Welcome back to Behind Greatness. Today we speak with Diana Pasulka, author of American Cosmic: Religion, UFOs and Technology, from her home in North Carolina. Diana’s academic reputation was rooted in the research of miraculous events within Catholic history to new religious movements.

In 2012, her world was rocked. At that time, she was researching for entirely different kind of book and started to see patterns in the historical records re aerial phenomena dating back 800-900 years. This piqued her curiosity and kickstarted a whole new adventure. Her thirst for truth brought her into a world of intrigue and of secrets – both open and closed.

Her curiosities led her through a 6-year journey as a modern day Indiana Jones – an academic, a researcher of the mystical and mysterious and a danger-defying explorer. We cover together what she spent years facing: the incredibly webbed story of the Pentagon’s long classified study of UFOs, the Invisible College, hunting for objects in New Mexico, researching within secret Vatican archives and personally being surveilled by government agencies.

We discuss her work under the cloak of danger – while living through a reality that was getting “weirder and weirder”. As her understanding of the new reality was being readjusted during her exploration, her beliefs too were adjusting alongside. We discuss the importance of art and of changing your conceptions, the suppression of knowledge as power, what Indigenous tribes all over the world already knew, the power of media message, the militarization of the narrative, the attraction of activities centred around the Bay area and the SRI Institute (remember Russell Targ?), the real mystical experience of Astronaut Edgar Mitchell and what he was up to on the moon … (oh, we’re not done yet) … creativity and external agents, human beings as sensors, off planet intelligence, Emergence, UFO Fight Club and technology as a new religion.

“Questioning builds a way”. BAM.

Listeners to this episode should DEFINITELY check out our episodes with Leslie Kean (ep. 112), Avi Loeb (ep. 105), Jeffrey Kripal (ep. 118), Dean Radin (ep. 122), Courtney Brown (ep. 131) and Br. Guy Consolmagno (ep. 133).