In the years since 2017, when this newspaper first reported on the unusual objects that U.S. military pilots reported zipping around their planes, I’ve occasionally been accused by friends and colleagues of being a U.F.O. “believer.” To merit that description, though, you actually need to have a specific belief about the tangle of phenomena involved in the story — from the zipping objects themselves to the would-be U.F.O. whistle-blowers, the tales of Defense Department disinformation and the U.S. senators who seem strangely interested in the subject. Instead I just have a lot of questions, which I pose to Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, in the latest episode of “Interesting Times.” Pasulka is the author of two very interesting books about U.F.O. culture, which she approached initially through the lens of religious experience, studying the commonalities between flying-saucer stories and supernatural narratives. But her writing attracted the attention of U.F.O. believers inside the U.S. government, and her contact with these sources turned her into some sort of believer herself. Our conversation ranged across two interpretations of the data. In one, U.F.O. enthusiasm is a science-fiction-tinged form of spiritual experience and religious storytelling. In the other the phenomenon connects, however mysteriously, to something that a government might reasonably try to study — or even cover up.
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