by D W Pasulka
I ever work at my day job again.”
“I wil ,” I said.
I knew that Tyler was having a spiritual conversion, and
that its effects in his life would be completely different from
what he expected. I had a feeling that he would learn more
about what the future held for him when we went to the ob-
servatory archive in Castel Gandolfo.
I was feeling very uneasy. To me the Vatican looked
like a medieval feudal palace. The constant presence of the
elite guards put me on edge. I understood that I was lucky
that Tyler had met Father McDonnell and that we were
then invited to attend several important meetings, but this
was only because of Tyler’s access. None of this would have
happened had I been there alone.
As it turned out, our time at the Vatican Observatory
couldn’t have been more different from our experience at
the Vatican. Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the
observatory, is a well- known astronomer who specializes
in meteorites and asteroids. He is an American Jesuit with
degrees from MIT and the University of Arizona. After we
drove up to the observatory and parked, Brother Guy greeted
us warmly. He gave us a brief tour of the premises, careful y
showing us which doors we could enter and which were
off- limits. After the tour, Brother Guy presented me with
the keys to their archive. I have spent half of my life looking
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through archives— and this was unprecedented. Archivists
are usual y very protective of their holdings, and we were
going to be looking at the works of Johannes Kepler and
other great scientists of Western cosmology. When Tyler saw
the list of books we would be viewing, his face lit up. He had
spent his entire life exploring space, and now he would get to
see the original works that had paved the way for his present
vocation.
The archive itself is beautiful. On exhibit are old
technologies of space exploration: the first telescopes de-
veloped to scour the galaxy. Brother Guy had lined the
walls with old photographs of nuns who had worked at
the observatory and helped to chart star patterns. He was
correcting the historical record by including those who
had been left out of it. I felt like I was home, and Tyler
did too.
Every morning, around 10 a.m., the brothers and priests
would gather for cappuccino and cafe latte in a room near the
archive. As anyone who has been to Italy can attest, Italian
coffee may be the best in the world. Tyler, who used to avoid
coffee as part of his healthy living protocol, had cast aside re-
straint and was now addicted. We stood in a small room with
about ten Jesuits with various types of PhDs, all connected
to space in some way— astrophysics, astronomy, and related
disciplines.
“What are you looking for in our archive?” one of the
brothers asked.
I wasn’t going to say that I was writing a book about
the topic of UFOs. That could have immediately alienated
us from these amazing scholars. I told the truth but without
using the word “UFO.”
“We are looking for instances of aerial phenomena.”
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“Aerial phenomena?” Several of the others stood and
stared at us.
“Yes.”
I waited a few seconds, and then I laughed. To my relief,
they laughed too. That was the end of the conversation.
To set the record straight, the Jesuits at the Vatican
Observatory are not actively searching for UFOs, nor are
they engaged in anything related to ufology. Brother Guy
has a wonderful sense of humor and some of his jokes and
comments, taken out of context, have fed into conspiracy
theories about the Catholic Church. What these scientists are
doing is revealing that science is compatible with religion.
And they are doing it so effectively that, after hearing Brother
Guy speak about his vocation, my Baptist scientist colleague
chose to become a Catholic.
T Y L E R’ S T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A N D
H I S R E V I S E D U N D E R S TA N D I N G
On our first morning in the archive, Brother Guy stuck
his head in the door and peeked in at us. We were busy
identifying books we wanted to read that day. Brother Guy
told us that he was heading up to the actual observatory
where the telescopes were housed and asked if we wanted to
come to a talk he was giving to a group of young scientists
from the European Space Agency. Of course we did. I’d heard
Brother Guy speak several times and I knew that his insights,
which were always delivered with humor, could be profound
and transformative. I had a feeling that this talk would in-
fluence Tyler, who was on fire to change his life. We jumped
up from our desks and helped Brother Guy get organized
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for the talk. Soon we were in a car driving through the gar-
dens of the estate and up to the top of the small mountain,
which overlooked a crystal- blue volcanic lake. The first thing
I noticed, besides the breathtaking scenery, was a fleet of
sleek cars lined up in a row, gleaming in the morning sun. It
was an impressive sight.
The young scientists were eager to see the historical hub of
their own space program and to meet the Jesuit who directed
this enchanting observatory. They were welcoming to Tyler
and me when Brother Guy introduced us. I was introduced
as a professor from the University of North Carolina; when
Tyler was introduced, along with his affiliations, the youthful
crowd burst into cheers and applause. I was proud that, at
least among these smart young Europeans, Tyler, whom
I considered an American hero, was not invisible.
As I predicted, Brother Guy’s talk was funny, informa-
tive, and profound. He made the young scientists laugh and
cry. He addressed the conspiracy theories about what he and
the other scientists do at the observatory by showing images
from popular culture, such as scenes from popular movies
and books that paint Castel Gandolfo as a hub of mystery
and intrigue, and then the reality, which turned out to be
pictures of the priests and brothers sitting together discussing
the composition of meteorites. The pictures conveyed the
mundane daily lives of the observatory scientists, even if
they did have Italian lattes. The popular depictions of Castel
Gandolfo were so far removed from the reality that the
whole group erupted in laughter. Brother Guy talked about
how, after he received his PhD, he felt a call to help people
in need and had joined the Peace Corp. Stationed in a very
poor country, he helped to feed the people of the small town
where he was posted and helped them obtain clean water. At
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night the vil agers would gather together and implore him
to take out h
is telescope so they could look up at the night
sky. They asked him about the meaning of what they saw.
It was then, he said, that something within him clicked. He
realized that he had a vocation, and that was to help people
realize that there is more to life than just what to eat for
lunch. The wonder of the cosmos and the questions that
arise from it were part of the human condition. It was as im-
portant as the bread we eat, as it fed the soul. It was literal y
spiritual food. He realized that he was in a unique position
to help foster this wonder.
Brother Guy’s words sent an electric charge through the
audience. When he finished, everyone rose and filed into the
observatory for a demonstration of the telescope. Tyler was
introspective. I could tell that Brother Guy’s talk had affected
him the way I thought it would. Not only did Tyler have a de-
sire to help people in a meaningful way, like Brother Guy, but
also he had similar training and also worked in space- related
research. He was touched by the wonder of the cosmos, and
his life was a testament to a type of vocation not recognized
by secular institutions. Here, at Castel Gandolfo, he saw that
there were scientists who lived a life of vocation, or calling.
They wedded their spiritual lives to their work lives. They
didn’t compartmentalize religion into attendance at a re-
ligious service one day a week. Their faith, spirituality, and
religion permeated everything they did. And they were
scientists.
That night Tyler and I were in the archive, looking
at the first of the books by Kepler. I had noticed that the
observatory’s neighbor was a convent and the home of clois-
tered nuns, and my own room was adjacent to theirs. As I sat
in the archive of the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo,
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staring at Johannes Kepler’s analysis of Copernicus’s cos-
mology, I was struck by the thought that Sister Maria of
Agreda, whose records I had seen, had claimed to have
bilocated to New Mexico, the part of the world where Tyler
had taken James and me to visit the supposed UFO crash
site. I looked up quickly. Tyler looked at me, surprised by the
suddenness of my move.
“I was blindfolded on the trip to New Mexico,” I said,
“so I don’t know exactly where I was. But we just read about
Sister Maria and she describes where she went. Is this the
same place where she imagined she went?”
Tyler’s face appeared to freeze and he looked back down
at his book. He wasn’t going to answer me. The small archive
suddenly felt large to me, not in any spatial way, but in a way
that fused it with my memories of New Mexico.
S I S T E R M A R IA O F AG R E DA’ S
E P I S O D E S O F B I L O C AT I O N
In the early 1600s, as Spain was exploring and colonizing
western North America, the youthful Maria claimed
that with the help of angels she flew through space and
over the ocean to New Mexico. Her sister nuns said they
witnessed Maria during her alleged bilocations and that
she rose a few feet off the floor and was surrounded by
brilliant light.
The veracity of Maria’s account of her experiences
was bolstered by reported encounters between Franciscan
missionaries in New Mexico and members of a native tribe,
the Jumanos, who presented themselves as eager to be
baptized. Allegedly, the Jumanos said that they had been
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visited by a “lady in blue” who spoke to them about the
Catholic faith.1
This story traveled back to Spain with Alonso de
Benavides, the first commissioner of the Inquisition in New
Mexico. He met with Maria and questioned her closely about
what she saw and with whom she spoke. Benavides was
impressed by her account, which included details of things
of which he thought she could not have been aware, and he
made a report to the king of Spain, Philip IV.
Maria’s “journeys” were strategical y politicized by
Benavides. He and others used them to justify their con-
tinued funding and efforts to expand the Spanish empire.
The missionaries wanted to believe, and most likely did be-
lieve, that Sister Maria actual y appeared, in physical form, to
the people who lived there. Benavides and others used this
miraculous story as proof that God wanted this area under
Spanish rule.
As I revisited this historiography, I thought about what
was erased in its telling. Sitting in the archive, it was hard
not to remember Sister Maria’s early work on cosmog-
raphy and her recognition of some of the “heretical” sci-
entific discoveries of her own era. Those works, her first,
were burned, and only a few copies remain. She wrote that
she saw the earth from space, and it was a spinning sphere.
She is best known as the author of the Mystical City of God,
a biography of the Virgin Mary, and her earlier work on
science and cosmography is largely ignored.2 I could not
help but draw a correlation with Tyler and his own imag-
inings of how humans will eventual y explore and live in
space. Was Tyler a contemporary Maria, existing in a sort of
cloister of invisibility? Maria imagined herself traveling to
what was for her a new world and making contact with its
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inhabitants, and this imaginary/ real voyage paved the way
for real missionaries. Tyler’s visions are supported by tele-
vision and media and we accept, on an “imaginary” level,
Tyler’s version of space travel. Maria’s visions were spread
through rumors, stories, and circulated letters. Today,
visions of UFOs and space travel are fueled by a vast media
industry.
Just as in Tyler’s case, there were inexplicable realist
aspects to Maria’s imaginings. Had Maria been alive today,
perhaps she would have been a remote viewer with the
Stanford Research Institute, as she seems to have possessed
the qualifications and skil s. There is a history of psychic
cosmonauts within religious traditions, people who claim to
fly through space with the help of angels or beings of light.
Even if Maria in some sense creatively imagined a place to
which she had never been, but had perhaps read about, it
would not discredit the very real history of how her reported
travels helped legitimize continued Spanish expansion. As
Jeff Kripal suggests, instead of positing an either/ or scenario
that negates the inexplicable and anomalous and reduces
Maria’s claims to purely imaginings and nothing more, why
not consider the story within a framework of both/ and? This
would allow both the possibility that Maria real y had some
experiences that cannot be easily explained away or reduced
to political machinations and that these experiences helped
pave the way for Spanish colonization in a world that was
<
br /> new to them, a place where people had already existed for
thousands of years.
Maria articulated her own version of the events and their
inexplicable nature. She even criticized Benavides for being
too “literal” in his interpretation of her bilocations. At the
same time, she insisted that they real y did happen. She wrote:
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God showed me those things by means of abstract images of
the kingdoms and what was going on there, or perhaps they
were shown to me there. Neither then nor now was, or am,
I capable of knowing the way it happened. . . . Whether or not
I real y and truly went in my body is something about which
I cannot be certain. And it is not surprising I have questions
in my mind, for Saint Paul understood things better than
I and yet tel s us that he was carried up to the third heaven but
does not know whether it was in the body or out of it. What
I can assure you beyond any doubt is that the case did in fact
happen, and that as far as I know, it had nothing to do with the
devil or wrong desires.3
Significantly, Maria notes that her travels would not have
happened without the assistance of angels, or angelic beings.
Angelic beings show up, again and again, in the discourse of
the psychic cosmonauts. Of course, Tyler believes in beings
that help him develop technologies.
Empirical or not, Maria’s imaginings helped Spain colo-
nize part of America. As a woman living in the seventeenth
century who dared to write, she inspired suspicion and had
to answer to the Inquisition. She later claimed that she was
pressured to answer to Benavides in ways that he desired.
Some of her writings were burned. Later, she recanted her
recantations and rewrote many of her former works from
memory. Colonial expansion was forged through the energy,
money, and desires of the Spanish elite. Maria’s voyages and
“first contact” were put in service to this end.
Across the table in the silent archive, Tyler was diligently
searching through the pages of an eighteenth- century book
about electromagnetism. I considered that his own special
skil s were used to serve an industry that sought colonization
and expansion of space. It was also an endeavor undertaken
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by the elite. The heads of the private space industries are