Blurry Creatures EP 126 — UFOs in the Vatican Archives (Dr. Diana Pasulka)

Field note

Dr. Diana Pasulka, a religious studies professor and the author of American Cosmic, is the outlier in the Library. She does not argue for any reading of Genesis 6. Her subject is how people interpret what they see in the sky. She describes keeping a log of Catholic accounts, from around 1100 on, of flying objects that observers read as souls from purgatory, angels and other things. She also says the Vatican Observatory holds a wall of material labeled extraterrestrial research. She sets levitating saints such as Joseph of Copertino beside modern abduction reports and argues that the images are alike while the interpretations change. When a host draws the parallel to the forbidden knowledge of Genesis 6 and 1 Enoch, she answers with Prometheus and with several ways of reading such claims, from brain states to literal contact. She also rejects the idea that the Vatican is hiding what it holds. For the through-line, she adds the historical record of contact language inside the church, and a scholar’s caution against reading it only one way.

Key claims

1. Dr. Diana Pasulka · 0:18:36 · Documented

   “Catholics were basically identifying these flying objects in the sky, but they were interpreting them as different types of things.”

   From her log of archival sightings, which she dates “from, like, 1100 onward.”

2. Dr. Diana Pasulka · 1:05:17 · Documented

   “They have a whole wall of of something that's called extraterrestrial research.”

   Her firsthand account of working at the Vatican Observatory.

3. Dr. Diana Pasulka · 1:00:39 · Interpretive

   “a lot of UFO abductions have levitation aspects to them.”

   She compares abduction accounts with Joseph of Copertino, the levitating saint.

4. Dr. Diana Pasulka · 1:01:07 · Interpretive

   “they called them souls from purgatory then we called them UFOs now,”

   Her view is that the images are similar and the interpretations differ.

5. Dr. Diana Pasulka · 1:03:50 · Interpretive

   “They know what they have. They know that they're weird.”

   About the Vatican. She frames this as a correction to cover-up theories.

6. Dr. Diana Pasulka · 0:24:40 · Interpretive

   “At the basis of both of those, you know, developments were ritualistic paranormal activities”

   About the early American and Russian space programs, including Jack Parsons.

Scripture and texts named

Pasulka cites no Scripture. Works and figures she names: American Cosmic (her book). Emanuel Swedenborg on angels and people on Venus (1750). A Kepler volume at the Vatican Observatory. Brother Guy Consolmagno and a Jesuit co-author, “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” The myth of Prometheus. René Girard. Genesis 6 and 1 Enoch come up only from a host (0:52:53).

Where it disagrees

She says plainly that she is trying “to stop any kind of conspiracy theory about Catholicism and Catholics” (1:03:42). That puts her against the suppression stories elsewhere in the Library: Woodward’s agents taking bodies (Confessionals 889) and Marzulli’s “powers that be” (Confessionals 881). Where Alberino (EP 57) puts UFOs on Mount Hermon, Pasulka gives several frameworks and does not choose among them.