American Cosmic

The 2019 source presents the six-year research of D. W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies, into UFO cultures, experiences and interpretations.¹ Pasulka says that her work involved an ethnography of UFO believers and research into UFOs and ufology.² Its principal analytical concern is not to settle whether UFOs are objectively extraterrestrial, but to document the formation of a new religious form, including the ways that experiences, institutions, scientific claims and media narratives acquire meaning.³ The source also presents Jacques Vallee’s framework, which distinguishes physical effects, the testimony of experiencers and the social persistence of belief as connected aspects of the phenomenon.⁴

A central case concerns Tyler D., James Master and Pasulka’s journey to a restricted site in New Mexico USA.⁵ The account reports that the group recovered a small metallic object, subsequently treated as an artifact, and that research scientists found it so anomalous as to be incomprehensible.⁶⁷ The object is therefore presented in the source as a point at which material investigation, personal testimony and claims of nonhuman contact overlap, rather than as independently established proof of an extraterrestrial craft. Pasulka also discusses Vallee’s argument that researchers should avoid separating physical and spiritual reality when interpreting UFO reports.⁸

The source extends this comparison to religious history and sacred sites. Pasulka reports visiting the Vatican Secret Archives and the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo, and describes a later trip to Rome Italy during which Tyler D. underwent what she calls a profound religious conversion.⁹¹⁰ In this account, archives, Catholic practices, anomalous experiences and contemporary technologies form a shared field of interpretation. Pasulka ultimately argues that belief in extraterrestrials and UFOs constitutes a new form of religion.¹¹ The source matters because it treats UAP research as simultaneously an empirical, testimonial, cultural and religious subject, while leaving the phenomenon’s ultimate ontological status unresolved.