It’s understandable if our present moment feels to many people like the end of the world. No one needs reminding of the litany of terrible things happening across the globe, from the a href="https://www.salon.com/2024/04/13/its-a-massive-year-around-the-world-too—and-democracymay-be-losing/" " ">"rosion of democracy to endless war to the “biological holocaust” our planet is undergoing thanks to climate change.
As someone raised in the shadow of Y2K and 9/11, my entire life has felt like waiting for an apocalypse. I was profoundly traumatized by the evangelical weirdness about those who will be “left behind” when Jesus returns from vacation to vacuum all the true believers up to heaven, not to mention the ever-looming specter of nuclear annihilation, terrorist attacks or killer rocks from space. Everything seems to be getting worse, not better. Yet, we’re still here.
To make things even weirder, now UFOs have been given mainstream legitimacy. We still don’t entirely know what they are, but one of the few established facts in this area is that the U.S. government has secretly studied UFOs for decades, and has actively sowed discord about whether they're out there and what they are. The feds and scientists who study them call them UAPs, or "unidentified aerial phenomena," which is admittedly more accurate, but the general public still gravitates toward the term familiarized by "The X Files" and other pop-culture artifacts. Whatever label we use, these things are unidentified. In many cases, we literally don’t know what the heck we’re seeing. research
That hasn’t stopped people from making all sorts of assumptions about unexplained things seen in the sky. But the typical Hollywood account really doesn’t reflect what most modern UFO/UAP experiences are like. In her latest book, “Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences,” religious scholar D.W. Pasulka seeks to demystify this growing phenomenon, suggesting that the truth is far stranger than fiction. While aliens visiting from other planets remain a popular theory, and cannot be conclusively ruled out, that's far from the only hypothesis. Salon spoke with Pasulka about UFO encounters, new religions built around technology and strange lights in the sky, and the apocalypse.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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