In Brief: The New York Times Lets Diana Pasulka Spread UFO Mystification

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed American Cosmic author Diana Pasulka for one of the paper's podcasts, and the result was about what you would expect. The two commiserated about the lack of UFO disclosure, shared similar blind spots about flying saucer research, and reveled in the alleged overlap between alien encounters and medieval religious experiences. The conversation was rather infuriating since Douthat seemed constitutionally unable to see the faulty assumptions UFO researchers like Pasulka make (namely, trusting sources she admits have withheld information) and Pasulka repeatedly comes so very close to understanding that UFO mythology is a modern derivative of (one particular strand) of religious mysticism but is repeatedly stymied by her acceptance, without evidence, that if a man in uniform cannot understand what he sees, it must therefore be beyond all human knowledge.

A religious scholar like Pasulka ought to know that if one reads the voluminous literature, even limiting oneself to the Christian and Christian-adjacent traditions, on the many oddball and bizarre claims of believers, there is no consistent narrative, no consistent phenomenon, and UFO researchers cherry-pick a small section from a phantasmagoria of claims to align with sci-fi ideas from the 1940s. (See, for instance, Theodore bar Konai's index of heresies from 792 CE.)

Pasulka offers very little that is new, and she hedges every implication with a qualifier except her contempt for skepticism, so there is no point in going through her rather flatulent efforts to talk around making any definitive statement while simultaneously chiding those who would rightly conclude that the lack of sufficient evidence to warrant a definitive conclusion also means there is no reason to act on imaginary proofs. Consider this nonsensical passage in which UFOs become everything and nothing simultaneously, a revelation with no referent: 

Douthat: So first, where does the answer lie? If it doesn’t lie with the government?

Pasulka: I don’t know, but I’m not going to say that the answer is that there’s nothing or that there’s specifically this thing. OK? So I think it’s a lot more complicated.
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Douthat: Right. You’re saying that there is a phenomenon that appears to have both spiritual and science fiction elements that is accessible in some way, not just to a crazy person in a field late at night, but to members of the most high-tech military the world has ever seen. And it seems to overlap with people’s perspectives about visitors from other planets, trickster gods, angels, demons. That’s really interesting.

Douthat tries to pin Pasulka down, but she slips away each time. Should the government disclose the truth? She says she has no position on that. What is the UFO phenomenon really? "Well, I’m not going to name it," she says, though, eventually, in exhaustion, she admits that she thinks it's basically angels and demons. But, happily setting aside any claim to truth, Pasulka said that the real value of studying UFOs is that it helps people to reject Enlightenment rationalism and materialism so they can see that "the world and the cosmos is a really beautiful place with a lot of mystery," she said.

Evil demons are allegedly kidnapping and raping us in the night, and we are supposed to view it as a wonderful and romantic mystery. And the New York Times--the NEW YORK TIMES--is happy to treat this as the new spirituality for the pseudo-intellectual elite driving our country and our world toward a new Dark Age.