In her previous book, American Cosmos https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2023/08/unidentified-flying-religions.html, Paskula, a religious studies professor, did a remarkable job of showing how the UFO ecosystem functioned and how it possessed the properties of an emerging religion. In this follow-up volume, she takes the advice of the distinguished UFO researcher, and West Coast venture capitalist Jacques Vallee, and returns to explore the experience of key experiencers of such phenomena. She discovers how our media mediated images of such encounters deviate from their living reality, often by excluding their spiritual/religious dimensions and their accompanying paranormal realities.
I use the word 'realities' advisedly because though as a professional student of religion, Paskula concentrates on the phenomenology of people's life events and their emergent metaphysical and cosmological speculation, bracketing any view she takes as to their underlying truth or otherwise, you definitely emerge with a strengthening conviction that the world is not, and never has been, as it is depicted in our 'secular materialistic' perspective.
First, she reminds us that multiple cultures have understood themselves as encountering non-human intelligences—whether they be ''other beings'' or the more immediately recognisable realities of animals and plants.
Second, it takes us through several case studies of individuals who have had varied encounters and have developed frameworks for understanding these encounters at different levels of sophistication. These include a distinguished aeronautical psychologist who has used her understanding to transform airline safety, now exploring the 'mentalities' of astronauts, including both their transformed view of earth and its surroundings, and unexplained encounters with both UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) and unearthly music to a distinguished Australian scientist who had a waking vision of St Michael who invited him to slay a black demonic shape initiating a whole series of encounters that have subsequently haunted and transformed his life. The 'synchronicities' in this particular case study are a wonder to behold.
These multiple case studies, each highly compelling, invite us to consider different kinds of non-human intelligence (including AI) and all indicate a certain reluctance on the part of their subjects to fully disclose what they encountered and what they learned for the obvious fear of having their, wholly respectable credentials, questioned from our dominant perspective that increasingly look like a view from, as W.B.Yeats described it, 'our three provincial centuries'.
Paskula maintains that this pattern of discrediting is partly planned and targeted. Whereas authorities are increasingly willing to engage with the physical side of UAP - spaceships and potentially their occupants - witness the recent disclosures to the U.S. Congress, they remain deeply adverse to considering the "impossible'' dimensions of these phenomena. The witness's likelihood of developing new skills, including precognition, the materials that do not appear to not only not come from this world but not, in fact, from this universe; and, the UAPs ability to come and go, and perform feats outside the parameters of what normally would be considered possible.
Most importantly, Paskula maintains a very level-headed cool about what she is describing and introduces us to people who strike you as profoundly balanced, thoughtful individuals, often despite what they describe as having gone through. Indeed, to quote from another tradition of otherworldly encounter, that of Shamanism, it feels like one is condemned to be a UAP/non-human intelligence encounterer rather than something you would select by choice!
This leads to another significant issue as to whether such encounters are positive and benign, or are they more negative and sinister, and an answer appears to be it depends on context and the kind of encounter; and, indeed, you could imagine that a valuable piece of work, building on this, would be a taxonomy, a varieties of the experience of non-human intelligence!
All told, this excellent book advances our consideration of what we truly experience, what it might mean and how our prevailing culture, intentionally or not, limits the possibilities of what can be said and the frameworks in which it can be articulated. Returning to the phenomenology of the actual experience then becomes a genuinely liberatory act of exploring how the impossible might, in fact, be only too possible!
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