From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthad, and this is interesting times.

There have been a bunch of flying saucer crazes in American history.

But the one we're living through right now started back in 2017 when this very newspaper,

the New York Times, reported on weird encounters experienced by U.S. military pilots.

And since then, it's given us congressional hearings, would-be UFO whistleblowers,

and we've had a brief panic over mysterious objects in the sky over the state of New Jersey.

I'm not persuaded that we're actually being visited by E.T.

However, this whole era has left me with a lot of weird, unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistleblowers actually know, or think they know,

about unidentified aerial phenomena.

And does at least part of the U.S. government really, really want Americans to believe in UFOs?

And if so, why? To help me search for answers, I asked Diana Walsh Pesulka to join me.

She's a religious studies professor who writes about UFO experiences as a very American kind of religion.

But she's also been pulled into this weird world of apparent government believers,

and she's become something of a believer herself. So Diana Walsh Pesulka,

welcome to interesting times. Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

So we're going to start by talking about what the UFO phenomenon is, especially as it relates to your own academic work.

And we're going to get into strange lights in the sky and government conspiracies probably as we go.

But I want to start where your work starts at a more personal level with individual experiences,

encounters, abduction narratives, conversations, and so on. So you're a professor of religious

studies. Why don't you talk about how religious studies led you into the UFO experience

or the UFO debate?

Yeah.

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