The New American Religion: How UFOs Became Sacred

How a university professor’s groundbreaking research reveals that belief in extraterrestrial life has quietly become America’s fastest-growing faith

July 26, 2025

In the sterile corridors of academia, where tenure-track professors debate postmodern theory and citation counts, Diana Walsh Pasulka made a discovery that would reshape our understanding of American spirituality. The University of North Carolina professor, whose specialty had been Catholic history and miraculous events, stumbled upon something extraordinary: more than half of American adults now believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. Among young Americans, that number soars to 75 percent.

These aren’t statistics about casual curiosity or science fiction fandom. This is belief, the kind that shapes worldviews, influences life decisions, and provides comfort in times of crisis. The kind that, historically, we’ve called religion.

Pasulka’s six-year ethnographic study, published by Oxford University Press as “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology,” presents a startling thesis: we are witnessing the birth of a new American religion, one that has quietly grown to rival traditional Christianity in scope and influence. But unlike the faiths that came before, this emerging belief system places technology, not scripture, at its sacred center.

The Invisible College

For decades, the public face of UFO belief belonged to conspiracy theorists, self-proclaimed abductees, and late-night radio hosts. This caricature served a purpose—it allowed mainstream society to dismiss the phenomenon without serious consideration. But Pasulka’s research reveals a different reality entirely.

Working through academic networks and Silicon Valley connections, she gained access to what researchers call the “Invisible College”, a clandestine network of scientists, academics, and entrepreneurs who study unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) in secret. These aren’t fringe figures. They’re successful innovators, many with government connections, operating outside public view due to the stigma surrounding their research.

The term “Invisible College” isn’t new. It was first used by J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who consulted for the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, borrowing from a 17th-century group of natural philosophers who laid the groundwork for the Royal Society. Like their historical predecessors, today’s invisible college operates through informal networks, sharing data and theories away from institutional oversight.

Why the secrecy? Because these researchers learned the hard way that public disclosure invites ridicule and professional suicide. Stephen Hawking once dismissed UFO believers as “cranks and weirdos,” but Pasulka’s subjects include millionaires, billionaires, and scientists whose innovations have shaped modern technology. They’ve simply chosen to pursue their inquiries quietly, creating a parallel research tradition that operates alongside, but separate from, mainstream science.

Sacred Technology

What makes this emerging belief system distinctly American is its fusion of spirituality with technological advancement. Unlike traditional religions that position the divine as separate from the material world, UFO believers see technology itself as sacred, a bridge between human consciousness and higher intelligence.

Consider “Tyler D.,” one of Pasulka’s key subjects. A wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former space program employee, Tyler believes his breakthrough biomedical patents came from non-human intelligence following the Challenger explosion. He’s not alone in this conviction. Throughout Silicon Valley, successful technologists quietly credit otherworldly inspiration for their innovations, viewing advanced technology as a form of divine revelation.

This represents a fundamental shift in how Americans understand the sacred. Where previous generations might have attributed inspiration to divine providence or personal genius, a growing number now see technological breakthrough as evidence of contact with superior intelligence. The smartphone in your pocket isn’t just an engineering marvel, it’s potentially a sacred object, a technology that connects us to forms of consciousness beyond current scientific understanding.

The implications are profound. If technology serves as a portal to higher intelligence, then the boundaries between the scientific and spiritual collapse. Quantum physics concepts like information theory and holographic universe models become theological frameworks. The “code” underlying reality becomes the new scripture, accessible only to those with sufficient technological sophistication.

Contact Events

Pasulka’s background studying Catholic saints and miraculous events provided an unexpected lens for understanding modern UFO experiences. Her work translating canonization records of Saint Joseph of Copertino, a 17th-century Italian saint known for levitation, revealed striking parallels between historical religious accounts and contemporary UAP reports.

She identifies what religious studies scholars call “contact events”, moments when divine or otherworldly beings interact with humans, subsequently giving rise to religious traditions. Whether it’s Moses encountering the burning bush, Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, or modern accounts of UFO encounters, these experiences share common elements: they’re transformative, they challenge existing worldviews, and they compel individuals to reorient their lives around new truths.

Rey Hernandez exemplifies this pattern. As Executive Director of the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute, Hernandez underwent a profound transformation following an encounter with what he describes as a “plasma energy being” that healed his dog. This experience shifted his worldview from materialism to a belief in non-human intelligence, leading him to co-author an extensive study involving over 4,300 UFO contact experiencers from 125 countries.

These aren’t isolated incidents. Pasulka’s research reveals consistent patterns: individuals experience anomalous events in childhood, often dismissed or forgotten, that resurface later through meaningful coincidences. These catalysts precipitate fundamental shifts in perspective and dedicated commitments to exploring the unknown. Scientists become believers, believers become researchers, and researchers become evangelists for a new understanding of reality.

Media as Ministry

Perhaps the most significant finding in Pasulka’s research concerns the role of media in shaping contemporary belief. Shows like “The X-Files” don’t just entertain, they function as cultural authorities, providing explanatory frameworks for experiences that fall outside conventional understanding. Where previous generations might have turned to clergy for guidance about mysterious encounters, modern Americans increasingly rely on popular culture.

This represents a historic shift in cultural authority. Religious institutions once held monopolies on explaining the unexplainable, offering communities shared vocabularies for processing transcendent experiences. But as traditional religious influence wanes, particularly among younger Americans, media fills the void. Hollywood productions, documentary series, and online communities become the new priesthood, interpreting anomalous experiences for mass audiences.

The implications extend beyond mere influence. Media doesn’t just reflect belief, it actively shapes memory and perception. Repeated exposure to alien narratives makes extraterrestrial explanations for unusual experiences seem more plausible. The constant stream of UAP content normalizes the concept of non-human intelligence, creating a cultural backdrop where belief in extraterrestrial life requires no special justification.

This dynamic reveals something profound about contemporary American spirituality. In an era of declining institutional religious authority, Americans haven’t abandoned the search for transcendent meaning, they’ve simply relocated it. The sacred hasn’t disappeared; it’s been democratized, distributed through technologies and media platforms accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

The New Orthodoxy

What emerges from Pasulka’s research is a belief system that possesses all the characteristics of organized religion while explicitly rejecting religious categorization. UFO believers maintain core doctrines: extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they’re benevolent, they’re interested in humanity’s welfare, and they offer solutions to our greatest challenges. These beliefs provide community, meaning, and hope for the future, the essential functions of any religious system.

Yet when Pasulka suggested to her subjects that they might be participating in a new form of religion, their reactions were uniformly negative. They consider their phenomenon “too sacred to become religious dogma,” preferring the fluidity of personal revelation to the structure of institutional faith. This resistance to formal organization may be the movement’s greatest strength, allowing it to adapt and evolve without bureaucratic constraints.

The belief system also exhibits distinctly millenarian characteristics, anticipating a transformative future facilitated by advanced alien civilizations or technologies. Like many American religious movements before it, UFO belief offers hope for imminent salvation, not through divine intervention, but through technological revelation. The second coming isn’t Christ returning to Earth; it’s disclosure of non-human intelligence that will solve climate change, end warfare, and unlock human potential.

Academic Revolution

Pasulka’s work represents more than scholarship, it’s an academic revolution. By applying rigorous ethnographic methods to a stigmatized topic, she’s created legitimate space for studying phenomena that mainstream science considers impossible. Her research, published by Oxford University Press and praised as “excellent scholarship,” demonstrates that anomalous experiences deserve serious academic attention regardless of their ultimate explanation.

This methodological breakthrough extends beyond UFO studies. Pasulka’s approach suggests that all forms of human experience, even those that challenge current scientific paradigms, merit scholarly investigation. The boundary between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” research topics becomes less about the phenomena themselves and more about the rigor with which they’re studied.

The implications for the sociology of science are significant. If prestigious universities and academic presses are willing to publish serious research on UFOs, what other “impossible” topics might emerge from the shadows? Pasulka’s work creates precedent for studying consciousness anomalies, paranormal experiences, and other phenomena that exist at the margins of scientific acceptance.

The Future of Faith

As America becomes increasingly secular, at least in traditional terms, Pasulka’s research reveals that the human hunger for transcendence hasn’t diminished, it’s adapted. The new American religion doesn’t require churches, clergy, or creeds. It needs only technology, media, and the persistent human conviction that we’re not alone in the universe.

This transformation reflects broader changes in how Americans understand authority, community, and truth. In an era of declining institutional trust, individuals increasingly rely on personal experience and peer networks rather than expert authority. The democratization of information through digital platforms allows anyone to become a researcher, investigator, or evangelist for their beliefs.

Whether this emerging belief system represents genuine spiritual evolution or collective delusion remains an open question. But Pasulka’s research makes clear that millions of Americans are finding meaning, community, and hope through their conviction that non-human intelligence exists and cares about humanity’s future. In a world facing climate catastrophe, political polarization, and social fragmentation, perhaps the promise of cosmic companionship offers comfort that traditional institutions no longer provide.

The new American religion may not have churches, but it has believers. It may not have scripture, but it has experiences. And it may not have clergy, but it has converts who are quietly reshaping how we understand the relationship between technology, spirituality, and human destiny.

As Pasulka’s work demonstrates, the sacred hasn’t vanished from American life—it’s simply gone cosmic. Whether this represents humanity’s next evolutionary step or its most elaborate self-deception may be less important than what it reveals about our deepest needs and highest aspirations. In searching the skies for signs of intelligence beyond our own, we may be discovering something profound about the intelligence within ourselves.

The age of American cosmic consciousness has begun. The only question is where it leads us next.