Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka’s stellar academic background didn’t prepare her for Silicon Valley’s billionaires and their breakaway civilization.

photo by: Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome. Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka to Skeptiko. In 2012 today’s guest was at a high point in her career, a well-respected Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, research awards, a successful book with Oxford University Press. She had even gained tenure, which as we all know is almost impossible to do these days.

Then Diana the universe winked at you, didn’t it? A colleague noted that your account of a Catholic saint and her encounter with an angel sounded a lot like a UFO story that led you to a UFO conference. You met the amazing Chris Bledsoe, who told you about his encounter with ETs that seemed more technological than biological.

Next, you’re off to a UFO conference in California where you just happen to land a personal tour of your old hometown, Silicon Valley with none other than Jacques Vallée.

So, quite a journey and that really set you off on this six-year journey taking you from your academic religious conferences with our friend Jeff Kripal at Rice University to harvesting  space junk from secret crashed UFOs in the New Mexico desert and with Silicon Valley meta experiencers who don’t think twice about ordering a thousand-dollar lunch from the Ritz and hopping on a private jet like an Uber and ultimately back to your roots in the deepest walls of the library of the Vatican.

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Read Excerpts:

Alex Tsakiris: Wow! What a story what a book. Congratulations on American Cosmic, a brilliant book and welcome to Skeptiko. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Diana Walsh-Pasulka: Absolutely happy to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: So I really just kind of skimmed the surface which would almost sound unbelievable to anyone who heard that introduction and think, “Oh, there’s more?” But there’s like a lot more. Tell people your kind of opening line when someone bumps into you on the airplane and says, “Tell me about American Cosmic.” What do you say?

Dr. Diana Walsh-Pasulka: Right. Okay. So people in my field of religious studies, this is kind of a well-known joke among us. We never tell people what we do when we’re on airplanes because you know, they will inevitably think we’re ministers or priests in the formation or something like that and want to know that type of stuff and that’s not what we do.

So we are in interdisciplinary fields, you know, where archaeologists, sociologists, historians and things like that, and what we do is we don’t really weigh in on the reality of beliefs. You know, people believe in all kinds of things. They believe in Vishnu, they believe in Jesus, they believe in Muhammad and things like that and we don’t say yes or no to those, what we do is we study the effects and practices and these kinds of things.

So, if somebody asks me about American Cosmic, frankly, I’d have to figure out who they were and because that bo...