Diana Walsh Pasulka

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of philosophy and religious studies and department chair at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, whose academic specialization in religious belief formation and popular supernatural culture, including an earlier scholarly book on Catholic purgatory devotion, gave her a distinctive analytical lens for examining the UAP phenomenon: not as a question of literal physical fact, but as an emerging belief system with structural parallels to traditional religion. Her book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (2019), based on a six-year ethnographic study, interviewed influential scientists, aerospace professionals, and Silicon Valley figures who privately hold serious beliefs about extraterrestrial contact, arguing that UAP belief functions for a meaningful segment of technologically and scientifically credentialed elites in ways structurally similar to religious conviction, complete with relics, revered experiencers, and a search for transcendent meaning, challenging the popular assumption that such belief is confined to society's cultural fringes. She has continued this research in Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (2024). Pasulka has also worked as a religion and history consultant for film and television, including The Conjuring franchise. Her scholarly, sociological framing has made her a distinctive voice within UAP discourse, offering an interpretive account of why the phenomenon commands such intense belief independent of unresolved questions about its underlying physical reality.