by D W Pasulka
been subjected to the universal mass rumor of the UFO. It is
something from which none of us could possibly escape. We
have all been exposed, from childhood and throughout our
lives, to media about the UFO, both as entertainment and as
a possible reality, as when it surfaces as a topic on local news
stations. How does one come to deem an anomalous event a
“UFO event”? Often this is facilitated by a book encounter .
T H E B O O K E N C O U N T E R
Each of the people I interviewed who said they believed their
anomalous experiences were connected to the UFO phe-
nomenon had had a “book encounter.” At some point after
their experiences, which sometimes persisted over half a
lifetime, they were given, came upon, or in some perceived
miraculous way were directed to read a book that put their
experiences into perspective and seemed to explain them.
Arthur Koestler describes the serendipitous arrival of the
very book one needs when one needs it as the experience
of “the Library angel.”7 It was Carl Sagan’s book about the
cosmos that changed Tyler’s life and started him on a path of
fusing what he learned in the space program with his ideas
I N T H E F I E L D | 1 0 1
about biotechnologies to form companies that helped heal
people. The book appeared mysteriously in his luggage, at a
point in his life when he was lost and desperate. For James,
the book was John Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters
with Aliens, which he picked up on a whim, believing it to
be science fiction. The book read like his own biography. It
helped him frame his experiences as being related to UFOs.
Scott’s book, Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for
Extraterrestrials, popped out at him while he was walking
through a bookstore. Although this is not surprising— he
was in a bookstore, after all— the book was unlike anything
that he would have chosen to read, yet he felt compelled
to read it. Echoing James’s experience, the book seemed to
Scott to read like his biography, and triggered the processes
whereby he started to piece together his obsession. The book
encounter differs from the library angel experience in that
the books offer the readers an explanatory framework for
their experiences.
One doesn’t have to accept the book’s framework. Scott’s
care and sophistication with regard to his belief structures,
qualities he says he did not possess in the beginning of his
research but forged over time, are instructive. It shows how
anomalous experiences become connected to a cultural
narrative. As I studied his photographs and placed them
back on the table, Scott offered his observations.
“After I read the book Out There, and numerous other
books, I thought differently about the experiences I had as
a child. Real y, I could not avoid the fact that they were so
similar to what was being reported by people who said they
were abducted and whose stories were in the books like
Out There. But I also knew that I didn’t know this beyond
a doubt. I could not, honestly, make a direct link between
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my childhood experiences and the aerial objects I started to
record.
“But, intuitively, I think there is a link.”
Most people are not as careful or as restrained as Scott. If
they have had anomalous experiences and they happen upon
a book that seems to explain them, they will assume that their
experiences relate to the theory presented in the book. This
is a normal process, and it is what Jung was getting at when
he proposed the concept of amplificatory interpretation, in
which the unconscious amplifies the associations related
to an image or a group of images and creates a meaningful
framework that is then associated with events or experiences.
It is partly how cultural narratives are produced, and while
the concept appears reductive, it is not. It admits to a real,
objective event; it just refrains from identifying, with cer-
tainty, what the event is. Instead, it focuses on the meaning
projected upon and associated with the event.
I have delved into the processes of the creation of the
UFO cultural narrative elsewhere.8 I’ve interviewed Edward
Carlos, a professor of art whose anomalous experiences were
featured in John Mack’s book Abduction. He resisted the term
“abduction” so strongly that I felt the need to rewrite and
publish his experiences from his perspective. His story and
its subsequent publication il ustrate well the process of first
experiencing anomalous events, then determining “what”
they are, and ultimately determining what they are called.
Carlos (as he likes to be addressed) noted that while Mack
was attentive to his feelings, he felt that Mack never had a
grasp of the real phenomenon. Carlos used the language of
several traditions to il ustrate his experiences. He said the
light beings he encountered were sometimes like angels and
sometimes like aliens, but that they transcended the language
I N T H E F I E L D | 1 03
of both Catholic and contemporary UFO traditions. Yet his
experiences became UFO related for a wide audience after
the publication and success of Mack’s book. Carlos never
called his experiences abductions or said they had to do with
UFOs, but that is how they were understood after Mack’s
book framed them that way.
In my article, I described the experience of St. Teresa
of Avila, a sixteenth- century Catholic nun. An extraordi-
nary woman, she instigated such significant change for the
Catholic Church of her time, both theological y and social y,
that the modern church bestowed upon her one of its highest
honors: Pope Paul VI made her an official “doctor” of the
church, a title previously held almost exclusively by men. In
the beginning of my shift away from researching Catholic
history and toward modern- day UFO events, I revisited
Teresa’s own testimony about one of her famous anomalous
events. Her status as a mystic began with a most unusual
occurrence, which even she had a hard time understanding.
It is commonly referred to as the ecstasy of Teresa, or the
“transverberation” of St. Teresa, which means “to be pierced
through.” She wrote about it in her diary:
Beside me, on the left hand, appeared an angel in bodily form,
such as I am not in the habit of seeing except very rarely.
Though I often have visions of angels, I do not see them. They
come to me only after the manner of the first type of vision
that I described. But it was our Lord’s will that I should see this
angel in the following way. He was not tall but short, and very
beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be
one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire. In
his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there
appeared to be a point of
fire. This he plunged into my heart
several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he
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pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly
consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe
that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by
this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it
to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God.
This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has
some share in it.9
I had read this account many times. An angel pierces
Teresa, and she goes into a religious ecstasy. That is how
I had always read this passage. After I had my realization
that modern UFO reports were in some ways similar to his-
torical accounts of religious phenomena, I decided to re-
read some of the primary sources from Catholic history.
My new reading proved very interesting. I had never paid
attention to the fact that her description differs radical y
from most of the artistic representations of it. There are
paintings and also a famous sculpture by Bernini. They de-
pict Teresa near a little angel with a small dart. They do
not depict the il uminated nature of the small being, nor do
they show Teresa’s confusion about the being (why it was
real, and not imagined, which would be difficult anyway).
I was particularly struck by her confusion. She doesn’t
know how to interpret this being. Is it an angel? And why
is it different from the angels she has seen in the past? To
think through this event and make sense of it, she turns
to the books of her time, Catholic angelology, which was
known by her confessors, the men in whom she confided.
Her book encounter, facilitated by her confessors, helped
her understand her experience as religious, having to do
with Catholicism and God.
The book encounter is one step in the process of deter-
mining that anomalous experiences are related to UFOs or,
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as in Teresa’s case, to God and religion. In these examples
the medium is a book, but it could very well be a movie or
a documentary that provides the explanatory framework.
Interestingly, these two interpretations— that the experiences
are related to religion or that they are related to UFOs— are by
no means mutual y exclusive. There is a “biblical– UFO” her-
meneutic that provides a way to interpret these experiences
as being both religious and related to UFOs. Several religious
groups, such as the Nation of Islam, are informed by such a
strategy.
Eddy, an experiencer I met, saw no problem conflating
UFOs with biblical events. I met Eddy at a local UFO con-
ference where he related his experiences. He said that he reg-
ularly saw flying saucers, usual y in formation, and always
fifteen or more, though often nobody around him could see
them, leaving him as the only witness. For a year he tried
to get his wife to see the saucers, and final y she did. She
even caught them on camera, producing ten pictures of the
saucers. He had brought a magnifying glass to the conference
so we could get a good look at them.
When I asked him what he thought of these visitations,
he asked me if I had read the Bible. I certainly had, I told him.
“Then you should already know what these are,” he said,
surprised.
“I might know, but please explain.”
“Jesus went up in the clouds on a saucer, and he will
come down again just as he went up,” he explained.
Some theologians read the Bible in a similar manner.
For them, the UFO or flying saucer is equivalent to aerial
phenomena mentioned in scripture. In the late 1960s,
Presbyterian minister Barry Downing advocated for this in-
terpretation in The Bible and Flying Saucers. The Reverend
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Michael J. S. Carter, a graduate of Union Theological
Seminary, offers a contemporary version of this claim. His
book, Alien Scriptures: Extraterrestrials in the Holy Bible,
argues that the Bible is a history of human contact with
extraterrestrials.10
SY N C H R O N I C I T Y A N D
T H E U F O E V E N T
They’ve always been a reality; what they are is still a theory
— Dav i d S t i n n e t t
One of Scott’s mentors and inspirations is David Stinnett.
David has been a UFO researcher for more than thirty
years and served as the director of the annual New Jersey
UFO conference. He has been a student of the Bible for over
twenty years, and he is a Christian. He is an active field re-
searcher who travels to hotspots of activity with his video
equipment, the deployment of which is guided by the years
of knowledge and experience he brings to his work. David,
of all the researchers and scientists I met, is the least likely
to draw any conclusions whatsoever about the phenomenon.
His influence on Scott helped In the Field maintain its rig-
orous standards.
“Many years ago I was going about my business on an or-
dinary day in New Jersey. I was on a back road in central New
Jersey. I then saw a gun- metal- gray aircraft. It looked exactly
like a C140 transport. It was creeping up very slowly, and
that caught my attention. It was completely silent. I exited
my car with my camera. When I tried to capture the object in
my finder, it would not show up. I jumped back into my car
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and tested the camera on other objects. My camera was just
fine. I jumped out again to capture the image, and the thing
was gone.
“I went home and walked into the room where I keep a li-
brary of UFO papers, white papers, research, books, and lots
of information. Instead of grabbing what was most conven-
ient, like something on the top of the pile of papers, I reached
under a huge stack of papers and wrested out a VHS tape. It
was a video of Dr. Bruce Cornet giving a lecture to the New
Jersey UFO Congress. In the video, Cornet described, in per-
fect detail, the craft I had just seen.”
There was a pause in our interview. I said, “A
synchronicity.”
“Yeah, a synchronicity.” He said this deadpan.
I could tell that he wasn’t buying it. He had related an
event that was like a book encounter but involving a VHS
tape, but he wasn’t taking the bait. I found this refreshing—
and fascinating.
“Synchronicities are one aspect of the phenomenon,”
he elaborated. “If a researcher does not experience them, he
or she is not real y doing the research right. But— and this
is important— a researcher doesn’t have to accept that the
synchronicities mean anything. They need to be careful, be-
cause synchronicities are very convincing when you experi-
ence them. They could lead you off the right track, and the
right track is to not be convi
nced.
“We see orbs, or we see unexplainable craft, and
most people jump to the conclusion that it represents
extraterrestrials from outer space. I don’t make that jump.
“One aspect of the phenomenon, pointed out by Vallee
as well as by George Hansen, is that it tricks and deceives.11
Researchers, when they encounter the real phenomenon, are
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so amazed by these aspects of it that they go off the deep end
in their theories and conclusions. They are convinced that
only they have these meaningful synchronicities. These very
real experiences dupe them into believing that the phenom-
enon is what they think it is. Wel , it’s not.”
Synchronicity, as defined by Carl Jung, is the coming to-
gether of inner and outer events that are not causal y linked
but are very meaningful to those who have the experience. The
UFO community is not the only community that experiences
synchronicity. In my research into Christian communities,
I found that many people interpret synchronicities, or mean-
ingful coincidences, as signs from God, or meaningful events
that show them that they are on the “right path in life.” David’s
position on experiences of synchronicity was atypical; he did
not assume that they meant anything deep or profound. He
certainly was aware of them, however.
I had been introduced to a similar position of restraint in
the midst of having a full- blown synchronicity. After college
I had tried to read the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His
work had come highly recommended, but the passages I read
always seemed misogynist. After a few pages of reading
I would close the book in disgust. Friends insisted, however,
that I should try to get past that unfortunate aspect of his
work. One friend had given me a copy of The Gay Science,
which I placed on my nightstand and promptly forgot.
It was New Year’s Eve. That night, I went to bed early
and fell asleep immediately. At midnight I was awakened by
fireworks and the merry- making of New Year’s revelers. Amid
the noise, I had no hope of returning to sleep, so I picked up
the book on my nightstand. I opened it up randomly. The
book was organized as a series of aphorisms. I happened to
open it to the only three aphorisms in the whole book devoted
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to New Year’s Eve. The first was titled “Sanctus Januarius”