The Basement: Diana Pasulka | Angels, Vatican Archives, and a Government Email

**AJ Gentile** (0:00)
There is so much NFL on ESPN right now.
Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (0:14)
Unbelievable.

**AJ Gentile** (0:16)
And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

**AJ Gentile** (0:30)
Today, I'm talking with Diana Walsh Pasulka. She's a religious studies professor who spent years in archives most people never see, including the Vatican's, reading sworn testimony about saints who levitate in front of entire towns. Then the government noticed her research and she ended up blindfolded in the New Mexico desert, digging for debris at an alleged UFO crash site. Blindfolded and driven out to the desert with a shovel?
Sometimes I miss the old Vegas. By the way, this is a woman who won't set out in a haunted house. The blindfold was fine, apparently. Today we're covering the Flying Saints, the recruitment and why she believes a new religion is forming around UFOs, with somebody already writing its Bible. Her new book, The Others, just hit the New York Times bestseller list.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (1:12)
The Times list is regular and controlled by big publishing.

**AJ Gentile** (1:16)
Unless she's on it, then it's a very prestigious honor. Congratulations, Professor. And her leading candidate for the Antichrist?
I didn't see that one coming.

**AJ Gentile** (1:24)
It's a cat, isn't it?

**AJ Gentile** (1:25)
It's not a cat. Yeah, it's exactly what a cat would want you to think. Stick around after the episode. I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. Let's go down to the basement.
Did you start your career in death? I know that you teach at the Museum of Death and Dying sometimes in Brooklyn.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (1:48)
Yeah.

**AJ Gentile** (1:49)
Okay.
So what was it that drew you to death? Yeah.

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (1:54)
I know. Okay. So I've been studying religion my whole life, and I'm in religious studies, so I just have to explain what that is. So because a lot of people don't know, they think that if you're studying religion, you're like a minister or a theologian. And I definitely, I went to school with priests in formation, people who were going to be priests and nuns and so forth. So I have that background.
But I took an academic track, and I was interested in religion from a perspective of, I just didn't think I was good enough, frankly, to be a theologian. Like in order to be a theologian, you have to like kind of walk the walk, right? And I was like, oh, I'm not, you know, I'm probably not that good, but I'm really interested in religion. So-

**AJ Gentile** (2:37)
Well, what's the difference between a theologian and a clergy?

**Diana Walsh Pasulka** (2:41)
Yeah, they're the same. They're the same, okay. So in order to be a clergy, you have to have a theology degree. And so I had the same background as a person who has a theology degree, but I went extra and got a PhD in an academic field. And I'm super happy I did. So I'm in this field called religious studies, which looks at religion. I mean, most of the world are religious practitioners. It's really an important thing to know about.
And so I study but not from a belief perspective. So I'm not advocating for any belief. I'm not advocating for belief in Christianity. I'm not advocating for belief in Buddhism. And I don't advocate for people to believe in UFOs. But that was the second part of my career, was studying UFO belief. And so how did I get into death and things like that?
So it wasn't really a choice. It just kind of happened. So I was looking at the ways in which my field is looking at technology and religious belief and the interactions that technology has on how people practice their beliefs and what they believe in. And so, but I was really interested in extraordinary events and how people describe them. So what would that be? That would be like looking at angel contact events in the historical record for Christians. What did they believe? Or Jewish people. So I started to look at that. That invariably crossed over into people having near-death experiences and things like that, because a lot of people who have extraordinary events also have brushes with death or something like that. And so that's how it happened. It was very on accident kind of. And one of my first publications in the first publications when I was a young assistant professor was looking, and by the way, I also spent a lot of time in archives. And archives are old libraries. So archives, so this is for young people out there.