ENCOUNTERS: EXPERIENCES WITH NONHUMAN INTELLIGENCES

This compact text is enormously informative and very readable. Diana Pasulka is a professor of the history of religion who has turned her attention from the study of miraculous events in Christian history to witness reports of UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) sightings, and finds they have much in common. She meets the legendary ufologist Jacques Vallée, and delves into the mysteries of the Invisible College. The people she talks to range from space specialists to ordinary members of society who have had extraordinary experiences.

In June 2021, the US military and the Pentagon released an unclassified report, acknowledging their funding of secret programmes to study UFOs, including one that systematically debunked experiencer reports. Diana assumes the role of friendly and unbiased researcher, collecting stories and filling gaps to further our understanding of unidentified phenomena. Some interviewees are named while others, like “Tyler D” and “Gray Man”, prefer to remain incognito. Diana helpfully provides the reader with technical definitions as they arise. Taking notes is useful, because there is no index.

One of her contacts is Dr Iya Whiteley, a British space psychologist, born in Latvia and based at University College London. Iya prepares pilots and astronauts for unusual encounters in the sky and disconcerting changes of consciousness as they contact the outer reaches of Earth’s orbit. Her work is transforming a culture of secrecy as pilots become more willing to report anomalies, the community acknowledges potential hazards, and the skies are safer. Iya is a woman of many talents. Her Newborn Global Language Project introduces babies to a cosmic perceptual network that includes the sounds of insects and animals and geometric patterns, all of which are part of Earth’s language.

Jose is a former student of Diana’s, a military veteran, and a recipient of visitations by demons, angels and aerial phenomena since childhood—an organic network he links with the noösphere of Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard to Chardin. Soon after joining the university, he began organising weekly meetings of veterans to share stories, transmit messages of hope, and prevent suicides. Nowadays he teaches high school students to work out, unplug from social media, be self-sufficient, embodied, and in tune with their feelings. Jose focuses on mental health, giving “young people a fighting chance against the armies of bots and algorithms trained on the destruction of their self-esteem and their cognitive abilities” (p. 138).

Taking an alternative perspective, Simone believes our apocalyptic age anticipates the start of a new era in which the multimodal capacities of artificial intelligence will be essential to communication. She jokes that her family says she “is an AI from the future” (p. 167). Diana reminds us of Socrates’ resistance to committing his knowledge to script. Plato also warned that when we put our trust in the written word we remember less; while we are eternally grateful to him for writing down the Dialogues.

Simone is one of three people interviewed who doesn’t so much memorise as download information. Another is Patricia, whose father was engaged in a secret space programme and participated in the Invisible College’s oral tradition. Diana and Patty became friends, as professors at the same university, and went out together with their children, developing a bond of trust that would enable Patty to let down her guard and talk about her childhood. As a schoolgirl, Patty was embarrassed when asked to show her mathematical calculations because her answers had been downloaded through spontaneous cognition. Her upbringing was severely restricted owing to the secrecy surrounding her father’s work of which she knew next to nothing. Her dialogue with Diana is revealing.

In 2022, during a conference to celebrate Rice University’s acquisition of the Archives of the Impossible, Diana met Len. Their conversation would add to Len’s sequence of synchronicities that began with a UFO sighting at Brockport, New York, in 1967, when he and his friends were sixteen. This happened during the operation of Project Blue Book (1952-69), which studied UFOs while simultaneously debunking UFO reports and the people who reported them. Len’s peer group shared the sighting, which Len described in detail to his father. His father remained quietly sceptical until Len happened to come across an independent witness statement in a newspaper, which described the phenomenon exactly as Len had. Only then did his father believe him. The “book encounter” is an important aspect of synchronicity.

One of Diana’s conclusions is that “The public reception of the experiencer’s report often shapes how, and even if, the experiencer remembers the event” (p. 212). Another is “that UFO encounters must be placed with contexts and not extracted from the lives of the people who encounter them” (pp. 198-99). In her closing pages she draws parallels with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (The Republic)—humankind’s journey from imprisonment in dark ignorance to the light of knowledge—adopting its framework as a guide to understanding UFO cultures and communities.