK. I endorse that take very strongly. 

There's much more at the link.