American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology
by D.W. Pasulka.
Oxford University Press, 269 pp., $26.99
Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences
by D.W. Pasulka.
St. Martin’s Essentials, 248 pp., $27.00
D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic has all the trappings of a sober ethnographic study of unidentified flying objects. Its organizing thesis holds that belief in the existence of shapeshifting extra-terrestrial visitors can be understood as an emergent religion, offering communion with a higher power, reassurance of universal interconnectedness, and a simplifying explanation for a chaotic world. Yet American Cosmic is itself a shapeshifter. The scholarly monograph yields to reluctant memoir: to a conversion story, to be precise, the genre in which a nonbeliever experiences a divine revelation and, having seen the light, becomes an evangelist. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, discovers herself to be the subject of her own inquiry. Against her professional instincts, she reveals that she, too, believes.
The premise that UFO mania resembles a religious movement is nearly as old as the phrase “flying saucer,” which was coined by giddy headline writers to describe the nine shiny circular objects that Kenneth A. Arnold, an amateur pilot, observed flying at outrageous velocities, in echelon formation, above Mount Rainier on the afternoon of June 24, 1947. Hundreds of sightings followed within the year, including one over Roswell, New Mexico, that three decades later, after the original Air Force investigator claimed a cover-up, received enough belated attention to dwarf them all. The mushrooming cultural influence of the great UFO awakening led Carl Jung to argue, in (1959), that UFO mania was displacing traditional belief systems. It fulfilled a primitive human need that organized religion had increasingly left unmet. The UFO was, in Jung’s phrase, a “technological angel,” and green men zapping vaporizers were better suited to modern sensibilities than angels brandishing golden spears. When God exited, aliens beamed
