by D W Pasulka
TO T H E M U T UA L U F O N E T WO R K
When individuals with no prior experience of UFOs be-
lieve they have had an extraordinary sighting of one, they
look for information associated with UFOs to make sense
of the event. One of the first things experiencers do after
an anomalous sighting is to perform a Google search. They
use keywords like “shining object” or “UFO,” and inevitably
the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) appears among the
search results. MUFON is an organization with the goal of
researching UFO- related events scientifical y. The organiza-
tion was founded in 1969 in the midwestern United States
and eventual y expanded into a national network of units.
It is a nonprofit organization that trains “field investigators,”
that is, people who go on- site to study anomalous reports. The
organization and its chapters also host conferences that focus
on UFO studies and research. MUFON has been criticized
for using “pseudoscientific” methods for investigating
sightings, reports, and experiencers, and it has been criticized
by experiencers who have input their own reports into its
extensive and public database of UFO reports.11
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I know the North Carolina state director of MUFON
and several field investigators. My associations with them
have been friendly and professional. Their research methods,
on my observation, are completely rational and objective,
and err on the side of skepticism. However, individuals as-
sociated with MUFON are not necessarily representative.
Experiencers I’ve interviewed say their experiences with the
larger organization have not gone wel . Several have reported
that their experiences have been made public in a com-
pletely altered form. When a person reports an experience
to MUFON, it goes into a national database of reports, and
these reports become the property of MUFON. They can do
what they want with them— like sell them to television pro-
duction companies.
One day Rey received an email from a friend who said
that he had seen Rey’s family’s experience portrayed on
the television program Hangar 1, produced by the History
Channel. Rey was horrified to find that an entire episode
was based on his family’s experience, but that the events as
represented on the show didn’t resemble their experience.
Disturbingly, the message it conveyed was the opposite of his
own and his family’s experience. What for them had been a
positive encounter was morphed into a terrifying home inva-
sion by extraterrestrials.
Rey saw his own handwriting displayed on the screen.
“All the handwriting you saw on the video’s pictures was my
handwriting; it even had my attorney letterhead blacked
out— that is why I know it was my report to MUFON.” Rey
was understandably upset that his experience, which had
changed the direction of his life and which his wife believed
was an “angelic” encounter, was portrayed as just the oppo-
site. The miraculous healing of the dog Niña was left out of
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the episode, as was the fact that Dulce had been praying all
night for the healing of her dog. The title of the episode was
“UFO Home Invasion.”
Rey felt betrayed by the larger organization, but he was
generous in stating that the volunteers and field workers as-
sociated with MUFON were not at fault. “Many of my dear
friends are members of MUFON— all are very nice individuals
and I deeply respect them. All of them are volunteers and
doing very important and excellent work. My issue is not
with MUFON volunteers but with the MUFON Hangar 1
production. Somehow my field report was not translated to
the video because not only were there inaccuracies but there
were actual fabrications. I just want to make it clear that the
folks that I know that work with MUFON are good friends,
highly credible, have done outstanding work, and I ful y
support them. MUFON is not the issue— the issue is my
shock to find out that my story was sold and the fabrications
of the MUFON Hangar 1 production.”
Rey asks, “Why the numerous fabrications? I understand
it is Hol ywood, but why a total fabrication?” At the time
the episode aired, Rey had already begun to receive the first
round of data compiled by his organization. His dataset in-
cluded over three thousand reports from people who claimed
to have had UFO- related experiences. Overwhelmingly,
these experiencers reported positive interactions with non-
human intelligence.
I have described the mechanisms of belief, which pre-
sent UFO events as real events that correspond to the truth.
The use of a genre associated with truth, the documentary,
produced by a company ostensibly related to veridical, histor-
ical accounts (in Rey’s case the History Channel), supports a
central claim of this book— that what one sees on television,
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in the movies, and on the internet does not necessarily
convey the actual stories of those who experience the events.
Yet the mechanisms provide a convincing viewing frame-
work. As viewers are entertained by the productions, they are
also forming opinions, biases, even memories that help them
interpret and form meanings associated with UFOs.
The description of the series as posted on the Hanger
I History Channel website is painful to read for those who
have experienced a UFO event or have knowledge of one:
There is a place where the truth about UFOs exists; a vast ar-
chive of over 70,000 files gathered over nearly half a century.
The place is called Hangar 1. Now, it is final y open for inves-
tigation. MUFON, an independent organization dedicated to
investigating UFOs, has worked diligently to compile, research
and store these files. The HISTORY series Hangar 1 will delve
deep into these archives to look for connections, clues and ev-
idence; because only by investigating the files of Hangar 1 can
we find the truth about UFOs.12
The database that forms the basis for Hangar 1’s “based on
real events” is filled with the honest reports of thousands of
people who have seen, many for the first time, an anoma-
lous aerial object. With good intentions, they report these to
MUFON. Where does this data go? In the case of Rey and
several other experiencers I have met, they become the basis
for consumer products, for entertainment. But the data is
also being used by other researchers and organizations. The
problem is that a lot of researchers who use it are not the
original on- site field researchers. If they were, they could
have vetted the original reports. For example, the state di-
rector for MUFON in North Carolina rules out all possible
explanations. Once she gets a report, she checks with local
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police and military to ascertain whether there were military
exercises or other scheduled aerial events in the area. She
also scrutinizes any photographs and physical evidence with
the help of trained videographers. If other explanations are
ruled out, she grants the report the status of “UFO,” that is,
“unidentified.”
Problems arise when researchers who are not local and
who are not trained field researchers take the data and ex-
trapolate to make general statements about the presence of
UFOs. Often, aerial phenomena like blimps, drones, and
lightning are misidentified as UFOs. These go into the data-
base, along with other reports. Several researchers I have met
have blindly taken all of the reports and lumped them under
the category of “UFO” sightings. This gives the impression
that there are more sightings of truly unknown phenomena
than is actual y the case. This “big data” approach skews the
data.13
The truth is potential y “out there,” but it’s unlikely to be
found in media productions.
✦
7
REAL AND IMAGINARY
Tyler D.’s Spiritual Conversion in Rome
The sky is a neighborhood.
— Dav i d G r o h l , Foo Fighters
THIS BOOK BEGAN WITH A journey, and it ends with a
journey, a plane trip to Rome where I visited the Vatican
Secret Archives and the Vatican Observatory in Castel
Gandolfo, one of the oldest established observatories in
the Western world. For centuries, monks, nuns, and priests
peered through telescopes at the starry skies here, nestled next
to a volcano and overlooking a startlingly blue volcanic lake.
I was a guest at the observatory and, astonishingly,
I was given the keys to their archive, which housed, among
many other things, works of Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus
Copernicus, revolutionary thinkers who bravely forged the
early paths of our current cosmologies. Like Tyler and James,
Copernicus was a radical thinker, a person who observed the
inexplicable and tried to make sense of it. At one time, the
works of Copernicus were banned by the church. Ironical y,
his books are now prominently displayed in the archive. At
the observatory, I felt as if I was in the quiet presence of the
hub of unorthodox science, a place where, final y, religion
and science did not compete. I was there with Tyler D.
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Almost two years had passed since Tyler had taken me
and James, blindfolded, to ground zero of the UFO myth in
New Mexico. Now, as the culmination of our work together,
I took Tyler to Rome, to ground zero of the Catholic faith.
Here he experienced a profound religious conversion, right
before my eyes. This was perhaps the most miraculous and
strange event of my eventful six years of research.
I have made the case that belief in extraterrestrials and
UFOs constitutes a new form of religion. Media and pop-
ular culture have successful y delivered a UFO mythos to
audiences through television series, music and music videos,
video games, cartoons, hoaxes, websites, and immersive and
mixed reality environments. New research in digital– human
interfaces reveals that it doesn’t matter what a person might
consciously believe, as data delivered through screens shoots
straight into memory, which then constructs models of
events. On a personal level, many individuals now interpret
their own traditional religions through the lens of the UFO
hermeneutic.
This chapter will explore a more complicated interpre-
tation of the social effects of contact, where the perceived
contact with a nonhuman intelligent, divine being is simul-
taneously imagined and real. I am not making an ontolog-
ical claim, that extraterrestrials are real in the sense that
couches are real, although they could be. I am arguing that
perceived contact has very real effects with powerful social
implications.
While in Rome I became reacquainted with a historical
figure whom I came to view as a meta- experiencer. Sister
Maria of Agreda was a cloistered Spanish nun who lived in
the seventeenth century. She was a mystic who wrote books
about the Virgin Mary that were very popular in her era
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and are still widely read. Her earliest works, later burned by
nuns of her convent, were cosmographies. They contained
descriptions of her astral journeys through space and over the
earth, which she recorded as topographies of other countries,
cultures, and space. As a young nun, she claimed to bilocate
to colonial New Mexico, where she said she met indigenous
Americans, taught them about the Catholic faith, and pre-
pared them to be baptized by Franciscan missionaries. The
Catholic Church recognizes bilocation as a rare “charism,”
or sacred skil . A person who bilocates is said to appear to
be in two places simultaneously. Maria’s story became very
popular in the seventeenth century and is even mentioned in
textbooks as part of the history of the western United States,
where I first encountered it as a student in high school. As
I progressed in my research at the Vatican and then in the ob-
servatory archive, I was struck by Maria’s similarity to Tyler.
T H E R E A S O N F O R T H E T R I P
I was in Rome to do two things, apparently unrelated. I had
agreed to go to the Vatican to help with research on the can-
onization accounts of a saint and a potential saint. While
I was there, I would take the opportunity to assess the his-
torical records of the search for extraterrestrial life— which
I assumed I would find in the observatory’s archive. The or-
ganization that funded my research trip to Rome had asked
me to analyze the canonization trial records of St. Joseph of
Cupertino and Sister Maria of Agreda. Why was St. Joseph
canonized, they wondered, and not Sister Maria? Their
stories were somewhat similar and they lived in the same era.
Joseph was a seventeenth- century Italian priest who was said
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to have levitated so frequently that the priests responsible for
the case for his canonization stopped counting the number
of people who presented themselves as witnesses. There are
copious records of the testimonies of his flights, levitations,
and even soaring to the ceiling of a cathedral— on at least
one occasion taking another person with him. The large
number suggests that they were probably not making these
stories up. They may have been, but seemingly something
had happened. Sister Maria of Agreda, however, was never
canonized, although her cause has been proposed to the
church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints many times.
Her biographers have said that while her body levitated
surrounded by a blinding white light in her small cell in
the
convent, she experienced herself soaring on the wings
of angels across the ocean and in space to what Spain called
“the New World.”
I had never had occasion to think of levitation as a re-
ality, but Tyler had— although not with respect to Catholic
saints. Within the UFO literature, levitation was a common
theme. People reported that during a UFO contact event
they had been levitated out of their beds into crafts, through
windows, and so forth. Tyler proposed to come with me
to Rome. The plan he suggested was that I would translate
the documents and he would offer his analysis based on his
work in aeronautics. Strangely, there was precedent for such
col aboration. A number of individuals from aeronautic
agencies had contacted me about my historical work on
levitating saints. A colleague whose work focuses on Joseph
of Cupertino had also been contacted by someone with
similar space- related affiliations. Apparently, at least some
members of the space industry believed in the possibility of
levitation.
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Tyler and Maria were, in a sense, inadvertent colonists
in their respective eras, who made imagined “first con-
tact.” Maria allegedly bilocated to New Mexico, and the
stories of her experiences helped Spanish missionaries ob-
tain funding to convert indigenous Americans. Tyler was
at the forefront of human efforts to colonize space. Just as
Maria’s voyages through space and to New Mexico preceded
and accompanied Spanish missionaries, Tyler’s mental
landscapes— which included the creation of alien- based
technologies— were supported by a massive media infra-
structure of UFO content, a fertile context for efforts to col-
onize and populate space. Maria’s case is similar to Tyler’s in
that she seeded the cultural imagination with supernatural
support for the missionaries’ work.
T Y L E R’ S S P I R I T UA L
E X P E R I E N C E : N O T E S
F R O M T H E F I E L D
It is one thing to describe how people utilize a UFO– biblical
or religious– UFO framework for understanding how their
religious traditions are linked to the new UFO mythos. It is
another thing entirely to see it taking place. Being witness
to the transformation of an individual’s religious belief and
