Diana Pasulka

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her book American Cosmic (2019) examined belief in UFOs as a modern religious form and described her travels with scientists she identified only by pseudonyms, including a trip to an alleged crash site in New Mexico and a visit to the Vatican archives. Encounters (2023) continued the study with people who report contact, among them Chris Bledsoe.

Pasulka writes as an academic observer, and her books are documented scholarship. Their contested element is the identity and credibility of the anonymous scientists whose claims she relays; one, 'Tyler D.', has since been identified in the press as a NASA contractor, Timothy Taylor. Pasulka does not herself assert that the objects are non-human, though she has said the people she studies believe it and that the material she was shown was strange.

The corpus interviews her twice, once with Karl Nell on biblical and angelic readings of the phenomenon, and cites her in several other episodes. The knowledge base records her work as documented and treats the claims she relays from others as testimony at one remove.