7-minute reading time
“If you look at a lot of religions, they already incorporate ideas of UFOs.”
Sean Illing. (2019). The new American religion of UFOs: Belief in aliens is like faith in religion — and may come to replace it. Vox.
[This interview has been edited for brevity.]
It’s a great time to believe in aliens.
Last week, The New York Times published a viral article about reports of UFOs off the East Coast in 2014 and 2015. It included an interview with five Navy pilots who witnessed, and in some cases recorded, mysterious flying objects with “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes” that appeared to “reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.” No one is quite sure what they saw, but the sightings are striking. And they’re part of a growing fascination with the possibility of intelligent alien life.
According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the 2019 book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion — and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think.
Her book isn’t so much about the truth of UFOs or aliens as it is about what the appeal of belief in those things says about our culture and the shifting roles of religion and technology in it. On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.
A partial transcript of the conversation between Sean Illing and Diana Pasulka follows.
Sean: You describe belief in UFOs and aliens as the latest manifestation of a very old impulse: a religious impulse. What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people?
Her book isn’t so much about the truth of UFOs or aliens as it is about what the appeal of belief in those things says about our culture and the shifting roles of religion and technology in it. On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.
A partial transcript of the conversation between Sean Illing and Diana Pasulka follows.
Sean: You describe belief in UFOs and aliens as the latest manifestation of a very old impulse: a religious impulse. What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people?
Diana: One way we can make sense of this by using a very old but functional definition of religion as simply the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. There are many definitions of religion, but this one is pretty standard.
Diana: One way we can make sense of this by using a very old but functional definition of religion as simply the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. There are many definitions of religion, but this one is pretty standard.
Religion is the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky.
There is another distinction about belief in nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligence, or UFO inhabitants, that makes it distinct from the types of religions with which we are most familiar. I’m a historian of Catholicism, for instance, and what I find when I interact with people in Catholic communities is that they have faith that Jesus walked on water and that the Virgin Mary apparitions were true.
But there’s something different about the UFO narrative. Here we have people who are actual scientists, like Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, who are willing to go on TV and basically make announcements like, “We are going to find extraterrestrial life.” Now, she’s not exactly talking about intelligent extraterrestrial life, but that’s not how many people interpret her.
She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.
But the belief that UFOs and aliens are potentially true, and can potentially be proven, makes this a uniquely powerful narrative for the people who believe in it.
Is it fair to call this a new form of religion? I think so.
Sean: You admit in the book to experiencing an “epistemological shock” to your understanding of the world after reading this literature and engaging with the scientists and believers behind the movement. Did they convince you that there’s something here?
Diana:
I wouldn’t call myself an atheist any longer, but I also wouldn’t say that I’m a believer. I don’t quite believe that there are extraterrestrials. I would say, though, that these scientists have discovered something that is truly anomalous, but I’m not in a position to say what it is or where it came from.
All I can say is that I was shocked to discover the level of scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life. I thought I was going to interview people who just saw these things and I was going to basically say, well, you know, this is the new structure for belief in aliens and UFOs.
I had no clue that there were actually people at top universities that were studying these things on their own, that there was a whole underground network of people doing the same work, and that there was much more to this than most people imagine.
Since journalists Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have published two articles in The New York Times, one in December 2017, and the second one last week, focusing on the military’s involvement in programs associated with UFOs and materials of UFOs, there has been a lot of public interest in the subject, even among my colleagues who used to scoff at the notion.
Sean: I’m curious why you call this a new form of religion. Traditional religions have dogmas and rituals, and they function as an anchor for the individual and a community. I guess I don’t quite see the parallels in the case of UFOs and aliens. Am I missing something?
Diana: The problem is that we tend to think of our own religions when we think of religiosity. And in the United States, most people are Christian or Jewish or Muslim. These are the traditional “religions of the book” that shape most of our Western understanding of history.
But there are many different religions, and some don’t involve things like gods or even dogmas. Zen Buddhism, for instance, eschews the idea of a god. It also tries to cure its practitioners of dogmas. Today, there are religions based on movies like Star Wars. So we do have to understand that religion is not exactly what we think it is.
Part of what I want to say in this book is that religion can take many forms, and the same religion can take different shapes in different places.
What we’re seeing now are new forms of religion emerging from our infrastructure of digital technology and technology in general. Religions are shaped by their environments, just like most things.
And think about what many religions consist of: Often, a religion begins with contact from something divine, something beyond the normal plane of human experience, and that thing communicates with a person on earth. And then there’s a story told about it. And then from that story, we get a larger narrative that erupts into what we call religious traditions.
Something very similar is happening right now around belief in extraterrestrial life. What fascinates me about this new form of religion is that scientists and people who generally distance themselves from things like miracles seem to embrace this new religious form.
Sean: Maybe the fascination with aliens springs from some deep need for wonder or awe in a world increasingly stripped of it and in which some of the traditional religions have lost their emotional power.
Diana: I absolutely agree with that. I also think that we’re doing more space exploration. We have different types of satellites now that we’re using, satellites that connect with our technology and personal devices. So there’s that element of this, but there’s much more going on.
If you look at a lot of religions, they already incorporate ideas of UFOs.
We’re in a kind of planetary crisis at the moment, and there’s an increase in apocalyptic beliefs about our capacity to survive on earth. A lot of people see disaster on the horizon, and there’s a deep fear that we won’t be able to save ourselves.
So what will save us? Well, for some, it will be these advanced beings who come to us and tell us what we can do or how we can escape. Maybe they will help us find another planetary home, or maybe they’ll bring some lifesaving technology. Who knows? But these sorts of beliefs are lurking beneath a lot of the popular fascination with alien life.
Sean: Do you see the obsession with alien life as a byproduct of our worship of technology?
Diana: That’s a great question that isn’t easy to answer. Surely a lot of it has to do with technology. Technology defines our world and culture; it’s our new god, the new thing we have to reckon with one way or the other.
There’s the idea that technology like artificial intelligence is going to kill us, but then there’s this idea that technology will be our savior, which is a very religious idea. So there’s already a kind of dichotomy around technology. But the point is that no matter what you think about technology and its impact on human life, there’s no denying its importance.
Whether we’re worried about technology destroying us or whether we’re hoping it will save us, we’re all more or less convinced that it will be at the center of our future, and aliens in so many ways play the role of technological angels.
Sean: I’m curious how religious authorities you interacted with regard this belief in extraterrestrial life. If we were to learn that alien life exists, it would completely upend the religious worldview. Do they see it as a threat?
Aliens in so many ways play the role of technological angels.
Diana: It’s a fascinating question. There are definitely people who believe that the revelation of alien life would completely change religions, but I don’t see it that way. If you look at a lot of religions, they already incorporate ideas of UFOs.
If you look at different forms of Buddhism, for example, you have types of Bodhisattvas that appear to be floating on discs and things like that. I spend a lot of time at the Vatican, and there are people there like astronomer Guy Consolmagno (author of the 2014 book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?) who wouldn’t blink an eye if alien life suddenly appeared.
But there’s no doubt that the discovery of a nonhuman intelligence would be profound, and it’s impossible to know how much it would alter our perception of ourselves and our place in the universe.
