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Today on somewhere in the skies, we are joined by author and professor of religious studies,

Diana Walsh Pousselker, to discuss her new book, Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligence.

This is somewhere in the skies, with Ryan Spud.

Diana, welcome back to somewhere in the skies.

So happy to be here.

Thank you, thank you. Now, it's been a while since we actually last spoke. I had you

wanted to talk about American Cosmic, obviously, when it first came out, and then I had the rare

opportunity to have both you and Leslie Kane in conversation on the show as well.

But now we are back, you are back with a brand new book, Encounters. But I want to ask,

before we even dive into Encounters, your new book, what has that journey been like since American

Cosmic? I know so much has happened since the book came out. And what ultimately led to kind of

this, I guess American Cosmic, part two in so many words. Yeah, what has the journey been like

since we last spoke about American Cosmic? Yeah, sure. All right, so I started the research

for American Cosmic in 2012. And I had, I must admit, I was not a believer in UFOs and I had been

studying religion my whole life. And so when I came into UFOs, I had seen some parallels between

aerial phenomena that was described, like, say in the 1500s by European Catholics. And then

what people were describing today. And I thought it would be a really, you know, very uncomplicated

look at this topic today, you know, what's been going on. The more I got into it, the more I

recognized that people were actually seeing actual real things. And that made me like reinterpret

...