Diana Walsh Pasulka

Diana Pasulka is a scholar of religion who has spent the last decade researching belief systems and social organization around UFO phenomena. Needless to say, she's riding a wave at the moment. I gather that the first printing of this book sold out after she made an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast.

The subtitle of Encounters indicates that the ones encountered are "nonhuman intelligences," including the extraterrestrials postulated in many stories of "close" encounters. But the substance of the book consists of her encounters with experiencers and investigators of UFOs and related phenomena. Other than action-hero Iya Whiteley, "The Space Psychologist," and skeptical visionary Len Filppu, the experiencers are all pseudonymous--or at least their names have been truncated to prevent identification. In most cases we are given full narrative descriptions of their formative experiences with nonhuman intelligences, but these accounts are often overshadowed by their retrospective feelings and opinions.

Pasulka remains (or perhaps becomes) vigorously agnostic about the objective nature of the exotic intelligences, detailing such hypotheses as space aliens (increasingly dubious), angels or demons, post-human artificial intelligences in "another dimension," and a gnostic-hermetic anima mundi. She never uses the latter phrase, although it is extremely apposite to some of her musings. Her style of entertaining these various theories and her warmth toward her informants sometimes makes her seem like a credulous enthusiast, especially towards the end of the book.

An interesting feature of Pasulka's analysis is her recourse to two Platonic texts central to esoteric currents: the allegory of the cave from the Republic and the parable of Theuth and Thamus from the Phaedrus. Her emphasis in the first case is on the identity of the puppeteers in the cave, thus courting a borderline-paranoid reading of the epistemological dilemma. She relates the second text to the impossibility or inadvisability of documenting transcendent truths.

Pasulka ultimately proposes two methods to circumvent the evident redaction (149) to which all her documentary sources have been subjected. One is personal, mouth-to-ear transmission in secrecy. The other is what she follows her informant Jose in calling "protocols," which are personal disciplines to remove epistemological noise and to be open to non-ordinary experiences. Both are touchstones of traditional esotericism, of course.

In the chapter "Gnosis," Pasulka refers extensively to the "Rosicrucian" orientation of Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée. Since I am familiar with the extraordinary level of diversity among doctrines claiming that label, I was frustrated that she emphasized the "non-denominational" unaffiliated status of the men. It wasn't until concluding that section that she mentioned in passing the authorities they acknowledged in modern Rosicrucianism: Rudolf Steiner and Max Heindel (131). (For what it's worth, I have read in the works of both men, and find Steiner interesting and occasionally profound, and Heindel decidedly loopy.)

This book is a fast read, but it seemed a little sloppier to me than her previous effort American Cosmic. Still, those who liked the earlier book will probably enjoy it, and it is a pretty engaging introduction to the beyond-nuts-and-bolts school of ufological investigation.… (mehr)