Diana Walsh Pasulka

Pasulka says she began exploring UFOs as early as 2012, while researching her book on purgatory, Heaven Can Wait; she had logged unexplained aerial phenomena in medieval and Renaissance Europe, which a colleague said looked just like UFOs.⁠[1]

Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture, published by Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press, traces how purgatory shifted from a physical place of punishment to a “process” and the gap between official teaching and lay belief; reviewer Ryan Marr recommended it while noting several imprecise statements, including on Newman.⁠[2]

She consulted on the 2013 film The Conjuring.⁠[3]

In February 2019 Oxford University Press published American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, the result of six years of fieldwork. She has said that religion scholars do not weigh in on whether such claims are true and that the publisher rigorously vetted her and her sources.⁠[1]

The book examines the mechanisms behind Americans’ belief in extraterrestrial intelligence, which she argues is changing and even supplanting traditional religions, with media replacing religion as a cultural authority on nonhuman intelligent life.⁠[4]

Publishers Weekly said she approached UFO believers with an open mind, offering a personal account rather than a well-sourced argument and comparing ufology with traditional religions such as Christianity.⁠[5]

Reviewer Steve Donoghue found the book’s documentation of a forming religion valuable but criticized her for calling believers who secretly study “artifacts” scientists, saying this quietly presumes such objects and alien civilizations exist without scientific evidence.⁠[6]

In December 2020 she appeared on episode #149 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, introduced as a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic; topics included belief and reality, how religions start, Jacques Vallee, artificial intelligence, the ufology community, the Tic Tac UFO, the Roswell incident and the singularity.⁠[7]

In November 2023 St. Martin’s published her Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, which places UFOs, angels, demons, animals and artificial intelligence under the heading of “nonhuman intelligences”; Publishers Weekly called it intermittently revealing yet haphazard.⁠[8]

In March 2024 writer Nathaniel Rich argued in The New York Review of Books that American Cosmic, though it has the trappings of a sober ethnography, turns into a conversion memoir in which the author reveals that she too believes, and noted that Encounters appeared without the imprimatur of a university press.⁠[9]

In 2025 religion scholar Thore Bjørnvig reviewed Encounters in the Danish journal Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift, calling it anecdotal and disorderly and giving examples such as presenting the long-documented “Order of the Dolphin” as secret and not addressing that strange sounds on Apollo 10 recordings had been explained as radio interference, which he said took the book away from rigorous scholarly discussion.⁠[10]

On September 29, 2025, she spoke at Case Western Reserve University’s Baker-Nord Institute for the Humanities on how more than a decade of contact with aerospace insiders and technologists reshaped her personal belief and scholarly method; the event page noted her appearances on The Joe RoganJoe RoganJoe Rogan is an American podcaster, stand-up comedian and UFC commentator whose long-form interview podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, launched in 2009, is among the most listened-to podcasts in the world; he hosted the NBC reality show Fear Factor, and his show’s content and political statements have repeatedly drawn controversy.Open the full entry Experience and the Shawn RyanShawn RyanShawn Ryan is a podcast host, former U.S. Navy SEAL and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) security contractor, and founder of the training company Vigilance Elite, who hosts the long-form interview program The Shawn Ryan Show. The show began with interviews of special operations veterans, later expanded to guests such as politicians and to current affairs, and ranked among Spotify’s top ten U.S. podcasts of 2024.Open the full entry Show.⁠[11]

St. Martin’s Essentials published her The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny, which links accounts of contact with UFOs/UAP to artificial intelligence and the science of life extension, opening with the prophecy of an early-20th-century Catholic visionary.⁠[12]

She has said she converted to Catholicism and that studying UFO experiences “supercharged my Christianity,” and has acknowledged that she has no secret knowledge or evidence about UFOs.⁠[13]

As of October 2026, UNCW’s faculty page lists her as Diana Heath (formerly Walsh Pasulka), a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion who studies the intersection of religion and media technologies and collaborates with aerospace and technology experts; she has spoken at venues including the Guggenheim in New York.⁠[14]

She received an Emmy nomination for Amblin’s Encounters.⁠[3]

Her areas of specialization include Catholic studies, religion and new media, digital culture and gender.⁠[15]

University of North Carolina Wilmington: Official website: https://uncw.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]