Blurry Creatures - EP: 126 UFOs in The Vatican Archives with Dr. Diana Pasulka

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Author and professor Dr. Diana Pasulka joins Blurry Creatures for an enlightening view into the convergence of UFO culture and religion. Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at UNC-Wilmington, Dr. Pasulka wrote American Cosmic in 2019, which explores the connections between UFOs, religion, and technology. Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, she interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence---bringing the topic of UFOs out of the fringe and into the mainstream. Dr. Pasulka graciously unpacks her journey in academia and its unlikely collision with the UFO phenomenon. She shares her own personal experience reviewing historical no-access documents in the Vatican and explores the relationship the church has had and continues to have with unexplained UFO experiences. Is the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, changing traditional religions or becoming a religion unto itself? Is how people interpret unexplainable experiences changing in the wake of media and pop culture? Come down the rabbit hole and find out.  Guest: Dr. Dianna Pasulka  Intro song: "Lost Time" Timecop1983 contact: [e-mail] blurrycreatures.com Socials instagram.com/blurrycreatures facebook.com/blurrycreatures twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: tinytaperoom.com Aaron Green: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkgreen/ Mastering: ironwingstudios.com Outro Song: TimeCop1983: timecop1983.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luke so often, people email us and they have this story. They're out in their woods and they're looking in the bushes and they got, What's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say. What is that? What is the stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs. And that's why we partner with rough greens.

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Just cover the shipping. Go to roughgreens.com and use discount code blurry. That's RUFFF greens.com discount code blurry. Rough Greens makes any dog food better. So in the extraterrestrial research part of the archive, this is at the Observe, because anything that has to do is space doesn't go to the Vatican Archive, it goes to the observatory, which is in Castle Gandalfo. And that's a space observatory. So basically they just had from back in the day, you know, from like 1,200 onward what people have thought about and published about extraterrestrials.

But if you look at the history of Catholicism and you look at like especially people in the Vatican, they know about Emmanuel Swedenborg who's talking about angels. and people on Venus and things like this in 1750, right? In 1750, there was a bestselling book called Life on Other Planets. There was a bestselling book called Life on Other Planet. Yeah. Welcome back to Blurry Creatures. This is your first episode. Welcome.

Welcome to the show. You might want to go back and start the beginning. This is kind of a journey podcast thing. Exactly. We've been doing this for a couple years now. We've heard a lot of weird stuff. Our paradigms have been smashed and put back together several times.

Just when you think you know what you're talking about, or you think you understand what's going on, you hear a story or you hear another smart person come on and blow it up again. So those of you who have been around since episode one, thank you. Thanks for being on the ride with us. We know how you feel,

because we're right there with you. Right? Just one is true. Yeah. It blows the little paradigm. Well, look at you. Yeah, you know, you have to. I prefer just to quote,

Jet, if I really want to do it. it but yeah that's the most fun but we were just talking Luke and I were just talking off air a little bit about just how blown away we are of the response of the podcast just how it's been charting people buying merch people be supporting the podcast and just going places in the public and people stopping us and saying nice things and it's a podcast you don't ever think you never know we're just having conversations and we're putting it out there we don't realize realize like oh you know this is this is wow, this is something that seems to be needed. A lot of people need to have these weird conversations,

so we're happy to have them for you. Right, and with you. Sometimes with you as well. But I want to say this, Luke, there are a lot of people feel alone. A lot of people message us and say, you know, I'm thankful for you guys because I felt alone my whole life. And I'm just thankful for your friendship, Luke,

because we can have these conversations together and we don't think each other is crazy. And sometimes I understand how they feel, but then other times I'm like, I feel lucky that I have a lot of friends in my life who don't think this stuff is crazy. And we can have conversations about it. But a lot of people, they tune in the podcast.

They have nobody to talk to them. Maybe even their spouse doesn't even believe in any of this stuff. We're grateful for you being here, though. And you're welcome here. And I truly believe there is a quickening. I think that people are waking up. You know, like we always say, like this is, we're just a couple guys that ask questions.

We don't have PhDs behind our names, but we're looking for better answers. Most of all, when we say this almost every episode, Nate, we want people to think for them. So digest the things, the experts we bring on that have spent the research time and decide for yourself, think for yourself. That's what makes free speech great. It's what this country has found on. It's what made this country great was that you had a free exchange of ideas and you could let the cream rise to the top. And that's, you know, I think it's some way that's kind of what we're doing.

We want to have platform where we can talk about things and, and then ruminate and marinate. Age and the fine, the fine whiskey barrel. That's right. You believe he's out there now, huh? It's just one of those people's right. He's out there. You know, it's, listen. I mean, we've come a long way since Bigfoot, but we need to all, we know our, we know where our core competency is.

And so we, we have to talk about the big guy. We're grateful to all our members. If you, if you want extra content, you can join, join up, become a member. There are extra episodes, exclusive episodes. There are exclusive groups, Facebook, Discord, telegram groups you can join and continue discussion about episodes and everything blurry. We also have merchandise, if you like, Nate's pretty talented, creative dude, and we've got some fun t-shirts. All that goes to support the podcast and us doing more of the more blurry things and more of this.

So thank you to our members. If you're interested, check out our webpage. Where are Nate? Blurrycreatures.com slash members or slash merch. Yeah, we also have a link to our official Spotify playlist for all the music we put on the show. And a guest suggestion sheet. and we're going to be doing more for all the members on the show. We're coming out with ideas every day.

We've got a lot of ideas. But you guys have been awesome. Thank you for all the messages. Sorry we don't get back to a lot of them. Lately it's just been a ton and we're trying to... I have a newborn. New dad's old dads. New dad's old dads.

We're flying by the seat of our pants. And I thank you guys for supporting the show, putting food on my family's table and helping this show get produced. and it's become so much bigger than we ever imagined, and we can't say thank you enough. And I actually put Ephesion 6 on my wall in here when I'm podcasting now because how crazy this show's gotten. I got to like stare at it, you know, put on the armor because it feels like this stuff's just,

it's not only real, but it's coming at you. And in a way that I've never thought possible. So thank you. We love all you guys. We're praying for us. Yeah. Yeah, we're grateful for this community. And let's bring on Dr. Diana Posulka.

Yeah, we have Dr. Diana Pasolka today. She's coming on the show. She wrote a book called American Cosmic Academic, who talks about the blurry things in our world, which, you know, we always love those people who are bold in their field to talk about the truth and not be afraid to have a bunch of pushback. Because, I mean, just the pushback we get sometimes, I'm like, gosh, I can't imagine being in, like, an academic field

and all the stuff they get. it's bold you got to be bold to speak out you know and there's a lot of people get put in jail these days if they speak out the truth so you know at least facebook jail uh Doug van dorn goes some facebook jail on Doug we love you yeah yeah but i mean literal jail some of these doctors who speak out they're going they're getting locked up you know and it's crazy just false accusations and all kinds of stuff so yeah you guys are awesome thanks for supporting the podcast thank plural features dot com thanks Matt marr Thanks Matt Marr for the suggestion and for recommending Diana. We need a show roller.

Yeah, we do. You're now entering the blurry person. The history of our Earth is so different from what we can imagine. Enjoy to journey. The Smithsonian that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right because if one person's right it bust the paradox, It all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural.

This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Herman event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. That's right. Well, Dr. Diana, we're glad to have you. So we'll do a proper introduction. Dr. Diana Posulka, you're an author and a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion.

We wanted to have you on because you wrote a book called American Cosmic, which is UFO's religion and technology. Really picked our interest because, and in talking to you before, we started recording, you're also a Christian. And we found out you didn't believe really in any of this stuff when you started researching it. I think it is a fascinating journey. I think with all of that, I would love to ask you about that journey from, you know, a religious studies professor to, you know, to this book.

Like, you know, how did that process happen? And how did you end up writing a book on UFO? Yeah, and you and my sister are both Davis alumni. So shout out. Wow, that is so cool. Davis is one of my favorite places, writing around on bicycles. And there's a great religious studies program there, which I had taken classes in and philosophy too. Okay.

I'm a Chico State guy, so we're rivals at one point. Now you guys are D1. Okay. Yeah, that's right. I'm Cal Poly. I'm Bigfoot on the circle. Oh my gosh. All right. A bunch of California educated kids.

We're all brainwashed, right? Yeah, that's right. We've got out of the brainwashed, I think. It's how it works. Baby, hopefully. Okay. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it.

There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple. I like to be easy. I'm going to be throwing away money on big wireless carriers. You too can say goodbye to overpaying for wireless, get a simple bill. And that's where MittMobil comes in.

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Dr. Judd Burton's out there dialing up Blurry every day, giving us the scoop on what's going on in the academic world and the ancient world on Mittmobile. Loud and clear on the job sites, way out in the middle of nowhere, Texas. And if you want to save money, just like the illustrious Dr. Judd Burton, switch to Mint Mobile. If you like your money, say where it is. Mittmobles for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash blurry. That's mintmobile.com slash blurry. Up front payment of $45 for three-month, five-gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month.

New customer offer for first three months only, then full-priced plan. land options available, taxes and fees extra, cement mobile for details. The Southerners are going to say, oh, no, this is too much, right? Yeah, right. There's too much NorCal here in the south. Okay. So I had an idea to do what I'm doing now when I was 11. So I wanted to, I was a kid who had a feeling of being religious, like being Christian when I was young.

And so what I did was I read the Bible basically when I was about 11. And it was the King James version, which is not a Catholic version of the Bible, but it's a Protestant version of the Bible with, it's a red letter edition. And so I would focus on Jesus's words in the Bible. And I said, you know, the Bible, once you actually read it is quite strange. And it doesn't make a lot of sense. It's a lot of books put together. Now, if you're a kid, you don't know this. So, but I knew enough to know that through reading this book,

there were, there's a history here and there were these original languages that this book was translated from. And I wanted to learn those original languages. And I wanted to know about the history of the Bible and religion in general. So that was kind of like a goal that I had when I was very young. And I ended up doing that. So I started off as a born again Christian. My family, my dad was Catholic and my mother was Jewish. We came, you know, from a class. California, new agey culture. And they weren't particularly religious, but I was. And so I asked them if I could attend a Catholic school that was actually run by sisters, the sisters of mercy. And these were great role models because they were living the gospel in terms of actually helping people

and, you know, doing actual work of feeding people and clothing people and getting them medical supplies and things like this. They were doing this in Central America at the time. And so this was my early education. And so I decided to now, I grew up, you know, what it was like in the 90s in California. It was the dot-com boom. So it was really easy to get a job doing really anything tech related and make decent money. So I did that and that kind of kept me off my route of going to, you know, school for religious studies for a while. But I kept reading philosophy and religion. And I knew, that eventually I'd do that. So I did. So in my 20s, I went back to graduate school and I was, I applied to the divinity school in Berkeley. It's called the GtU, the graduate theological union.

And it is a great school because you've got everybody who wants to learn academic, you know, the field of academic religious studies, but also they want to either be a priest or be a rabbi. And there are schools there that teach people how to do that. So that's where I went. And so I took classes at UC Berkeley and I took classes from the Jesuit school theology and I took classes from all kinds of different schools. And I learned a lot about religious studies, which is different than theology. So people ask me, you know, are you a minister or what do you do? No. I teach academic, I teach that basically that comparative religion or the history of religions.

So we learned every, I learned about every sort of religion. So I teach classes on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Muslim, you know, Christian. I teach Christianity people who are Christians and have not ever read the Bible, by the way. So these are the things I do. I had never thought of UFOs before. So how did that happen? So what happened was that I've, you know, when you start, when you're in an academic program, it kind of distances you from things like miracles and the reality of religious people and how religious people have experiences that are, that they could call miraculous. Supernatural stuff, right?

Exactly. Totally supernatural stuff. So it teaches you to not believe in those and it teaches, it distances you from those things. And so I was fully distanced from these things until 2011 and 2012 when I had the experience of finishing a book about a Catholic doctrine of purgatory. I'd been through a lot of the archives of, you know, Catholic culture. And I did a lot of research. You know, I was a complete academic. nerd, you know, this is what I was immersed in doing. I had young kids. And so I was, my life was

basically taking care of my kids and doing research and teaching, nothing else. And then what happened was that I came across all these sightings of UFOs. I didn't know they were that. Like, I didn't, I didn't think about it in that way. But I, I saw from like 1,100 onward to like up until the present that European and North American and Canadian Catholics were basically identify these flying objects in the sky, but they were interpreting them as different types of things. And so I had a kind of like a breakthrough weekend where I had this and I was done with this one book and I said, I don't know what to do with all this stuff. I had kept a log of these sightings, like here's an example of one of them, a sighting that this nun had. It was this in the

1800s. And she kept seeing these orbs come through her cell. you know, basically she was in a cell, right? Like that's what nuns lived in, these convents. And it was a stone cell that she was in. And these oars would come in. And she was afraid of them and didn't know what to think of them. So she told the mother superior and the priest of the convent, they didn't believe her. But she kept having this experience.

So finally, the mother superior sat with her one night, saw the orbs herself and realized that she, they thought that they were souls from purgatory that needs. to be prayed away. And they got the whole community together and they prayed. Well, this is the type of thing that I kept coming across. And so I showed the log to a friend of mine. I said, I really don't know what to think of this stuff. And he said, it looks like Steven Spielberg, like, you know, UFO stuff. And I said, you are crazy.

But that weekend, there was a UFO conference in Wilmington. And I attended it. And when I attended it, I realized that people were still having. these experiences and then boom my world changed i completely the supernatural became real and i had an experience i would call it it was a experience that was frightening terrifying and also strangely familiar because i recognize that those things that i've been studying my whole life were actually real and how now do i think about them like how do i deal with this now and how do i deal with this now and I frightened a lot of my colleagues.

They were like, what's going? What happened to you, right? But you know what? I developed a new way in my field of talking about this stuff. So I was already the chair of my department back then. So I could do that. I could write a book about UFOs without being maligned. And then the U.S. government comes along this last summer and basically says, yeah, they exist.

We don't know what they are. And so, you know, a lot of, you know, my book came out. The timing was perfect for it. So that's what happened. It's wild. Yeah. There's so many things I want to ask, but I think it's fascinating that you wrote this book, taking these experiences and then contextualizing it in the context of a religion.

I think one of the things you talk about is that there's 75% of American adults believe in in extraterrestrial life, right? And this is the way that you teach academic religion, you make an argument this is becoming a religion. It is. Can you unwrap just a little bit of that way? for us because I think that's a fascinating way to look at it. And it's what Nate and I, we're talking about in the very beginning, Diana,

when we were, that we started this podcast was to try to contextualize the crazy things people experience and see stuff that's in the Bible that's, that doesn't make a lot of sense. And then to try to make it make sense in, you know, through the lens of, of the biblical narrative of our,

with the foundation of our faith. And you're taking this experience and saying, this also looks like a religion, the way that people treat these experiences. what you think is a really interesting juxtaposition on this. And I would just, and I know you spent, what, 60 years doing, you know, an ethnographic study on all of this. So I would love just for just a little bit of insight to why you see it like that, you know, and maybe even why you called it American Cosmic with the idea that this happens across the world as well.

Sure, yeah. So American Cosmic. So that references to a book by Henry Young called the Russian Cosmists. And so this is how that happened. So along the way of doing this study, it became known that I was doing a study like this. And I was approached by people from who were affiliates and worked with NASA and also were involved in our U.S. space program. And so they came to me to understand what they were seeing, basically, and what they were experiencing. And they wanted me to kind of explain it to them, which I thought was so strange. And so what happened was that I learned, I started to do some historical work about our space programs. And I recognized that at the basis for the Russian space program, the two viable space programs back in the day, right? The Russian space

program and our space program, the United States space program. And each of them were founded on very odd ritualistic types of things going on. You know, you had Jack Parsons with us, and I don't know if you know anything about him, but he would do these kind of occult, not kind of, that's the California way of saying it. Crowley stuff.

Yeah, full on occult work. In order to download or, you know, bring about these technologies that would help him develop rocket technology. At the same time, or a little bit earlier, the Russians were doing the same thing, but theirs was Christian. Their, theirs were ritualistic, but they were Christian. They believed that they were getting in touch with angels and beings that were godly, not demons and things like that.

But the rituals were very similar, okay? Although they, you know, the Russians didn't involve the weirdness that Jack Parsons was involved with. But for a person who studies religion, they were rituals. And most people don't ascribe science with rituals. And they don't ascribe our space program in particular. They wanted to be completely nuts and bolts, you know, and no paranormal stuff. But I'm sorry, at the basis of both of those, you know, developments were ritualistic paranormal activities that kept going on. And so one of the people that was that I associated with and learned from was I call him Tyler D in American Cosmic.

He was basically kind of like in the tradition of Jack Parsons, but without the Crowley stuff, because he was Christian. But the space program, the America, I just did a talk on this actually. The American space program is steeped, especially when it does these certain launches down in Cape Canaveral. They have to do it at certain times. They have to do it. Certain people have to stand in certain places. They have these patches that look in special clothing that they use. I mean, it's ritualistic.

And so that's why I called it American Cosmic, because I wanted to identify this tradition that we are completely as Americans unfamiliar with. We don't even know about it. And in fact, if you ask people in NASA today about Jack Parsons, they don't want to know. They're like, let's not talk about that. That's what I got back when I was doing this research. Interesting, too. Because the other thing is von Braun, right?

It was a Nazi. Yeah. So you have these, you know how the Nazis were. so very much focused on the occult in trying to harness. I mean, they built rooms and castles. And they were, I mean, they were practicing black magic. I mean, they were doing satanic-type things. And then you have one of those people.

That's really interesting to hear. I mean, because, yeah. Yeah, we hear it all the time on our show because we have a lot of, we have a huge following of flat-earthers who listen to the show. And they get really into NASA and the deceptions and stuff. And it's not really what our show's about. I mean, we talk about creatures specifically, but we've heard everything from there's orbs associated with Bigfoot to actual abduction stories and encounters.

I mean, there's nothing weird that we've, I mean, we've pretty much have heard it all now after doing this for a couple of years and everything's strange, but it is, I do argue sometimes with the Flat Earthers on our show and say, look, whatever you think, whatever we think we know, it's always 30 times more complicated. Like, NASA is not operating what it tells the public what it's doing. Yeah. That doesn't mean, it doesn't mean everyone in NASA secretly knows the, world is flat and they're hiding this from us and you're the only one who figured it out.

Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. And so it's, but I, but I do think you're right that there's a lot of occult stuff that goes along with CERN. It's science. But wait, what are they doing? What are they really doing here? They tell the public, oh, we're just putting these particles together. No, no, no. You're doing something else. And so we hear that all the time. And it's always good to talk to someone who who discusses with these because these debates go on in our channels all the time. Like, what is that? What is NASA really up to? What do they know? And a lot of this stuff happened around the 30s. Around Roswell, suddenly all these agencies sprung up out of the ground.

And I think they do obviously know things that we sort of, you know, debate on our show. Like, what's going on? Do they have alien tech? Did they go to the moon? Did they not go to the moon? What do they find there? Where do these creatures come from? So it's all very blurry.

But I just think it's complicated. So it's good to hear you kind of put that to words because I've always kind of associated, like, some people know in NASA, but some people don't. and it's just this complicated dance. But hey, flat earthers, that's not a dig at you. Love having you listen to our show. I just got to say that. That's exactly the case. So, in fact, what I did was in my book,

I created a framework for us to understand what was going on. And the way I did that was I used a reference to this movie called Fight Club, which was a book. Okay, so before it. And it's a very, it's a very intense movie. But what it does have in it is this idea that there's, this underground movement of men, basically, and they have a club, but they don't talk about it. First rule. Exactly.

Yeah. First rule of fight club. Don't talk about fight club. Yeah. So this is what's really interesting is that one of the main people of my book is Tyler. And I named him after Brad Pitt's character in Fight Club. Just a quick pause. We love movie references, or at least I do especially.

So this is just wheelhouse. 80s movies too. The 80s, our show is 80s themed, but any movie reference. So we're tracking, loving this to Tyler. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, so it's not just NASA, but it's also aerospace and the NRO.

So all these organizations that are, you know, space oriented, they have the rule, which is basically you don't talk about it. Not only do you not talk about it, but your boss doesn't even know what you do. Okay. So Tyler's boss didn't even know what he did. the friends that he worked with at the places where he worked, they didn't even know what he did. He couldn't talk about it. He also had these constraints.

He couldn't go on the news. He couldn't go online and look at the news. In fact, oftentimes he would ask me, can you look at this website? I want to see what it says about so and so, right? And I would have to look for him and tell him because he wasn't allowed. He was monitored that much that he wasn't allowed to do that. So what I did was I unwittingly, not by my own, choice, found myself amidst this culture of people who were so incredibly compartmentalized

that oftentimes they didn't even know what their mission was. He never knew what his mission was. He had to figure it out. Okay. So this is the level of secrecy that was created in order to keep people from not knowing, even the people that were doing these missions from not even knowing what they were. There was a point when I believe that, in fact, I stumbled upon names for programs. I didn't mean to, but I did. And then they would change the names to numbers. That's crazy. You know? Yeah. So, I mean, that's how it works. Yeah. As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect.

Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold. I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm true. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krisby, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley through 62326 participating stores only while supplies last the app for full terms. It's very strange. Yeah. And then people people get mad because like Bob Lazar basically said this and went public with it. And they're all like, well, there's no record of him doing this and that. And I'm like, you don't think they could make, they could easily make someone disappear because they barely have any, you know, like you said, They have this, it's just the shroud of secrecy that kind of flows through it.

And I remember my, my ex-father-in-law was telling me a story before, you know, he passed away. He was saying that his dad worked in Area 51. He said that his dad came home and told him a story once that his father is in Area 51 with clearance, with security. And yet, while he's in there, they had, they were moving something from one part of the facility to the other part of the facility. And they had a bunch of armed guards there. protecting inside this high security clearance area moving things. He's like, his dad is like, I don't know what they're moving, but I'm not even allowed to see what they're moving.

And it was just like, and then later on, years later, you hear Bob Lazar story about this and you're like, they didn't know. And he couldn't talk with his other coworkers because they didn't know what they were doing. And everyone was sort of in the dark. And then skeptics will listen to order to me like, ah, these people are all liars and this isn't true. And I'm like, well, it makes a lot of sense when you hear that, you know, a lot of lot of people don't know what's going on. And I wonder if that's because if they find someone

that they don't like, they can just get rid of them real quick and, and they don't have to deal with it or they're just afraid of being out. Yeah, I think, I think that it was a, it was a really genius plan to do this because then if you want to keep a secret, also they don't write, you know, people, especially in the communities of UFO people, people who are euphologists, they really focus on textual things, like things that are written down by clearance people and things. And things like that. Well, I promise you that they're not writing these things down. So they have communities of oral tradition, and we call it oral tradition, where they pass their information to each other in Word. And they call it, there's a word for it called pencils up, where, you know, okay, this meeting's

pencils up, which means you don't, nothing, right? There's no written record of it at all. And so, I mean, it's a genius way to keep this type of thing quiet. Another strange thing, though, that happened was that the man who I called Tyler. I showed him everything I was going to write about him. By the way, it was cleared with everybody in my book. They read their chapter and they wrote off on it and said, yeah, it looks good. One thing that happened was that I found out that he identified with Tyler, Tyler Durdon in Fight Club. He even had the soap. He's making soap. The bike club soap and he also had he had the robe you know tyler durden wears like this purple robe he had the purple robe that he would have at home that his family would make fun of him for having i mean so

i nailed his personality yeah and well it's not even just UFOs i mean it's it's it's all the weird stuff it's we talk about ancient history a lot on our show it's all the the the architecture around the megalist that's you know this Egyptian timeline that is inaccurate egyptologists are always arguing, Bigfoot sightings, oh, those aren't real. You know, it's every single, and we constantly go through the archives on this show. We're talking about giant skeletons were discovered when we, that gets covered up or UFO reports. And this isn't a, this isn't a modern thing. You can go back in news archives and read about these things. And Bigfoot sightings go back a long time too. So it's just constantly shrouded in conspiracy theory. Nobody wants

to look at it, but it is cool that a lot of, you know, doctors and educated people, do come on our show. And every once in a while, the right personality who's actually applying the scientific method will come on and say, look at the evidence. It's right here. You have to apply it. But a lot of people are afraid. I guess they're afraid of, like, Jeff Meldrum, who's like the Bigfoot guy, you know, he said all his colleagues who make fun of them all the time. He was constantly being ridiculed because he's like, look, I have actual evidence. I know what a, I know what a real footprint looks like. This is not a human footprint. I can, this is my life's work. I can prove to you. This is not faked. And yet,

every all of us colleagues to laugh at them so there's something strange going on in all these areas whether it's aliens UFOs or all the cryptid science so it's good to hear you kind of talk about this little bit because we we do to make that point a lot on our show that no matter what rock we turn over it's always this mysterious the bones go missing or so so we say on our show all the time and we even we even make shirts about it because it's so yeah we have to send you That's right. I'm actually writing an article right now for a folklore edition for my field that talks about why, you know, why does stigmatize knowledge? Like it's called stigmatized knowledge in my field. Like, and so, you know, people who seemingly are above suspicion in terms of their scholarship like John Mack, who studied UFOs. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning research scientist at Harvard. And, you know, his own university, put him under investigation for studying UFOs in a way that was at what that was you know he conformed to the scientific method you know so I mean I was you know I I was certain things had

changed by the time I started doing this work and this was it you know in 2012 one up and then my book was published in 2019 but when I would when I would be asked by usually grad students to speak at their universities a lot of my colleagues would be horrified by what I was talking about and they were sure that I had been misled by people who were not actually who they said they were. Well, I knew who they were was actually accurate, right? One of those people is Gary Nolan from Stanford University. He's James in my book, but I couldn't say so at the time because the government hadn't yet come out. But then when the disclosures of UFOs started happening, you know, now those people want to write about UFOs. And, you know, and so I just think that that's

disingenuous, you know, because they didn't follow the data then. How are they going to follow the data now? Yeah. That actually has kind of piggybacks on the question I want to ask you about all this, because your book, like you said, your book is timely, right? In 2019. And now we have, we talked about before, we have the government, they're holding meetings now. Congress is holding meetings about UAPs. They're now talking about it. And they even renamed the whole thing to desigmatize it, right? But do you think that we are in the middle of another like Copernican sort of revolution where we're sort of reorienting because we have this new, we have this thing that people when talking about for a long time, but now it's being talked about in the mainstream narrative?

You think that we're in a bit of a revolution in the same way that like Copernicus in his revelations changed the way people thought about earth and man and where we, where we said, do you think the things that's happening right now and we're kind of in the midst of this? yeah so i do think that okay so first the copernicus analogy is really good right and i actually did use that in a proposal that i was you know putting together uh for a book that i'm writing right now but after assessing it i also see that we're in a a completely different era in terms of our infrastructure so you know when protestantism and catholicism split it was in it was because of technology was because of the Gutenberg press, right? So the printing press allowed people to read the

Bible on their own without it, you know, being in the hands of priests and such. Right now, what's happening, this disclosure is not, is not on the time frame of those who are disclosing. It's on the timeframe of the people because right now you have other space programs. You have a Chinese space program and you have other countries that are putting things up into space. and they're beginning to see what's up there. And so we can't, they're not going to keep the lid on all these things that are flying around. And by the way, once people see these things that are flying around, their worldview is open so that they can see other things too. Okay.

So they see that reality is not what we've been told it is. Now, when this happens, I think that, and will we have enough people? I think that we're at a really interesting point in human history, frankly. and I can't predict what's going to happen, but I can tell you that people have been here before. And if you look pre-Christian even to Plato and Plato's Republic and, you know, the cave, the allegory of the cave where people are like, hey, you know, when Jesus was killed by Rome,

a lot of his followers called him this, called him Socrates. They said, you know, you're like Socrates from back in the day, you know, you were killed by your government for trying to get people to see what is real, right? And so I think that we're in that kind of place right now. And I think that we're getting a lot of narrative framing. And we need to be aware of that. And but I don't think with that honestly, I don't have a lot of hope that I think that communities like yours and communities, you know, that I feel like I might be a part of are we can help each other to identify the BS, right?

And the framing that, you know, no, this is how it is kind of thing. And we're like, no, that's not how it is. we have brains you know we can figure it out but a lot of people will just go for the bread and circuses instead and we and we can't fight that because technology this is a good part of my book actually is physiologically addictive so you know when you have like you know tick talk or something like that and i see the changes in students because i'm a professor so the people i see are 20 year olds and i see 20 year olds from 10 years ago 20 year olds from 20 years ago and 20 years ago and 20 years, 20 year olds today. And they're different. And the reason they're different is because they

have this thing that they're like sucked into and they're addicted to it. And it is changing their behaviors and everything. So yeah, I think it's a scary time to tell you the truth. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, and it's, it's amazing how, you know, when you, everyone seems to have some sort of experience, whether it's, you know, they see a big foot. And you typically, it's people that are the most skeptical who see something like this or they see a UFO. We had several people come on a show and say these things fly right over their head, 10, 15, 20 feet, and they're silent and they're huge. They're like the size of buildings.

And they're doctors. You know, we had a doctor come on and tell us his experience. And I think that for the most part is that more and more of these things are happening. Bigfoot seems to be the most cited of the creatures. But the UFO phenomenon is ramping up more and more and more people are saying this. And so eventually, you know, they've got to get on top of the story is kind of the narrative that we hear a lot is that it, because of the cell phones, because of the TikTok videos, because of all these things, more and more is coming out every single day. And eventually it's going to be undeniable. And sort of this fake history that we've all been taught.

Someone's got to tell us, you know, the new fake history, I guess you could say, like the alien seeded us on this planet, you know, and they're the ones who did it all. And it kind of feels like we're being built up to something like that, some sort of ultimate reveal, some sort of close encounter where it finally happens and everyone can see it. There are a lot of channels like us who are just trying to tell Christians like, hey, this stuff's been going on in the Bible since Genesis. Wake up. You know, it's right there in the pages. The weird stuff happened. We had encounters with angelic realms. They came in, they messed with us.

They gave us technology. And it's like, it's crazy how many people just don't know this. They've been going to church their whole life. And they're like, man, you know, like we bring on a doctor. He talks about Genesis 6 and some of the weird, weird passages of scripture. And then all of a sudden they're like, I'm in. I get it. It makes sense.

You know, it's not hard. And so what do you think was the moment for you when you were, you weren't a skeptic anymore? You believed. You knew something was going on. Something changed. Like you sort of had your epiphany, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So that's why I'm really always tolerant of people. because of my own history, right? So as a child, I was, I had super, I had experiences of things and I was a believer, right? Complete believer in the supernatural aspects of religion, which is, by the way, ironically, why I wanted to study religion. And then when I became a graduate student, I mean, that's a very intense training that you go through. And I started to study it from a distance, right? It was an evolution that I never, acknowledged, it just literally happens to a person because you're so immersed in communities of

like-minded believers. Like they believe what you're, you know, they're being taught what you're being taught. We all are on, it's almost like you share their frequency. And so when something weird happens, you don't even see it. Yeah. Because you're not trained to see it. And then what happened was it was it hit me so hard in one weekend that what I had been studying my whole life from a distance was actually.

actually real because I heard these people talking about it. And then this happened to me and then this happened to me. And I was like, whoa, wait, wait. So I went back and I looked at some of the major what I call contact events in Catholic history where literally people are being absconded by angels. And I read the original sources. So I looked at them in their original languages and they didn't look at all like how they'd been represented in art.

So we tend to look at the art and we're like, oh yeah, that looks pretty, right? This angel encounter looks really nice. Well, this angel is beating the heck out of this person, you know? It's like, or this or that is happening. And I was like, wow, no way. And I just went back. And so this all happened in 2012 during a whole weekend. And it stayed with me for a whole year, this feeling of being disoriented because of this.

Now, strangely enough, I was working with these two screenwriters. who were the, they're Christians, this Chad Hayes and Carrie Hayes, and they were the screenwriters for the conjuring. And I was, I was actually a consultant on the first conjuring, the movie. Wow. And so I was, and my expertise was in traditionalist Catholicism, which is what Ed and Lorraine Warren were, you know, they were traditionalist Catholics, who believed in demons. And they were, you know, helping people get rid of, you know, they were exercising people, helping people. And so those guys who were from California, and I felt like kind of like a kin to them, they were identical twins, and they were like Christian, and they really wanted the conjuring to come out

with a very intense supernatural message. And in fact, if you look at the last, you know, the quote that Ed Warren says in the last, in the conjuring, the first conjuring, the last scene, you know, it's real, you know, it's real. The supernatural is real and evil is real. Okay. So they were with me that whole time. They lived in Wilmington doing the filming for the conjuring. And so I had them to basically, they wanted to know because they could tell something

was going on. And they said, what's going on with you? You know, are you going through some kind of like research, spiritual thing? And I said, yes, I am, actually. And I told them about the UFOs. And I said, I've become convinced about this. and it's changed my whole worldview. And so that's, they helped me through, you know, we helped each other actually because

then I showed them what I was doing and I introduced them to some of the people. And so this was my year, it wasn't a moment, it was a whole year in 2012 of waking back up to the reason why I studied religion. That's basically what it was. Was there any moments where you getting outside of that? like you felt like maybe it challenged your conventional beliefs, so that were you, where your faith, would you like maybe question your faith?

And then how did you, how did you sort of traverse that? Okay, so I never questioned my faith. It made me more faithful, in fact. But what it did do is it scared me a lot. And there was a point where I said, I'm not going to do this because I perceived so much darkness, like so much darkness.

I went to a, I went to a conference. and this conference now in retrospect was it was a conference with CIA. It had some CIA affiliations. Yeah. And the people there, you know, there were people who believed they were hybrids and things like that and everything like that. I wasn't that it wasn't that it was the ideas in the conference that were so challenging

to me. And this sounds very strange, but I'm just going to tell you how it felt. I felt the dark. I felt darkness. It wasn't that the ideas were dark. I literally felt it. And after that I said, I'm not going to do this anymore. This is very bad.

It's very negative. And then I got- You're amongst friends here. That doesn't surprise us to at all. Yeah, it was like harsh. It was like, this is really negative stuff. And I don't want to bring that into my life. But I was it.

So there were enough good people who kind of are in my position, who are doing kind of similar things, that they kind of helped me come back to why this is important to do right now. And why, in fact, I get, I was harassed. I get a lot of harassment. I've, you know, a lot of times I, Gary and I both were harassed. And we reported this to, he reported it to the Stanford police,

you know, university police and I reported it to my university police. I'm meeting with a detective this week tomorrow, in fact, about it. So it's not like you can just go out there and do this research and think that, oh, yeah, it's going to be all fun. It's not. It's, I don't know why people are doing this, but I do know that if they're doing it, there's a reason for it. There's, you know, so.

I have a follow-up question to that because it's something I wanted to, because I think this actually fits into that. But you talked about all the aerospace stuff, right, and the space programs and the ritualistic basis on that. In your research, do you believe that those institutions or people within those institutions believe that they are getting information from ETs or, you know, what we would seem to be maybe like even demonic stuff?

Yeah. Because there's that there's that thought too that, like, and I know that something that you talked about with Tyler was that he believed that he had this extraterrestrial knowledge downloaded to him. And when I hear that, to me it sounds like, you're kind of accessing the spiritual realm. And of course, this is not a new thing. This is as old as Solomon said, nothing's new order of the sun.

But the fact that some of these things are based on ritual, it just got me thinking, like, how much did you run into that where either the technology or the ideas and the idea technology as well was coming from somewhere else? Or, I mean, I don't know. I'm just, it just was something like that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this is an ongoing question. Okay. Definitely many people that I met who were within those programs that we talked about believe that they were in touch with ET presences. Just like Constantine, Constantine Chikosky from Russia believed that he was, but he thought that they were angelic. Jack Parsons did, but he didn't know what the heck they were, frankly. And but they looked pretty evil to me. Like I thought his whole program was pretty twisted. It was Babylon workings, right?

It was really like gnarly mystery school satanic stuff. Oh, it definitely was, but it was efficacious in the sense that it definitely got us off of Earth into space. You know, it did work, I guess is, you know, for better or worse, I suppose. Sounds a lot like Gen 6, though. Sounds a lot like the trading of technology and ideas for, in that case, women, right? It's the idea that there's this transfer of knowledge, you know, if you ascribe or you, You look into Enoch, right? And you talk, which is, you know, just a big exposition on Genesis 6.

There's the idea that all of the watchers taught humans how to cut roots and practice magic. It was all technology. It was learning the father of animal husbandry and all these things that all of a sudden you have the explosion of technology. So that's what I hear in this space, too, is like that they're tapping it, that they're getting, they're getting knowledge from somewhere else. Yes. So, I mean, yeah, in the introduction to my book, I basically said that there's a myth of Promethe.

right, which is the giver of technology to humans. And he's kind of an, he gets punished for it by the gods, right? So he's not a god. He's a half god. And he's a titan. And he's like this, you know, he's the one who gives technology to humans. So it's not, it's a myth that's been around. But it's no longer mythological when we get into my book.

You know, it appears to be a reality is what I was trying to say was that how do I talk about this academically when the people that I'm interviewing believe that they're getting technology literally from, you know, ET or some external source. And I, there were various ways of doing that. One was to talk about creativity and what that does and that possibly makes your brain think that you're actually getting it from an external source, but you're actually in a certain state of vibration in your brain. So, you know, there's lots of different, there are different frame, not lots, but there are different frameworks for looking at this. And a lot of people go with the literal framework of, you know, this is a living myth. This is not a myth, actually. This is real kind of

thing like Tyler does in my book. And a lot of the scientists do, they're more literally minded than people in the humanities, I guess. Okay, but we let's get back to this idea of feeling that the darkness of this. So, you know, when you look at Werner von Braun, right, and you look at his, how he created his technologies, we have to acknowledge that he had a concentration camp you know, where people, there were more people who were killed in the creation of his technologies than actually by the weapons that came out of his technologies. I mean, could anything good come from that kind of creation, you know, where people are literally slaves? Sounds like a ritual, too. Like, it's the letting of blood. It's a sacrifice. In a macro form, it's a human sacrifice, right?

Which is really crazy to think about. It's absolutely true. Yeah. So again, in my field, we talk about ritual studies and there is René Gerard is, I don't know if you know the work of René Gerard, but he basically makes the case that, you know, religion came up, especially he's Christians, he's Catholic, and he basically said that Christianity is the religion that recognized that all human progression seemed to happen from sacrifices, from, you know, ritual sacrifices. And he said, Christianity was the one that basically said, let's make this the last. sacrifice. Let's make Jesus the last sacrifice and then acknowledge our innate desire to kill each other over things, you know, over basically scarce resources. Yeah, I mean, I, I, you know, did the space

program, I don't know. That's a lot of stuff that you'd have to like look into. Yeah. But I can say that all of that stuff is quite disturbing, you know, and that these are the kinds of things that I worked with when I was writing that book. And I ended in a pretty negative, like, I wouldn't say I was optimistic at the end of that book. In fact, I ended it with Martin Heidegger's idea that only a God can save us now. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Luke and I talk a lot of off show about how dark it gets on our show, just people coming on sharing their stories. And then it's funny, we were talking in the day about, man, the last couple episodes have been dark. And then we get an email from one of our recurring guests who says that she has somebody who came out of the occult was a satanic ritual abuse survivor and wants to come on the show

but we have to disguise her voice and all this different stuff and it's like, wow. We were just talking about this, Luke. I was just telling Nate, I was like, I can't do any more heavy episodes for a while

because it's just, it's a lot, it is. It's heavy. You know, in the art of war, you need to know your enemy. And so part of

of us being Christians in understanding the gospels, understand that we're also at war. We are, We are caught up in a cosmic war. You know, we're not fascinated by the darkness, but we want to expose it. People need to be aware. It doesn't serve anyone to put your head in the sand.

You're obviously there. You wrote a whole book on traversing this space. And yeah, it gets heavy. Nate made a great point. Like, and I can see it through, you know, six years of studying this. You ran in some, as you say, really dark places. Well, what I think is the one thing that I've learned a lot in the show is just how many people have carried these burdens, these supernatural burdens, I would say, or something like. that where they don't understand why would God flood the world? You know, they've carried these,

these, they've believed, but they haven't believed with their whole heart because they've questioned the Old Testament. A lot of things in the Old Testament, which are very blurry, like what was going on then? And then when you just, when you, when you work backwards from like some of these creatures that people see today and it goes all the way back to the corruption of all creatures, you go, oh, okay, so there's, there's been this occult stuff that's been going on forever. It's not a new thing. The like scientists and NASA are doing occult practices. They were doing this all over the world.

They were building the same pyramidal structures everywhere. They were all worshiping their gods. What happened the last 300 years where we all just put our heads in the sand and we're like, we were trying to analyze the world inside the matrix. It doesn't make any sense. It's like, well, yeah. But then somebody will get pulled out of the matrix and everyone gets pulled out in a different way. Yes.

And they see something or they have an experience and they come out of it and they go, wow, everybody is clueless. The hardest part is the church is clueless. But then you plug in some of these things we've discovered on our show like Genesis 6 and such. And then you can, you let those burdens go. Like, oh, now I get why God needed to flood the world. Human beings were almost when extinct if you take it literal, you know. And we try to apply the scientific method on our show. we don't we like when you say the myth of prometheus i almost wonder if like i i'm under the

belief now that those people that those stories were real they just preserved them in a way that we can understand them throughout time but i it seems as though those demigods fits right demigods right into the nephalum right the north at one point yeah yeah yeah no that's what i was doing i was trying to open it up from yeah what we consider to be a myth to yeah i am now in this myth. That's what I say in my introduction. I am now in this myth and I'm going to write this book from being within it and deal with it, academics.

You know, because this is it. You said you were, you were reading about these, these original Catholic miracles, right? Or these. Yes. Yes. Did you find anything crazy in the Vatican archives? Did you get, did you come across? Yes.

Yeah. Tell us. Yeah. I mean, anything. It's a whole. Yeah. It's a whole. whole treasure trove of blurry creatures.

Yeah. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, miles and miles of miles. So I saw, I mean, there were so many things. We were there to do specific study of Joseph of Copertino, who is a saint, who is said to have flown around, right, levitated. And a lot of UFO abductions have levitation aspects to them, right? People are levitating up and doing this.

I posted on my Twitter account a picture. of people going into purgatory and it literally looks like a flying saucer beaming people up into it, right? So it wanted people to see that these images are so similar and these representations are similar. The interpretations are just different. You know, they call them souls from purgatory than we call them UFOs now, kinds of things like that, right? In the Vatican Archive, we came across a lot of things. We came across a woman who's called the woman in blue. She lived in the 1600s in Spain, and she believed that she was being taken by angels kind of flown up above earth into space where she could see the spinning earth and she described it and taken to what she called the New World, which was basically New Mexico and around that the southwest, Arizona, all these areas.

And she was put down and then she actually interacted with indigenous tribes there. And in fact, one of the leaders, the chief of that indigenous tribe just called me the other day. And I have to return his phone call because he said, come on, tell me about the lady in blue. Like we really want to know because they have statues of her. And their whole oral tradition goes back to this time period. So there were missionaries from Spain who happened that they were evangelizing, right? And so they happened upon this indigenous tribe who already knew the gospel, already knew that Jesus' name, already knew all of these things. They were like, how did you know? And they said, this lady came,

you know, and they were like, what did she look like? And so it, so this is, uh, so we came upon her records and looked at her records. And then it's like a whole episode. It's a whole episode in itself right there. It was crazy. So I, I had already, I thought I'd finished my book, but I turned it into my editor. And then once I saw this stuff, I realized I opened my book with going to New Mexico to this specific place and I recognize that this sister or none believed that she had been at this place that I had been to too with this guy Tyler who I was now at the Vatican Observatory with reading this woman's documents. Wow. It was pretty weird. And so I mean how much of that stuff is underlock and key though? Oh yeah you have to have special credentials to get in. It's not public.

Some of it you can't get to. No, no, no. Did you see anything about the Nephilim in there or any of that kind of stuff? There's a lot of stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, the thing is that you have to understand a lot of people think that the Catholic, okay, so for one thing, I'm a Catholic, I'm a Catholic, I'm a historian of Catholic thought. I'm Catholic.

I was let in because that's what I do. And I have a PhD. You have to go through a whole series of checkpoints in order to get in. Okay. So yeah, it is under lock and key. And barely anybody could get in there to read these documents. These documents are really old. Some of them would disintegrate, right?

If you touch them, so you have to be careful with them. The thing is about it. is this. And this is to stop any kind of conspiracy theory about Catholicism and Catholics. Like, the Vatican is trying to hide the truth about them. They know what they have. They know that they're weird. They look at it within their theological worldview that these beings existed or exist. And that's okay. That God created everything, right? And that these beings are just part of God's creation. And they don't view them as like, you know, that they're trying to keep the world from knowing about, you know, these beings. You know, the thing is, is that those, the Catholics right now at the Vatican are doing their hardest right now.

They're darnedest to basically digitize those documents because those documents are basically going away. Like they're disintegrating. Yeah, they really are. Yeah. What do the Vatican think about, what do they think about your project? Did you get any resistance talking about UFOs and then writing a book about UFO? No, no, not at all. No. I have a lot of friends at the Vatican and a colleague is brother Guy Consolwanyo, who's the director of the Vatican Observatory. In fact, we were given quarters at the Vatican Observatory to stay. So we lived in those quarters for like a week to do our research. We were given lattes and I mean, it's pretty awesome. I actually lost an original Kepler, an original book by Kepler.

Oh, gosh. Yeah. So they basically look. They probably changed the rules after I was there because I went there and I'm like, they go, yeah, just look at whatever you want, you know. And I was like, are you sure? And they're like, okay. So I did.

I looked at everything. I'm like, okay, they have a whole wall of something that's called extraterrestrial research, research into extraterrestrials. And I was like, I'm starting here. And so, you know, you go through the whole thing. Every single day we'd wake up and we'd go in there and we wouldn't leave except for like a latte, right? or like, you know, or lunch or something like that.

This is wild. And we go right back. It was awesome. And we go right back and we do the study again. And so I kept a lot of the books out. One of them was Kepler, you know. And for some reason, this was really fascinating to me because he was talking about magnetism and a lot of these kinds of things.

And sadly, I misplaced that book. And so when I got back to the United States, I got a frantic email from Brother Guy. And he said, do you know where the Kepler is? You know, it's priceless, right? And I'm like, oh, gosh. to your carry-on. Wow. No, I actually remembered, believe it or not, where I put it.

I said, yes, I do, I do. And they probably, like I said, changed the rules after that. I feel really bad about it. So what did you read in there? Because, I mean, it's difficult because I feel like something that we talk about on our show a lot and it gets heated in our channels. It's just like every institution is compromised somewhere. Every institution. It's not just like, oh, this institution's good.

This institution's bad. It's just like there's good. bad cop and everything. And so it's hard to identify. Because like some of the things you said earlier in the episode, and that's a whole other rabbit hole, there's just like when spiritual entities appear to you and tell you something and there's a lot of historical accounts,

I mean, how do you know which team they're on, you know? And you don't and you don't know. It's not that we don't believe it exists. It's just how do you not be deceived? Yes. And so, but in terms of the Vatican, we've never really talked to anybody who's been inside of it. And we know they have answers.

But there's got to be some people in there that are probably not wanting certain things to get out. I mean, it can't be like 100% across the board. Everyone's- Well, there's a lot of people who are angry at Catholics and the Vatican from good reasons. You know, I mean, the, you know, the priestly pedophile thing, all that kind of stuff. Terrible, right? And the whole, you know, it's been around for a long time. The Vatican was the Roman Empire. I mean, it became the, you know, Roman Catholic Empire.

I mean, it's like when you go through Rome and you look at the, and you go into the Vatican and you go through their museum and everything, you basically see a history of colonization and war. And that wasn't pretty for me to watch or see, you know. It was a lot of carnage, okay, and, you know, taking of other culture stuff. So, yeah, so we're talking about an empire, not just a religion. Okay. So I talked to Peter Gumpel, who some of your listeners should check out. super interesting. He is in his 90s and he was, he was supposed to be a cardinal, but he didn't want to be because he enjoyed being, he was a Jesuit and lives in the Vatican. And basically he is,

he reminded me of Tyler because he had several, he had rules that were very much like Tyler's, where he couldn't go online. He doesn't have email. He couldn't see the news. You know, he had to keep his, his own worldview separate from the worlds because you have to understand that they're taking their faith seriously. Christians are in, but of, but not of the world. So, right? So that's where,

that's how they live. They believe that they're in the world, but they're not part of the world, right? The world lives with different values than like Father Gumpel. Now, does that mean that everyone at the Vatican is like that? No, there's like such corrupt people there,

but he wasn't one of them. And so, you know, I did my best to find those. people and to talk to them. And he was a papal advisor to the last how many popes, you know, as long as he's been 30 years old. He was almost killed by Hitler. His nephew was killed by Hitler. His mother was almost killed by Hitler. He intervened to save her. So, you know, he's like, he knows so much history. What does he think about UFOs? What do they think about? There's a great

book by Brother Guy, Consolmagno, and his friend who's a Jesuit, who's a father Mueller. And it's called, would you baptize an extraterrestrial? Would the Pope baptize an extraterrestrial? And that goes along and talks about the whole history of extraterrestrial belief within the Catholic Church, basically. So to them, it's not as big a deal as it is to people in the United States. Because people have been talking about extraterrestrials in religions for a very long period of time, right? Just like you all say, you know, that it's back there in the Bible. I mean, Brother Guy says, look, you know, just look through the Bible and you'll see reference to beings from other places in planetary intelligences and things like that.

So it's different terms now, right? Like, I mean, literally, like angels, extraterrestrial just means not of Earth. And so we can think of it's semantics, which I think is interesting the way, but it's manipulated though, which is very interesting. That's how in most people's minds, those are very different things. Yeah, in most people's minds, they're very different things. But if you look at the history of Catholicism and you look at like, especially, people in the Vatican, they know about Emmanuel Swedenborg, who's talking about angels and people on Venus and things like this in 1750, right? In 1750, there was a bestselling book called Life on

Other Planets. Well, it's just like, it's like the whole, I think it's why there's some distraction with ancient alien theory is that it just takes all of that and puts it in an alien bucket and then just says, oh yeah, aliens did this. Aliens came here. Aliens did that. And it's like, If you describe to a biblical worldview, that's not how you would interpret it. No, no, no. So the Vatican doesn't, this is what they don't want. They don't want. And this has happened in the euphology community a lot.

A lot of people who are what I would call UFO influencers. They're not necessarily researchers, but they're influencers. And they like to talk about the Vatican a lot. And they say, we're going to go to the Vatican and we're going to bust open, you know, this thing. Well, guess what? they're on the outskirts of the Vatican. Like anybody who's been in the Vatican knows, you can't just go into the Vatican.

The guards are different. Like, you know how the guards look really nice on the outside? They are the Swiss guards, right? They have special uniforms and everything. When you get in the Vatican, they're actually scary as heck. I mean, these people have, like, machine guns, and they're wearing full fatigues, and you don't go anywhere unless you're with someone in the Vatican.

Like, I was like, you know, I was terrified of these guys. Yeah, I was lucky to go there. I went there and went to St. Peter's and went to the Sistine Chapel. It was definitely. Look at you. Just so well traveled. It was, no, I mean, it was an experience. I just remember being like, well, there's a lot of people there trying to try to sell you something. They were trying to convince you.

Trying to sell you tickets to something that was free. That's what I noticed right away. Everyone's trying to, like, wait a minute, that's free. I know that's free, buddy. It's difficult. It was just, but everything's so amazingly old. I think that is sometimes on our show, obviously, yeah, the, Vatican does get, it sort of gets just, everything's blamed on the Vatican. Why is it in here?

It's at the Vatican. And I do think that, like I said earlier, there's just, there's so many people that have infiltrated all these systems and they all have their own agenda. And it's, you can't, it's not, there's, nothing is easy. Nothing is as easy as a lot of the people listen to their show. It's, it's, it's this easy. It's just this one deception. I'm like, no, it's not. It's very complicated. Satan's not going to, like, leave any crumb trail if he doesn't have to. I just can't get past Nate that there's a whole wall, Diana, that you said. Yeah, I was going to ask her that. I was like, dude, this is insane.

Yeah, give us a little rundown. What are some of the talking points of that? What are some of the. Look at the blue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in the extraterrestrial research part of the archive, this is at the observatory, because

anything that has to do is space doesn't go to the Vatican. an archive that goes to the observatory, which is in Castle Gandalfo. And that's a space observatory. And so, so basically they just had from back in the day, you know, from like 1,200 onward, what people have thought about and published about extraterrestrials. And so when they get it, when you get into the 70s and when you get like the 60s and the 70s and 80s, it just took off and it got super interesting. And I could, I didn't have enough time to go through it.

But what I noticed was that the terminology changed. So when you, and this is another way to do archival research is that you don't just look at what's in there. You look at how things are categorized, all right? And if, and if there's a shift in the way things are categorized, you know that something happened. So I wasn't there long enough to figure this out, but I did have Tyler with me and Tyler was part of the US space program. So he was able to fill in some of these blanks. But what I found was that when they got to the 80s and certain space, missions. They stopped, they were actually funding programs that were in search of intelligent

extraterrestrial life, right? Like SETI? But, yeah. But after that, they stopped funding that. And they started to cert, they did microbiology. Like they wanted to find like, you know, traces of biological things. Like bacteria on meteors and stuff. Yeah, they weren't looking for it. They took out intelligence. And I was like, why did they do that? That was after the Apollo, one of the Apollo missions. And so that's what Tyler looked at me and said, think about that.

Yeah. Nobody got their question answered. Yeah. So the funding and the funding for the research changed. Absolutely. Yeah. But they tell you, you know, these things you can't talk about or you had free access to write about whatever you found?

There were certain times when I was told to not talk about certain things. and in no uncertain terms, basically. Sounds like fight club. There's a little fight clip thing going on here. Yeah. Talk about it. Right. And I didn't.

And then what happened was that all of this stuff happened where the government started to talk about it and all of this things changed. And nobody told me to not talk about it anymore. So I'm talking about, except for referencing people who want to be anonymous, I'm talking about all kinds of things that I was told not to talk about. And what do you think aliens and UFOs are? I mean, what's your take if you had? Yeah, sure.

So I think that people have been seeing things in the sky for a very long period of time, as long as humans have existed. It appears that they've been having these experiences. I don't discount these experiences. I believe that people have them. What they are, I have a professorly view, and then I have a personal view, and I separate those so my university won't, you know, so I can say, this has nothing to do with my colleagues, right?

Or my graduate student professors. Yeah, yeah. I do think that there are... Which is very fight club. Yeah, I'm not in flight club. I'm not Tyler. So I'm just a professor. I'm not bound by those rules.

So I think that there are a variety of these things. And I do believe that we can... Like, you know, I do believe in these angelic presences. And I also believe in demonic presences. I feel like I felt these before. This is me not as a professor talking. Okay, so this is just as a human being. being alive and having these experiences. I've always wanted to know what they were about. I feel like I know I have a better

understanding of what they're about now. I feel like we make choices in our lives to open us up to various experiences. And I think that I've, I know people who've had very bad experiences, either drinking a lot or doing drugs and feeling these things, you know, these presences or whatnot. And even without those, you know, and I feel that I, I try not to go to places that where UFO activity is identified. I do not call any type. I'm not a C.E.5 person, you know, a close encounters five person. I don't want to be. I don't want to hook in with any other, you know, I just don't want to do that. I don't want to advocate that to anyone. And I believe that, I believe that human beings are made to like we have kind of like some people would call it a God gene. I think we have a predisposition to want to, to know. about the spiritual component. You could call it God, Jesus, whatever, you're, you know, right?

So I believe in that. And I believe that people, if they want, can do that. I also have been studying the protocols that people have done, like monastic communities, communities of monks and nuns, and the ways in which they've cultivated having experiences of peace and love and goodness and things like that, what you would call, you know, God and prayer and contemplative prayer and things like that. So I think that these things are very real.

I think some of them perhaps could be extraterrestrial. I do believe that some of them are interdimensional. So, yeah, I believe in a variety of different ones. Yeah, it seems like it gets more complicated, the more we rocks we turn over and the more things we find. And it's not easy. It's not an easy answer. I think a lot of people want an easy answer to a lot of these complicated topics. And it's just not.

I mean, it's just human beings have been given a little bit of information, but we haven't given enough. We've almost been given enough information just to carry on. And we're so curious. Yeah, the fact that these sightings do go back and the alien encounters do go back. And I'm surprised that there have been more academics

involved in this topic than I originally thought when we started the show. It seems like when you go, there are always a few outliers of people who apply the scientific method to these blurry topics and found some interesting stuff. And I didn't know that there was an archive in the Vatican. Dan, I've got one last question for you here.

I'm curious, having studied the UFO phenomena and then also having sort of laid that over a religious infrastructure because that's where your expertise is and your study is, most UFO people probably don't describe to religious beliefs per se. Like you talked about, there's a lot of, like it or not, there's a lot of spiritual, supernatural element to this stuff. There's probably, there's a very physical aspect to a lot of people's experiences and into, there's also a very supernatural.

So do you think that there is, in this UFO religious spaces, you might define it, do you think that they are, there is a, like, almost a cumptive Jesus moment that could be waiting at the end of that as people dive deeper into, into this? And the reason, the reason, yeah, okay, the reason I asked this is we've talked about this for Nate about how in certain communities, and this is indifferent, not the UFO, but maybe in the bigfoot community, and I believe this was Duke, and I brought this up on another episode, but I think it's fascinating, the people that have encounters, according to some of the people that are doing their research, Bigfoot encounters that a very, a significant portion of those people get saved,

which is a really interesting, like, reaction to having an encounter. And so my question then is, you think that for a lot of these people that could end up with, you know, finding their answer, answers in sort of a come to Jesus moment. Yeah. So my, one of the things that I do is I look at people like classic examples of UFO events, right? And I think we could all agree that Kenneth Arnold's 1947, you know, where he's a pilot and he's going over a mountain rainier.

And he is the envy, we get the term flying saucer from this encounter that he has. So he has, he's a pilot. He is a smart engineer guy. and his identifying these things and people calling them flying saucers, he called them flying plates, right? They look like flying plates. We all think that's a nuts and bolts kind of, you know, spacecraft type thing, right? But if you actually go back and you look at what happens to him after his encounter,

you realize that he describes these things as beings, as like living things. He also says that he thinks that they're like Ezekiel's wheel. and he also begins to make these prayer cards like any Christian would know what a prayer card was, right? So he has the picture of the flying saucer and on the back of it he has his philosophy where he identifies this as spiritual and he gives it to anybody who he meets. He says, have you heard of this? And he gives it to them because he's become evangelical about his spiritual experience of having a UFO. So my point is this is that I'm not overlaying a religious framework on UFOs. What I'm doing is I'm looking case by case at UFO events and I'm saying, this looks

weirder than you think everyone. Like this is a paranormal event. This is not just a nuts and bolts craft. You know, you can have all these, you know, pilots in the sky and like, you know, saying, oh, this and that's happening. And we take and, but, you know, you go to the very first pilot in the sky and he's freaking out because now he's had this experience that leads him back to the Bible. And I'd love to ask you, like, my last question is, like, is there a story in your life where

you've had a, like, a skeptical colleague or someone in your life that has, you know, you've had a conversation with and they've come full circle? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk and tell about that a little bit? Yes. So this was actually a colleague of mine who you would think shouldn't be skeptical because he's at

Rice University. His name is Jeff Kreppel, and he's a friend of mine. And at the beginning, this was in 2012, when I had just written my book about purgatory and he was blurbing it. I met him through my, he's in my field. He does religious studies. And his background similar to mine, he was, he wanted to be a monk. And then he kind of ended up at University of Chicago in religious studies. Okay.

So he's going to blurb my book on purgatory. And we both know people in the UFO scene, right? And I start to tell him about my experiences. And he thinks it's really interesting. but he doesn't buy, he buys that UFOs happen, but he doesn't associate them with our tradition of Catholicism at all. He doesn't. And so I say, wait a minute, he did his master's thesis on Teresa of Avala,

who has had what looks like a classic kind of abduction experience, right, that's made into, if you've been to Rome, you may have seen the statue of Bernini statue of Teresa. It's called the Ecstasy of St. Teresa. And you see this angel kind of with a dart that's going like this to her. And it looks like a cherub. If you read the original account, so when I had my experience of that weekend, I looked back at hers and I reread her account of it because she wrote it down in her diary. And I subsequently had published about it.

And I read it and I said, my goodness, like she's having this experience that John Mac talks about in his book. So I wrote to Jeff and I said, Jeff, look, you know, Teresa had this experience. He said, no, no, no, no. He said, she didn't, Diana. He said, that's Freudian. That's all like Freudian and clearly nothing to do. with UFOs. And so I did translation where I kind of emphasized like that this being was she really

saw it. It was short. It wasn't like a big angel. It didn't have wings. It had a dart which she, which, you know, did like the examination on her and everything like that. And I sent it back to him and it freaked him out. He was like, oh my gosh.

He said it's like UFOs all the way down. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard. I mean, it's, and it feels like that's, to me, some of the extent of the way that religions and the Bible is taught is,

is it's like all that stuff is edited out of the story. All those characters are omitted. So we're all kind of confused. And then eventually if we take some of the like verses in Matthew 23, Jesus says, you know, like the days of Noah when I'm going to come back. I mean, what does that mean? It feels like those realms that were once interacting with human beings. You know, we, we didn't have this problem of disbelief.

We didn't have this problem of, oh, I don't believe in any of that stuff, you know. I don't believe in creatures. I don't believe in UFOs. And it was more like which side are you on, you know, in ancient history. And then we've kind of gone to this era where we spend all our time debating if these things are happening. And then it's such a waste of time because once you get out of that and you realize, man, this phenomenon is not just in one of these camps. There's so many camps of weird stuff happening. and we have to spend some time actually figure out like what is going on because clearly there's

going to be a deception. Like you said, you didn't end your book with like a positive note because it sounds like what you hear is what we hear is like it's going to be such a mind grenade on too many people at once where people aren't going to know what to think because the church isn't educating people as a whole. There are some churches that talk about the weird stuff, but as a whole, most people have no idea that our government's trickling this out. Yeah. That there's this ancient history you don't know. And, you know, a lot of this stuff is undercover. So I guess we try to be hope dealers on the show

and say, you know, this is why you need a savior. This is why the son of God came to save you because this, this kingdom of darkness is deceptive. It's big. It's, it's gnarly. So we try to talk about that a lot on our show. And it's really encouraged my faith. It's just like, yeah, you know, I do need a savior. I do need someone to put my hope in. It sounds like some of your colleagues are coming around when you're, when you're shooting them over some info. They've come around. A lot of people, I honestly thought maybe 10 people would read my book, but it seems like it resonates with a lot of people. And people do want to know. And they are wake, there are wake, you know, I hate to use that term waking up. But yeah, they are waking up to the fact that is, that is supernatural.

and as much as the people who are most angry are the people who want it to be spaceships, you know, with technology. They don't want the supernatural stuff because it's too weird for them. But, you know, it's like you have to go where the data takes you. Yeah. I mean, that's the same thing we thought 10 people will listen to our podcast. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, Nate. Nate and I just going to do this because we like to have a good time and talk to each other.

Right, yeah. And then, yeah, we hit some of these charts. And I'm like, oh no, this is crazy. I don't know if I wanted to get any bigger. No, I know. I know that feeling. It's like, whoa. We get trolled.

Yeah, a lot of people troll us. And a lot of people from different camps. And everyone has their, you know, like I was saying, I don't pick on the flat earthers, but, you know, they love our show and they listen to our show. And they really, really want us to get into these areas. And we're talking creatures, you know, where that's the fences we put up on this show. And sometimes we get out of those lanes. Something like a Bigfoot encounter can bring you, can bring your faithful circle.

you can, it's almost like it, it's not related, but it is related. It gives you permission to believe all the strange stuff. Right. And I love all the academics who are giving people permission in these spaces. Hey, you can believe the weird stuff. It's everywhere. It's out there. And there's metrics for it.

I think that's the other thing that's important, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Diana, it's been a pleasure. Yeah. Do you want to tell? Yes, it has.

Thank you so much. And do you want to tell people where they can find your work or in the stuff you're doing? Well, I do have an Amazon author page and all my books are there. I have a lot of free stuff that's on Academia, EDU, and people can look at that too. And it talks a lot about how technology and us interface, you know, and what that means for the way that we believe stuff. But yeah, oh, and I have a Twitter account. I try to stay off of a lot of social media because of the trolling that goes on. You know, it's just not good for anyone.

Oh, man. Not negativity. Yeah. Yeah, but I do have a Twitter account, D.W. Posulka, and I post stuff there, and there are a lot of supportive people there, too. Awesome. Yeah. Well, if you ever want to come back and do, like, a deep dive on the Vatican. Oh, I will. Yeah, absolutely.

That would be fun because, yeah, I feel like it's shrouded in mystery a lot. We're trying to get someone knows a lot about the Vatican. And someone who's been inside the Smithsonian knows a lot about that institution as well. If you know anybody who's willing to spill the secrets on the Smithsonian, we'd love them. Oh, that would be a good one. I'll get one of my colleagues who does that and I'll do the Vatican and he or she could do the Smithsonian. That would be a cool show. We'll disguise your voices and not tell anybody who you are so we can tell all the secrets.

Yeah, exactly. We're always trying to figure out what's going on in the blurries. The blurry verse is what we call it. Oh, that's cool. I like that. We're grateful for your time. And you know, you have five teenagers. Yes, I do.

And you're the chair, your academic chair of your department and you're writing books. So grateful spending a couple, you know, spending some good time here with a couple knuckleheads and just want to ask questions. Yeah. And just thank you. And so, yeah, everybody check. Go check out American Cosmic. Big shout out to Matt Marr, who recommended we reach out to you. Yeah, thanks, Matt. And actually did some show notes for this. So Matt, you're appreciated. Oh, cool. Yeah. But we, now we're. And my sister, Jam.

David's alumni. Davis alumni. Yes, right. Yeah. So, North Cal, we got NorCal here. Noircal. Yep. Yeah.

And thanks you for praying for us. And I don't know if that'll end up on the episode, but, you know, because we started, I don't know if we'd start recording already or not, but appreciate that. And thank you for, just thank you for taking time is valuable. Time is valuable and we just appreciate your time. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

Take care. Thanks so much, Diana. Thanks, guys. There, you bet. Take care. Good to meet you. Thank you.