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I recently finished reading The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny, from religious scholar Diana Pasulka. Released this summer, The Others follows Pasulka’s previous books, American Cosmic and Encounters. It’s a good book, and if you are curious about the intersection of “the phenomenon” and religion, I recommend it — with a caveat.
I read American Cosmic a while back, and it had a lot of ingredients that satisfy readers who are obsessed with UFOs. It tackles subjects like UAP materials from what could be the Roswell crash, the wild saga of experiencer and orb-summoner Chris Bledsoe, and how things like UAPs shape what scientists and laypeople alike believe. American Cosmic was first published in 2019, which doesn’t seem like that long ago to me, but since then, there’s a great, big elephant that has stomped into the room and demands addressing: artificial intelligence.
The subject matter of The Others is grounded more in religious history, early science fiction, and AI than it is in UFOs. That surprised me a bit, but it was also refreshing, in a way. It tickled a part of me that hasn’t had much tickling since I was actively studying literature and philosophy in college. The Others read much more like an academic paper than the typical (and more sensationalist) UFO content out there. And it does, indeed, address the important topic of how these subjects are involved in shaping a new belief system.
Pasulka seems to lament that people nowadays are living with less of an inner world than ever before, and things like AI might be making it worse. At the same time, belief in UFOs is reawakening people to the idea that there’s more to reality than the materialist worldview has allowed us to see. It’s funny because, at least speaking for myself personally, she’s exactly right. As a youngster, I was interested in magic, the paranormal, reincarnation, and the beliefs of various (especially) Eastern religions. I abandoned that as a young adult, ignoring or dismissing anything that couldn’t be explained by modern science. Coming to terms with the reality of things like UAPs has reignited that spark and reopened that door to the interior world that Pasulka seems to deem so important.
Still, Pasulka has plenty of warnings for believers, some of which she discusses in an interview with AJ from The Why Files in his “Basement” series of interviews.
I suppose I was expecting from The Others something more along the lines of the many other UFO books out there — sinister mystery, coverups, and tridactyl beings. Instead, I got a whole new rabbit hole to dive into (and to that effect, I’m currently reading more scholarly literature, about Gnosticism specifically).
So, while not like other UFO books, if you’re looking for something that ties in other topics and reads more like a dissertation than an encounter narrative, give The Others a go.
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