Belief in aliens could be America’s next religion

Belief in aliens could be America’s next religion

Clare Coffey

“Certain outcomes,” is frustrating circumlocution, but it embodies a tension fundamental to the book. Pasulka documents the end of a long cultural shift regarding UFOs, as it moves from a marginal fringe to a major belief system. Part of this shift is what Jacques Vallee calls the “Invisible College,” the network of credentialed, well-placed researchers seriously investigating the phenomenon. “The phenomenon” is Vallee’s carefully neutral term for the collection of commonly attested events and effects that make up “UFO” sightings. The term is useful for those trying to apply a scientific or scholarly framework, because it makes no claims about the origins. And in fact, Vallee does not believe that what people commonly identify as extraterrestrials actually come from space. Vallee is agnostic on their actual origins, but at various points has posited that they may be some sort of window into another dimension, or an illusion created for psychological manipulation.

“The material looked like crumpled tinfoil that was also a type of fabric. It was clumped with dirt and debris.”

Pasulka cannot shake the suspicion that it was planted for her to find, that the whole thing was a setup. Eventually though, a team of scientists determines that the object is highly anomalous, unlike any known material on earth.

“In religious studies, this would be a miracle, either a miraculous object or a miraculous event, such as a healing. Of course, this is not how

Tyler and James would speak about the site, but it is my assessment. The sites in New Mexico function as the sacred sites of a new religion…

They are the places of a hierophany, where non-human beings descended to earth and left us a ‘donation’ as James, chuckling, once called it.”

Runesoup: Talking UFOs, Religion and Technology with Dr Diana Walsh Pasulka

This week, we welcome back to the show one of my favourite guests from last year, Dr Diana Walsh Pasulka.

Diana is chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and joins us today to discuss her recent book, American Cosmic.

We explore interacting with off-planet intelligences and what such practices might actually do to you; as well as meaning and synchronicity; and how contact events become religious over time.

Fascinating stuff!

Was just thinking about this thread, because I have been more and more conscious in a uptick of UFO discussions amongst people I've met. Especially people who claim to be very skeptical of organized religion. They seem to fill the void of God with a different kind of faces straight out of the unknown, aliens. 

It would seem the popularity of "forward thinking" podcasts like Joe Rogan and so forth, has gotten the concept of extraterrestrials back into the public consciousness. Big time