Review of "The Others" by D. W. Pasulka

The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny
D. W. Pasulka | St. Martin’s Essentials | July 2026 | 288 pages | ISBN: 9781250394866 | $28.00

​Reading American Cosmic author Diana Pasulka’s The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny is supposed to be an enlightening philosophical exploration of human deficiency in the face of potential intelligences greater than our own. In practice, it was more of a book length extrapolation of a verse from “Weird” Al Yankovic’s classic parody “Amish Paradise”:
 
           Think you’re really righteous?
           Think you’re pure in heart?
           Well, I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art

​This is, at heart, a book about people who are competing to be the first to prostrate themselves before a higher power—but only so they can be blessed by it to rule over the rest of us. It is not what the book jacket (seeking to piggyback on the fame of Pasulka’s American Cosmic to the tune of a 100,000-copy print run) promised, “a hidden history of alleged contact between human and nonhuman intelligences.” Indeed, after reading the book, I doubted whether I should bother even to review it because it has so little connection to anything real. But, as an unintentional portrait of the intellectual (or, rather, sci-fi) underpinnings of our new ruling class’s insane preoccupations, I found it worth discussing.
 
Nevertheless, The Others is a deeply weird book. It is concerned with theological and philosophical ideas about the future of humanity, especially a future in which we are no longer the only advanced intelligence known to us. But it is also a book that praises prophets ancient and modern and seems to implore its readers to humble themselves before the Lord, no matter whether that superior intelligence is God, space aliens, or talking computers.
 
Pasulka opens with a discussion of Hereticon, Peter Thiel’s invitation-only soiree for fringe thinkers, and she reports on his antichrist lecture at the 2024 conference. (According to Jacques Vallée’s recently published Forbidden Science 7, but unmentioned by Pasulka, Thiel asked to meet Pasulka privately after he began studying the UFO phenomenon, and they shared an interest in Renée Girard, the Stanford professor obsessed with the idea of mimetic violence and scapegoating.) She discusses science fiction as the “prophetic tradition of secular culture” and whether sci-fi speculation is akin to ancient prophets—and the argument holds so long as you either (a) agree that neither had any actual knowledge of the future and therefore used speculative fiction to imagine possible futures, or, (b) follow Madame Blavatsky in claiming both were divinely inspired. No points for guessing where Pasulka implies that she falls on that spectrum.
 
Three chapters are devoted to rhapsodizing about Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a 1953 novel which may have basic philosophical interest but is not exactly a revelation on par with the Summa Theologiae. Pasulka wants to use it as a framework for thinking about alien intelligence and psychic powers. (Clark was a believer in the paranormal when he wrote the novel, but he later became a skeptic of the very phenomena Pasulka wishes to use him to defend.)
 
As we get deeper into the book, Pasulka brings in characters supremely confident in their superiority, such as Mark Stahlman, who made a great deal of money as a venture capitalist and now considers himself possessed of knowledge from “a different timeline” that allows him to understand that the Enlightenment and secularism are bad and only by embracing a vaguely defined, Orientalist vision of the spiritual can we harness AI to find harmony and true utopia. He also suggested that this will involve humans forming their primary emotional connections with AI-powered bots.
 
Stahlman takes up many of the middle chapters of the book, a useful puppet for Pasulka’s obvious interest in denigrating secularism and reason in favor of spirituality and the irrational. Various interviewees then offer different perspectives on whether AI is a digital antichrist or whether it is a silicon-based savior. This section is wrapped up in potted summaries of esoteric and mostly Catholic theological and philosophical arguments revolving around the question of whether humanity, with AI enhancement, will reach its divine potential or whether, in exceeding our God-given limits, we will become post-human, and whether either path allows us to become the spiritually transfigured ultra-human of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit philosopher who felt evolution directed intelligence toward spiritual transcendence.
 
I’m not much for esoteric Catholic philosophy, so these lengthy chapters, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, brought me little joy. With no evidence to support the speculation, and Pasulka mostly sitting back and simply summarizing other people’s books, it was for me simply a shrug. If you don’t come to the chapters already believing in Christ and His Apostles and their divine powers, then there is little to gain from reading about Biblical transfigurations as prefiguring transhumanism.
 
More than halfway through the book, I finally hit upon material of more interest to me when Pasukla changes topic to explore ancient myths, the Watchers, and some of the philosophies roped in to the ancient astronaut theory. Unfortunately, it’s framed around Russian librarian Nikolai Fedorov’s cosmism, particularly his idea of humanity’s “Common Task,” which is to eliminate death, resurrect the deceased, and fly all living humans and the resurrected dead to the stars—also known as Elon Musk’s business plan. So, instead of dealing with the actual philosophical implications of the mythology of the Watchers—which is, secretly, the common religious underpinning of the all the UFO philosophies Pasulka summarizes—Pasulka instead attempts to weight cosmism against Catholicism to see if she can reconcile the two. Of course, she doesn’t put it quite that way; instead, she explains that the modern transhumanists adopting cosmist ideas are confused and are mistaking transhumanism for transfiguration, implying that Catholic dogma is more spiritually satisfying than digitally uploading a cartoon of one’s consciousness to an AI system.
 
But, again, the chapter is mostly an academic summary of various philosophers’ articles and books, so when Pasulka concludes that we are on the precipice of turning “science into a sacrament” through a technology-induced spiritual transformation of consciousness, it falls a bit flat. Some of the philosophers seem to imply it, but those words carry the same weight as those of any other prophet speculating without evidence. Does anything support these arguments? We’ll never know because the evidence Pasulka uses in these chapters is not from science or sociology or even syllogisms. She brings in stories from graphic novels like Ghost in the Shell, and that about summarizes the problem with her approach: Stories are just stories. They don’t automatically map onto the physical reality around us simply by virtue of having been committed to paper.
 
That’s why chapters like the story of “Dana,” a transgender scientist who claimed to develop precognitive psychic powers after having her car battery die on the night her brother passed away left me unimpressed. Dana, who is also a UFO experiencer—because, of course—says that she patented technologies that appear to her in visions she receives when invisible energy beams strike her skull. She might very well believe that, but stories are just stories. Data, as they say, is not the plural of anecdote, and no one has attempted to measure these supposed energy beams to prove their reality—an odd omission for a scientist. (Pasulka says Dana has been in psychotherapy since 2009, but oddly never asks what, if any, conditions Dana has been diagnosed with.) Pasulka makes an interesting observation about the prevalence of cosmism among the Silicon Valley elite and how California New Age movements influenced technology pioneers in the 1970s, but with no one willing to go on the record about their apparently deep-seated belief shuttling the resurrected dead to the stars, it’s just another anecdote, and one that passes in a few sentences.
 
More than three-quarters of the way through the book, Pasulka finally starts discussing the subject her subtitle, UFO philosophy, which she does through John Keel and Charles Fort. She skips over Fort’s entire raison d’être, his unconventional approach to the philosophy of science (which one might consider relevant to, say this book), and instead focuses on Keel, attempting to raise his—let’s generously call it speculative—quasi-Gnostic notion that spiritual entities are fabricating the paranormal to make humans believe false things as a magisterium equal to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas or the dialogues of Plato. Imagine someone calling Ancient Aliens an education equivalent to Harvard and you get the idea. Pasulka trusts people and their stories, but she won’t lift a finger to evaluate whether they are true; for her, the existence of the story is evidence enough for a belief, and a belief is for her sufficient evidence.
 
This argument allows Pasulka to deliver a conclusion that is sweeping in scope and literally true while presented in a celebratory fashion that is at odds with the disturbing implications: “The UFO, oddly enough, has re-enchanted the modern world; it has re-legitimized transcendence for secular subjects. Ironically, religion remains the most adaptive framework we possess for understanding and responding to potential nonhuman intelligence, from AI to alleged UFOs.” (Here, though never really defined, it appears that “transcendence” is being used mostly akin to Burke’s sublime, with a slight tinge of the supernormal.)
 
Unfortunately, Pasulka makes no effort to back up this assertion or to follow its implications to their conclusions. What does it mean for a formerly scientific society to regress into mysticism? What effect would the pursuit of imaginary supernatural experiences at the expense of improving physical conditions in the material world have on civilization? Those questions are far too practical for a humble philosopher of religion to bother with. Instead, she summarizes Steven J. Dick’s speculations on alien intelligence and whether aliens will have evolved into “post-biological” AI systems that probe the universe and whether we might consider them gods. You know, useful stuff.
 
I waited for the book to build to some sort of conclusion, and I was frankly taken by surprise when it abruptly ended. There is no grand statement about the power of religion, no final argument for its role in society, or even any real thought about whether AI is “true” intelligence in any meaningful sense. The Others is a series of book reports interspersed with interviews that tell us little about philosophy but much about the folly of human belief. Some of the subject matter is interesting and would probably be compelling for readers who care more deeply than I about the details of Catholic moral reasoning. It demonstrates with firsthand accounts just how much science fiction has replaced both science and faith as the ideology of the tech elite. But as a coherent book of philosophy, it is disjointed, unclear, overly academic, and often boring. As a book about UFOs and AI, it fails to truly reckon in any serious way with the real philosophical and moral implications at play, and it will need to fall to an actual philosopher to truly evaluate the “secret forces guiding human destiny” imagined to operate among the intelligences that too many with too much power hope someday to bow before.