Diana Walsh Pasulka is an American professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In her own description, she is a practicing Catholic.
In 2014, she wrote a book on purgatory with the title “Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture”. She says that she didn’t believe in UFOs at first, but claims that her research of apparitions or manifestation of souls in purgatory has shown her that those experiences are similar to modern-day UFO sightings or abduction experiences.
A few years back, a rich entrepreneur and scientist, whom she calls Tyler, took her on a trip to an alleged UFO crash site in New Mexico. She then met various scientists and other people who studied UFOs in secret, ostensibly because they didn’t want to lose their jobs and who she calls the “Invisible College”, after a book by Jacques Vallée. In the following years, she studied UFOs more, and interviewed UFO believers. She wrote three more books: “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology” (2019), “Encounters: Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences” (2023) and “The Others: UFOs, AI, and The Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny” (due to be published in 2026).
Pasulka also sells courses on ufology and she was a consultant to the horror movie franchise “The Conjuring”.
In this two-part article series, I am commenting on statements that Prof. Pasulka has made in various interviews and in a paper she published on purgatory. I have not actually read any of her books, but she does talk extensively about their contents.
St. Teresa of Ávila
One of the main examples she uses in her interviews is the vision of St. Teresa of Ávila, who was a Spanish Carmelite nun in the 16th century. St. Teresa of Ávila was a famous mystic, who had various visions and wrote books on the spiritual life.
Pasulka mentions this vision of St. Teresa of an angel and says: “I’m not going to say this was a UFO experience, but it was an anomalous experience that that has pattern matches to modern-day reports.” In another podcast, she says that Teresa had “a weird experience that looks like an abduction”.
“If you look at Teresa of Avila: she’s a nun, who is now a Doctor of the Church, she’s a very well-known, beloved saint in the Catholic Church. She had an experience that… She had an experience with what she considered to be an angel, but when you look at the primary source material, and this is in the 1500s in Spain and it’s during you know the time period when there was an inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, so it’s not like she would want to have talked about this. But she did write about it in her diary and so she had this experience where she was basically praying and off to her side she saw what something that she couldn’t really understand. It was a being and it was about three feet tall and she said it was very shiny. And she said she was confused by it, because when she saw angels prior to this they would be imaginative angels. She made the distinction that this was not an angel in her imagination but this was an actual fleshy thing. She saw it and so she was confused. She didn’t know what kind of angel it was and she said it must be a cherub.
[…] But you could tell that she wasn’t even sure it was that and so this can… This, by the way, can only be known by reading her work and looking at her own description of the event, because this is a very represented encounter in Catholic history and there’s a very famous statue in Rome by Bernini.”
This angel then pierced her heart and her entrails with a fiery dart and she had a deep experience of the love of God.
Pasulka compares the dart with an “instrument that people are examined with” by aliens in John Mack’s famous book “Abduction”.
Pasulka claimed that the common depiction of St. Teresa’s experience, like the Bernini statue in Rome, is different than the vision described in the “primary source material” and that we should look at “her own description of the event”. Later in the interview, she used the analogy of a “telephone game”, implying that others falsified her account.
The author of this article has looked at the primary source material: the experience in St. Teresa’s own words.
“The Lord wanted me to see this vision here a few times: I saw an angel on my left side in bodily form, which I do not usually see except by miracle. Although angels are often represented to me, it is without seeing them, but rather as in the vision I mentioned first. The Lord wanted me to see this vision thus: he was not large, but small, very beautiful, his face so bright that he seemed to be one of the highest angels, who all seem to be ablaze. They must be those called Cherubim (1), for their names are not revealed to me; rather, I see that in heaven there is such a difference between some angels and others, and between one angel and another, that I cannot tell. I saw in his hands a long golden dart, and at the end of the iron part it seemed to me to have a little fire. This seemed to pierce my heart several times, reaching my very entrails. When he took it out, it seemed to me that he took it with him and left me all aflame with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me groan; and the sweetness that this great pain gives me is so excessive that I do not wish for it to be taken away, nor is my soul satisfied with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain but spiritual, although the body does not cease to participate somewhat, and even quite a lot. It is such a sweet exchange that takes place between the soul and God that I beg His goodness to let those who think I am lying taste it (2). During the days that this lasted, I walked around as if in a daze; I did not want to see or speak, but only to embrace my sorrow, which for me was greater glory than all that exists in creation.” (link, p. 234)
There was no “telephone game” involved. It is true that she was a bit confused at first, because the angel appeared in bodily form, but St. Teresa clearly spoke of an angel in the original text.
The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Bernini. Image by sarahtarno, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0, here.
Pictures of UFOs
In one of her interviews, the interviewer asks Pasulka a very important and logical question: if UFOs are real, why aren’t there thousands of images of them? She said:
“Yeah, that’s a good question. And I don’t know why. […] So people report having terrible dreams or nightmares and we don’t question them. ‘Prove it’, you know. We know that they are, because we have them. We have terrible dreams and nightmares. So could these people be in an altered state of consciousness experiencing this? That would explain why we don’t have, you know… So rather than subject them to ridicule, you know, especially if they’re generally credible people: we just don’t have the answer yet. So, you know, we can’t take a photo of your dream, right? But you’re still going to have that dream.”
There are two options what these aliens can be. They are either physical or non-physical.
If they are physical, then they have to travel in a physical spaceship. And all physical objects can of course be photographed.
On the other hand, if they are not physical, then that means that they are spiritual. This puts the discussion back into the domain of religion.
Synchronicity
Pasulka often references her idea of “synchronicity”, which she defines as “meaningful coincidences” which are the “engine of spiritual belief”.
“In religious studies you find that, no matter what religion or denomination: synchronicity. […] When I was doing my book on purgatory, a lot of Catholics were telling me their synchronicities and them saying: ‘So it was a sign from God’, you know. And I noticed this in the UFO community, too. People had like a lot of synchronicities, I did too, and people ascribed meaning to them. Like, you know: ‘I must be on the right path because this is happening and things like that.’”
So, “synchronicity” is essentially Divine Providence. A good definition of Providence could be this: “As applied to God, Providence is God Himself considered in that act by which, in His wisdom, He so orders all events within the universe, that the end for which it was created may be realized. That end is that all creatures should manifest the glory of God, and in particular that man should glorify Him, recognizing in nature the work of His hand, serving Him in obedience and love, and thereby attaining to the full development of his nature and to eternal happiness in God.”
She then brings an example from her own life: she disliked Nietzsche. But one day, she couldn’t sleep so she opened a book by Nietzsche and found a passage, which correlated with her thoughts at the time.
It goes without saying that God doesn’t lead people to read atheist philosophers. In this case, it could have been a temptation or a demonic influence.
It is absolutely clear that “aliens” who create “synchronicities” cannot be physical beings. Or to use an English figure of speech: flesh-and-blood aliens in nuts-and-bolts spaceships. How could physical aliens steer one’s life in a certain direction?
Anomalous experiences
Pasulka mentions briefly that people, who started to study UFOs, started to have “anomalous experiences”. She includes herself, but doesn’t share details.
How would aliens know, whether someone had started to believe in them, so that they could appear more frequently with their UFOs? This doesn’t make any logical sense.
What’s actually happening here is that the person has opened the door to demons. The demons can then gain an influence on the life of the person, leading to oppression, obsession or possession. Professional exorcist priests say that most people who suffer from some diabolical influence, whether it be a full possession or something milder, have opened the door to demons at some point in their life.
“Jesus also calls the demon ‘murderer from the beginning’, ‘father of lies’. He is the sophisticated seducer of man’s moral balance. He is the evil and cunning charmer who knows how to infiltrate everyone’s individual psychology. He finds the open door and comes in: through our senses, our imagination, and our concupiscence—what today we call fomite. Again, through utopian logic, disordered social contacts, bad friends, and bad worldly ideas, [he slips] into our actions and introduces deviations that are all the more deadly because they appear to conform to the physical or psychological and instinctive structure of our person: this is why temptation is so seductive. These structures run deep and influence our personality. He takes advantage of our own fabric, our makeup, to enter our psychology subtly.” (P. Gabriele Amorth, a famous exorcist in his book “An exorcist: more stories”, p. 68)
John Keel, himself a ufologist, wrote once in his book “Operation Trojan Horse”:
“Dabbling with UFOs can be as dangerous as dabbling with black magic. The phenomenon preys upon the neurotic, the gullible and the immature. Paranoid schizophrenia, demonomania and even suicide can result-and has resulted in a number of cases. A mild curiosity about UFOs can turn into a destructive obsession. For this reason, I strongly recommend that parents forbid their children from becoming involved. Schoolteachers and other adults should not encourage teenagers to take an interest in the subject.”