Controversy erupts over change of NE Philly Catholic high school uniform
One of Philadelphia's most well-known Catholic schools is changing its uniform.
Girls at St. Hubert Catholic High School are saying goodbye to the "Sack."
But, change isn't easy and the move has some parents and students upset.
NORTHEAST PHILADELPHIA - A uniform change at a Philadelphia Catholic school has parents and students on opposite sides and upset over the changes.
What we know
Anyone who went to Catholic school in Philadelphia knows how passionate people are about their alma mater.
But, an unforeseeable controversy has erupted over St. Hubert High School's announcement that they are changing the uniform students will wear.
What they're saying
"I like it, I do like the new change, but I still think it's a shock to us," freshman Ivy Clark laughed.
She said she doesn't mind the new uniform and her mom doesn't mind, either.
"My mother went to St. Hubert's and she wore that uniform and I understand nostalgia but I think maybe it's time to move on," Maggie Clark said.
Timeline
Ivy commented, "I don't think it's right in that sense because you didn't tell us that this wasn't gonna be our uniform fully for the entire time here that we have been here at St. Hubert's."
Maggie is one of the parents who voted for the new uniform and isn't too worried about the cost.
She said, "I assume every year I'm going to get a new one. She's still growing and there's wear and tear, so it doesn't go into effect until next year, so that gives me the summer. I was going to buy a new one anyway. It's just a different uniform."
The other side
But, a whole lot of other parents, students and graduates are not at all happy as Laurajean Snellbaker shouted, "Keep the sack!"
Keep the sack is the mantra of Snellbaker and others and there's an online petition with more than 2,000 signatures demanding to "Bring back the sack!"
St. Hubert's Class of 2024 alumni, Alivia Murphy and Snellbaker's daughter, stated, "I personally like the traditional sack because I graduated in it and my sister goes to the school still, so I really want to see her graduate in the same thing!"
Snellbaker continued, "There's no legit reason behind it. I know more than a dozen parents that cannot afford what we're going through as is, walking in through, starting our kid for the school we just can't afford it."
Dig deeper
The school's administrators say the goal is to modernize the look of the uniforms and said in a statement:
"We realize a new uniform does mean an additional cost for families. We have taken that concern seriously and have taken steps to control cost to the greatest degree possible."
So many people weighed in on social media that comments on Instagram and Facebook were shut down.
Alumni Tracy Schmid said, "I think people are used to what they had when they graduated and any change makes them nervous."
Local perspective
The president of St. Huberts said the school has 30,000 of the most passionate graduates in the world and she understands people care. The topic was bound to stir up emotions, but it just shows St. Hubert's will be around for a long time.
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When U.F.O.s Become Religion
transcript When U.F.O.s Become Religion Do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials? Something I can't discuss in a public setting. What is the deal with U.F.O.s? Does your government want you to believe in aliens? Should you believe in aliens? These are questions that my guest this week thinks about a lot. She's a professor of religious studies who writes about U.F.O. encounters as a very modern form of ancient spiritual experience. But she also seems to think that they're a little more concrete than that. Diana Walsh Pasulka. Welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. So we're going to start by talking about what the U.F.O. 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 U.F.O. experience or the U.F.O. debate? Yeah, so I've been studying religion for many years. I study at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. I've been a practicing Catholic for almost my entire life, and I studied Catholic history. And so I've done a lot of looking into popular culture and how this forms belief about Catholic ideas like afterlife, other worlds, things like that. So I didn't believe in U.F.O.s, had never seen 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' I wasn't a person who was interested in that topic, but I was interested in the ways in which people thought of transformation, spiritual transformation, but also transformation that happens on Earth through these narratives of going into another place another world journey. And how did that pull you into studying people who claim to have had a U.F.O.-style encounter? O.K, so when I was doing my work for the book about the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, that brought me to a lot of archives. And so I'd go into the archives, and archives are places where things aren't digitized. And so I started to look into how Catholics viewed, how souls ascended into heaven or purgatory. And what I found was a lot of documentation from 1,000 years ago, 800, 500 years ago, about recorded sightings of aerial phenomena that Catholics had from Europe. And these are things flying in the air? Yeah, aerial phenomena. So, they interpreted these in different ways. Here's a good example - So in the 1800s, there was this young nun and she's living in a convent. And every night, this ball of light comes through her cell. And she's pretty upset about this. So she tells the Mother Superior, and she says, 'this is happening.' And the Mother Superior says, 'you're having a bad dream.' And so the nun is pretty certain this is happening and happens nightly. And so at one point, the Mother Superior says, 'O.K, I'm going to be with you at night to see what's going on.' And they determined that this is a soul from Purgatory that needs to be prayed back into Purgatory. So the whole convent gets together and they go through a process of prayers to kick this orb or this flame of light, out of her cell. So these kinds of things I saw, and I started to keep track of them. Sometimes they were interpreted as flying houses. Sometimes they were interpreted as little beings. You know, about 3 feet tall and shiny. And I shared this with a couple friends of mine, and I said, 'what do you all think of this?' And one of them said, 'it looks like modern day reports of U.F.O.s.' And that shocked me. And I thought, oh, I didn't accept it. To tell you the truth, I thought it was, hogwash. I was like, no, that. It can't be that. There was in town there was a U.F.O. conference, the Mutual U.F.O. Network. And so I decided to check that out. And when I was there, I heard people talking about their experiences encountering U.F.O.s. And it sounded very similar to the log I had of reports of Catholics in Europe talking about this. And so I started to do a lot more intensive work. I met academics who were studying this. And before I knew it, I was people who were a part of aerospace companies, and the military begin to want to correspond with me and see the data and the research that I had been doing. So that's what got me into this topic. All right. So we're going to save the aerospace communications for a little further on in the conversation. I want to talk about the details of U.F.O. experience. So when you say you went to a conference, you started talking to people who had these experiences. Are we talking about the classic 'X-Files' abduction narratives where people report being taken up into spacecrafts? Are we talking about things that are more intimate and personal? Give me a couple examples of what we talk about when we talk about U.F.O. encounters in the 21st century. So the people who were at the conference had had U.F.O. encounters. And often what this entails is a person will see something in the sky, an aerial phenomena. If it's an intense encounter, they will call themselves an experiencer, where they have an experience of a being or some kind of telepathic communication with the aerial phenomena itself. And this will shift their world. This will change them. And some of the people believe that they're getting special information or they've had this experience. And none of their neighbors have had this experience. So they feel kind of special about it. But the experience is a pattern match to the experiences that I saw from 500 years ago, 200 years ago. So what. When people report having a telepathic connection you said they get information from or they feel like they've gotten information from these kind of experiences, what kind of information do they get. What does that mean. O.K, people report this. So a lot of the people would report the information as something that had to do with the future. So they would have ideas of basically like an apocalypse, a bad scenario for the future. So the people who I talked to at this conference were pretty convinced that we were going to face some type of a cataclysm. So I talked to them a little bit about how people have thought that for about 2000 years. And so it hasn't happened yet. So it hasn't really happened like they thought that it would. So when they have these experiences and they get this information, it a lot of times makes them upset because they're thinking that the end of the world is going to happen. A lot of these people who you've talked to having what we think of as the classic abduction story, where they feel like they've been taken to a different place, taken onto a ship, these kind of things. Or is it more this kind of just interpersonal communication with some kind of light or being. It's both. So the classic image of the alien abduction, you see a farmer generally. Being abducted into a spaceship. So that's like the meme that we see. We also see a cow, right. Going up into the spaceship. These are they're ascending into a spaceship. If you were to see how souls in purgatory are shown in paintings from the 1400s, the 1500s, you'll also see them ascending into spaces, aerial spaces. So yeah, so are people experiencing journeys into other spaces. Spacecraft? are they seeing things that are not of our reality. Yes, that's what they're having. They're having those kinds of visions. Definitely and so one of the books that I read, when I think it was around the time that U.F.O.s kind of came back into the news, which would have been when my own newspaper, the times, reported on Weird sightings of aerial phenomena by US pilots. And I had not, I watched the x-files in the 1990s. I had not been a U.F.O. person in any meaningful sense of the term. But I got sucked into reading a little bit of the literature. And one of the most persuasive books that I read was by a famous U.F.O. researcher, shrouded in mystery, a guy named Jacques Vallée. Who obviously you're familiar with. And he wrote books pretty early, I think, in the modern U.F.O. phenomenon where he connected this not just to past religious experiences, but also to a whole realm of folklore right around, let's say, fairy abductions. And I thought Vallée's argument was quite persuasive, that there is this kind of persistent phenomena in human history that suddenly gets reinterpreted as the space age dawns in terms of creatures from other planets. But in fact, is this kind of folklore substrate that just takes different forms depending on the cultural, the cultural context. And that seems to be a version of the argument you're making in linking modern U.F.O. sightings to, yeah, the experience of Catholic nuns or religious mystics in the past. So you think you think that whatever we call the U.F.O. phenomena is something that it doesn't start in 1947 with Roswell or anything like that. There's some consistent historical phenomenon that's part of human religious sociology. So one of the first books I read when I made the turn to study U.F.O. beliefs and practices was Jack's 'Passport to Magonia,' which is a great book, one of the many great titles of books in the U.F.O. literature. In U.F.O. literature Yes And to me it really looked like a religious studies book. Here is this. By the way, he's a really interesting person who's an information scientist. So he's able to do this work on archival materials, just like I did. So Jack links it to fairy folklore, but he also looks at the phenomena since until 1860, something like that, the Industrial Revolution. He stops because he knows that by that time we have things in the sky that are ours. And so 1947 marks a specific time period where the idea of the U.F.O. becomes, it basically hijacks this kind of perennial idea of angels and things like that, aerial phenomena in the sky that that's not when it begins, but that's when it gets hijacked, in my opinion. That's when it becomes a narrative that is connected to ideas about space, alien life. Flying visitors from literal other worlds, not from supernatural dimensions and so on. That's right. But there. But one thing that's been really striking to me is that there are ways in which U.F.O. experiences look this raw material of religion that hasn't yet been forged into any kind of fully coherent belief system. And I'm curious where you're writing about this as a religious studies professor and framing it in part as almost the development of a very American 20th and 21st century form of religion. But it seems to be a form of religion that is completely agnostic and uncertain about what it's actually describing. People there's people with every theory under the sun to explain what they're experiencing. So I'm curious what you. What are the actual beliefs of the U.F.O. community. To the extent that you can describe them. And do you think do you think that there's a coherent religious vision, or is it just this kind of raw material where every person has a different interpretation. Yeah, that's a great question. So what I'm suggesting and I say this in my book, American cosmic, is that this is a new form of religion, actually. Coherence is not going to be a feature of this religion. This is a religious development and it's decentralized. And the reason it's decentralized, it doesn't have a Pope. It doesn't have the one experiencer, although there are U.F.O. religions and Raëlism and these come these are they come about through the 1940s to the 1960s. But then what you see when we get the internet just to pause. Raëlism was the cult. Remind everyone what Raëlism was or is. It is a U.F.O. religion that originates with Raël. I can't remember his actual name, but he's a French man in the 1970s. He has a U.F.O. experience and he's abducted. Or I don't think he'd call it that because it's a pleasant experience for him. He's enlightened. Yeah and so he comes back and he spreads the message. And this is now a religion. It's called A New religious movement. That's how we would describe it in religious studies. One of them also is the Nation of Islam. So I can talk about both of those. These are both apocalyptic religions in that they believe that the end is soon O.K, and that the end will come with the arrival of a spaceship. And that the spaceship. But the spaceships are the good guys. Yeah in both of those religions and both of those. Yeah the spaceships are the good guys. That's correct. So they're bringing peace. They're bringing peace and enlightenment and so on. But when we say it's a religion, do we mean that there is a kind of supernatural component, a spiritual. Are people praying to the aliens. Like what makes this different from, I mean, is it just that the right is the line just totally blurry that it's like, they're acting like the spaceships or angels, but they're calling them spaceships. Like, well, you have an advanced being here who's going to bring a wondrous world to these people. So it may not conform to what you consider to be a traditional religion like solecism. But Buddhism doesn't conform to Catholicism either. So each of those nation of Islam and the rails raelism these are traditional religions. Like they conform to what people in my field would call a religion. Do They pray. Do they have practices. Yeah, they do have practices. They're different. So nation of Islam has a completely different type of practice, then the realism. They do nation of Islam. Just declare. Nation of Islam basically folds a kind of extraterrestrial narrative into a Islamic style of monotheism. So it's effectively integrating ideas about other worlds into Islamic framework. Yes, it does. Yes Yeah. And it's specifically an American religion. So it Islam doesn't recognize them. So traditional Islam does not recognize them. So those so those are examples where U.F.O. experience gets basically taken into or takes a traditional religious shape. There's someone who has an experience, they have a prophetic narrative. And people there's a set of rituals and beliefs and people subscribe to it. That's then that's something. Then go on and talk about the decentralized form. That's the religion of the past that we're not going to see that anymore. So the internet comes along. Why not wait. Why not. Why aren't we. I'm just about to tell you. O.K tell me. Sorry Yeah. No that's O.K. So the internet comes along, and what it does is it creates a decentralized space. When people now see aerial objects, what do they do. They take their phones out and they record their experiences, and they upload them to social media platforms. And so this gets then folded into different narratives. So we're not going to see a coherent traditional religious framework right now because we're in a different infrastructure. Things aren't going back. But no, we're not going to see this kind of coherent U.F.O. narrative unless it comes from the government itself, which I think is happening. O.K, so it's the internet that is fundamentally decentralizing. Oh, absolutely. Yes because people who have these experiences can go online and see, for instance, that they're not unique, right that there's other people who've had these kind of experiences. So that means they're less likely to think there must be one special prophet of the U.F.O. message, and they're more likely to see many prophets now, right. So many people. So everyone so everyone is entering into this kind of ongoing conversation in which each new experience is just something to talk about and argue about. And there is, at least here in the United States, there's a give and take with the narrative that comes from DC Congress about the topic of U.A.P. And so that's an ongoing feature of this, what I call religiosity. So it's a new form of religion. It is a religiosity. So it's different than traditional religions. So let's. All right. Let's I've been resisting it. But let's go towards Washington DC. Because someone I think could take up the argument you're making and say, Yes, there are these experiences throughout human history and they reflect some kind of Jungian unconscious manifesting itself in dreams and hallucinations, or they reflect persistent patterns in mental illness that are of material causes that are understandable. But I think what makes this different, as you keep suggesting, is that it interacts with the government, with the National Security state, with people inside the government who have beliefs about U.F.O.s and may try and leak or make claims about U.F.O.s and so on. But I want to stick. I want to stick with your biography for a minute. You mentioned earlier that once you started researching this subject, you started getting communications from people inside the government or inside the aerospace industry. What form did those communications take. Correct O.K. So when I started the research for American cosmic, I said, O.K, this is going to be pretty easy because we have the internet here and we have all of this data. And it's pretty obvious what's happening. And about a year after I started to do this, I would get emails and oftentimes people that I knew would reach out to me and say so and so got hold of me. This is a person who works at this company. There's space related research. And they would like to talk with you. Are you comfortable talking with them. People who emailed me again were from legitimate aerospace companies and were interested in seeing the research that I did about Angel contact events and things like that. So then I began to share information with these people. And I had read books and so forth and other people's books, and I recognized that I might be identified as a person who could spread disinformation. So that was always on my mind as well as I was working with these people. At this point, these people didn't care if I was going to ever publish anything again. They were just interested in what I had done and they wanted to look at it. And they had actual jobs doing this work. So that was eye opening for me. What without obviously betraying confidence is when you say they had jobs doing this kind of work. What does that mean. They were employed by Nasa or Northrop Grumman or someone like that to research aerial phenomena. Like their job was director of aerial phenomena Research. I mean, what do we mean. Yeah, they wouldn't have a title like that. So they at this point, this is pre 2017 when Leslie Kane and Blumenthal you know. The New York Times' pre 2017 again for the audience is when the New York Times' published stories about military pilots encountering aerial phenomena. And it opened an era of New debate about these things. But sorry. Go on. So Yes, that's right. So this is pre 2017. This is around 2013 to about that time period. And they have various titles. They have quote unquote day jobs as say a mission controller at Cape Canaveral things like that. And they would say this and almost all of them called it this. They said my hobby job, they would call it their hobby. And so they would some of them would go to places that they called crash retrieval places, and they would look for debris from U.F.O. crashes. And then they would find scientists who would be able to look into the debris and find out if it was anomalous. So this is the type of research that they were doing. Some of them worked with astronauts, trained them. And so forth. So it was various types of people and jobs, but their hobby jobs, as you call them, this is off the books work. The Uc government is not paying them to do the research you're describing. They're doing it on their own. I don't actually know that. But that's what they imply. That's what they mostly said. They mostly said this is something I'm interested in because I made a differentiation. Yeah O.K. Yeah O.K. So go on. So you had this kind of contact with them. This is all before the times reported on these things. So how did that develop to the point where you took the idea that there's an objective reality here. Seriously, even after writing American cosmic, I still was not a non-believer. And I wouldn't say I wasn't a disbeliever, but I was. I was on I was open to being convinced. O.K I was open to being convinced. And there were a lot of scientists around me. I was in embedded research. So I was part of their community and still am actually. And so this afforded me an insight into their lives. And their lives were basically dictated by this type of study. So some of them had constrained lives. And what I mean by that is that they had security clearances and things like that. So in a sense, it was they were most likely part of intelligence communities, too. And when they would reach out to you, they would send you an email. Like sometimes it was an introduction. So after the first few emails with certain of them, I got an introduction from an experiencer to a person who I met at a conference, which was an American Academy of Religion conference. And so I met this person publicly in a public space because I wasn't used to talking to people like this for most of my life. And anyway, it was I got an insight into the lives that they led, and I became convinced that the government was definitely doing something related to this, whether or not it was actual U.F.O.s, I honestly don't know. But I know that it's something that is definitely these people are involved in doing, and it's part of a secret program. And that was something that came out in the 2017 New York Times' article that there was this secret. These programs are. Yeah, there's a government program studying this - U.F.O.s, U.A.P. But the official line of all these entities has been the US government doesn't have, a secret program that, for instance, has a lot of material that we think is from other planets or anything like that. There's no Correct So what you're. So what you're talking about is, in effect, private information. You have private reasons to think that the US government effort goes beyond just collecting data and videos and trying to resolve anomalies. I mean, this has been stated by people who are affiliated with the military. So it's not necessarily private information to me or to people who have been watching the news. My understanding is that there's a set of people, including former Defense Department officials, various people who have said one consistently. There's a bunch of aerial phenomena that we don't understand that our pilots see, that we have video of. Some of the video has been released. Some of it, as far as I can tell from my own private conversations, is classified. But that's publicly stated that there's some things we see in the sky that we don't understand. Then we have also publicly stated that, look, the Uc government, we research this stuff. We've set up dedicated groups that are researching it, but their public statements are limited to we're trying to resolve anomalies. We don't know anything about secret programs. And then you have starting after 2017, a set of whistleblowers or would be whistleblowers who have come forward, who have testified before Congress, who have written books saying, actually, the Uc government people in the US government know more about this than the public statements are letting on. There are secret programs. There are materials held by defense contractors that people think come from other worlds, these kind of things. So I'm just trying to distinguish between those two layers. They're O.K. So I have a public information is Yeah. I have a question for you. So Yes, the people who are the whistleblowers are these not also people who are part of our government and employed by our. No They are. Yeah O.K. So what's the difference then. So we have. O.K no that's fair. Yeah we have I agree. So Well wait wait wait. So we have this is what's confusing. And I think we should be rightly confused here because I believe that this confusion keeps people from wanting to do the research. Because you have the government, right. You have the whistleblowers who are working for the government and people who have written the books Lou Elizondo had been working for the government in one of these programs, says this is still happening. And we also have people like Tim Gallaudet, who's Rear Admiral. You have Colonel Carl Nell stating that there's no doubt that this is happening, that aliens exist, or that this phenomena exists and we're studying it. So you have those people coming out, and then you have another part of the government who's coming out and basically denying this. So it's very confusing to a person who wants clarity. And as for me, I try to stay out of it. So I'm not on any side. I'm watching this happen just like you are and just like other people are. And I might have more insight into what's going on because I know several of these people on both sides, both on the part where people are basically saying it's all not real. I know those people, and I know the people who are saying that it's real, and it's definitely something that's not transparent. It's definitely not transparent. And I think that what you just described is a good description of my own perception that there is people who work within the government who. Some of themselves believe that there is a real phenomena or related to or overlapping with that. Want some want Americans to think there's a real phenomena. And then there is a official government narrative that there's some weird stuff out there, but the government doesn't know any more than you or I do. So I'm but I'm trying to push I'm trying to push through that a little bit. So I want to go back to your own. I want to go back to your own story because Yes, you said you're an observer. So at a certain point in the mid 2010s, then you're talking to people connected with the government who, let's say, overlap with the kind of people in terms of their perspectives, who came forward as whistleblowers saying, look, there's real stuff here, and the government knows it. What convinced you. Because you just said you weren't a believer, implying that you became a believer. What about those conversations convinced you that you aren't just doing sociology of religion here that there is actual things in the sky or wherever else that people are in touch with. O.K, so part of it was that and by the way, I don't advocate believing this for anyone. They have to do their own research. So I'm not advocating belief in U.F.O.s or U.A.P., but definitely I became convinced that there was definitely something to this. When I met so many people who interfaced with the phenomena through their jobs and their jobs happened to take them up high into the stratosphere launching rockets into space so that they had a view of what was happening, in space. They've witnessed aerial phenomena that are not ours, and there are not Russia's or China's. And when you meet 10 of these people and they all have similar reports. It's interesting. It changes one's view. These people are not public. Some of them are, but some of them most of them are not. They don't want to be associated with this work that they do. They don't want people to know about it. And they're kind of everyday Americans. So basically, what we have in terms of videos of fast moving objects is, if not the tip of an iceberg, at least a piece of a larger hidden phenomena that many people have encountered who go into the sky or into space. That's correct. Yes O.K. Is there anything else that has convinced you. Yes I've also had insight into the counter intelligence gents. That's against the outing of this information. And it's a rough situation here because you have people that are out there talking about it and saying, we need to be transparent about this. This is real. Like Ryan Graves. And then you see who is one of the Navy pilots who become an advocate for this. Exactly and then you see pushback against him, public pushback, you see, even on Wikipedia Doctor Gary Nolan, he's at Stanford University, he studies this and he has a foundation called the soul foundation. And their Wikipedia page was taken down. My own Wikipedia page was changed a bit. So, this is why I'd like to stay out of this space for the most part, because when people are talking about it in a way in which they're advocating for transparency, see, I see that they do get pushback. O.K I want to talk more about the pushback, but just on the experiences themselves. What do these the 25 inner circle, people who communicate with you, what do they think they're studying. So there are inner circles and inner circles. So I would say that always. So the people who I think have most interface with this, they don't know what it is. That's my opinion. But they think that it's very important to study because it seems to be taking an interest in us. There is another inner circle that again, doesn't know what it is, but is able to do some physics work and recognizes how advanced the propulsion mechanisms are. But also these people have interfaced with it enough to know that it is. It has some trickster elements. So this is called they call. They have a name for it. By the way. It's called the hitchhiker effect. The idea that when a person has an experience, it often sticks to them. It's like a hitchhiker. It goes home with them and say they have an experience, and then they have sometimes poltergeist activity in their home. They might move and it moves with them. And this is something that is to me, seems to be straight out of religious traditions, because it looks like, the tricksters of religious traditions. And some of these people are able to extract themselves from this through their own religious tradition. So this is how religion then comes back in an unexpected way to me. So this is for example, this would be a case of someone has one of these bizarre experiences, and then they go home, right. And they suddenly have what looks like poltergeist activity or something around their house, and they call their Catholic priest to say some prayers of exorcism. Is that what you're describing. Yes, Yes, that kind of thing. Things like that happen. So they bring. So they bring a kind of religious attempt to religious resolution of what starts out seeming like a science fiction issue. Absolutely Yeah. And are there people who have essentially, again, we were talking earlier about the concrete religions that have formed around U.F.O.s. Are there people inside the government who you think have those kind of concrete beliefs who are like, O.K, these are angels or demons if they're Christian, maybe they think they're demons or these are literal aliens from another planet who we are speaking to. Are there people who get that concrete in the inner circles you're describing. O.K, so the people that I know are not being that concrete. However, they still experience the hitchhiker effect. And they some of them know that if they utilize the tools of their own religion, whatever that religion is, Anglicanism or Catholicism, that it seems to help the hitchhiker effect. But they also think that there's a real phenomena that they would like to back, engineer and utilize. But real, real technology. Yeah Yeah. Absolutely Yes, Yes. They believe that. They believe that. I believe that. Yeah I have not seen machines or anything like that, but I have you have not seen. No, no. Have you. Have you talked to people who claim they have seen machines. Yes O.K. And those people are. Where do those people say they've seen the machines. Well, inside. I can't say that, but I can say that I've talked to them about the machines, and they have not told me where they've seen the machines. O.K O.K. So this. All right. So this is I don't know if they've seen the machines or not, or if it's an elaborate setup where they're seeing something. So that's why I like to stay away from most of the government information about the topic. And these are people that are working for the government with the government. O.K So I want to pursue a kind of frustrated line of inquiry here. So just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a couple of stories, but the first one was the most important one that was drawing on a different set of government reports, basically, and leaks about the U.F.O. phenomenon that emphasized the degree to which a lot of U.F.O. material is based on deliberate disinformation. That, and the running claim in the story was that repeatedly and consistently, the Uc government has welcomed stories about U.F.O.s and mysterious aerial phenomena as a cover for various high Tech National security experiments. And so one example in the story was there's famous cases, really, but one famous case of a U.F.O. encounter involving a nuclear facility where nuclear weapons were shut down mysteriously in association with an aerial phenomena. And the claim in the journal story was that the Uc government was testing the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, in fear that the Soviet Union would use this pulse against our facilities. And the pulse created a weird, a weird experience for the people in the facility. And the government was happy to have them believe it was aliens, rather than come clean about how we were testing our own defenses. That would be one example. And then related to that, the piece also suggests that there's kind of like hazing and initiation rituals inside the military where people will be told, 'Hey, we're studying U.F.O. No, I can't show it to you. You can never tell anyone about it. Goodbye.' And this is like a prank or it's a test and so on that this is part of military culture. So that's that story, right. You could take that story and say, O.K, this kind of layering of deliberate disinformation, pranks, rumor and so on helps explain why so many people in the US government believe there are U.F.O.s, real U.F.O.s. And then you also have this persistent religious spiritual phenomena that is like other religious and spiritual phenomena. It's not really amenable to study, to scientific study. It's amenable to sociological or religious study. So why shouldn't as a curious journalist or listeners of this show, just take the Wall Street Journal narrative as normative and say, look, if there were really if somebody really had a piece of a spaceship and you have these whistleblowers willing to talk about it, wouldn't someone actually just show us the spaceship? It could be that was a long. That was a very long question, but this is tell me. Tell me what you make of anything I've just said. I mean, the person who wrote the Wall Street Journal article, which of course, I read seems to have a conclusion. And I don't. So there's a conclusion that, no, there's nothing to see. And I don't think that's true. But the conclusion that there is something to see and it's an alien spacecraft is also doesn't feel right to me. So I always propose that we and also the idea that it's a cover up for tech. Absolutely could be true. But then you have to take this into context. We had this program, a government program called Project Blue book. And it was run by Allen Hynek. And this is in the 1950s. Yeah all the way up through the 1960s. And so in with this program, there was a disinformation campaign by the government to identify people who were believers and spreading belief and basically stigmatizing them. And so this is something that we still have inherited. We've inherited the Project Blue Book, and then we have the Wall Street Journal article coming out. No, it's just the opposite. The government wanted you to believe in that. I mean, I'm sorry, it's just a very confusing scenario, and I choose not to pay attention to that. There's disinformation about this. I think that's the first thing people need to know is that you're not going to get the straight story. Like I said earlier, from the government, the government is telling us two different contradictory things. The story lies elsewhere or the answer lies elsewhere. Wait, O.K. But I don't agree with that. So first, where does the answer lie if it doesn't lie. O.K, I don't but I'm not going to say that the answer is that there's nothing or that there's specifically this thing. So I think it's a lot more you're saying. You're saying that there is you're saying that there is a phenomenon that appears to have both spiritual and science fiction elements that is accessible in some way, not just to a crazy person in a field late at night, but to members of the most high tech military the world has ever seen. And it seems to overlap with people's perspectives about visitors from other planets. Trickster gods. Angels demons. O.K, that's really interesting. But you're also saying that there are different factions within the government that have different agendas about how much people should know about this. One of those factions you're friends with by your own description, and that is the faction that, from your point of view, wants, wants us to have a conversation like this one. For the New York Times' And my question is, if that faction not the whole government, just that faction in the government, the kind of people you're talking to. If they have some evidence that goes beyond powerful personal anecdotes, why can't they just give it to us. And that's where I think the Wall Street Journal actually gets it right. Because most likely it has to do with something that the government needs to keep secret. And I respect that you think that the but there's going to be something that even something that even the faction. So there's this term that people in the U.F.O. world use called disclosure. Which capital D. Which is the idea that at some point, you're going to have there's secrets that the government knows that will be disclosed and/or there are people who want there to be disclosure. But this hasn't happened yet. Correct But you're saying that even the people who are pro modified limited disclosure agree that there are things here that are so secret that they just can't reveal them. I mean, I think that if they thought that there were national security issues, they would definitely think that we should not disclose them. Absolutely but then why are they coming forward and testifying before Congress. So there's a guy. One of the names we haven't mentioned is David Grusch, who is another whistleblower who again, had completely legitimate government credentials, both inside and also outside organizations that were doing some of these investigations. Grusch came forward as a whistleblower, did the podcast rounds. He was on Joe Rogan, right. For a long, long period, long conversation on Joe Rogan, testified before Congress, said a lot of really wild stuff that goes beyond the more limited nuance, right. He said a lot of really wild stuff and then essentially disappeared as a figure in the public eye. But if you listen to David crush, you had the sense that David Grusch and people like him want something to be revealed if you take them seriously. Yes if they want something. Nobody O.K. No one assassinated David Grusch. He was written about in the New York Times' He testified before Congress. You talked earlier about Oh, there's pushback to this stuff. And it's harsh edits on Wikipedia pages. Like, this is I feel like we've demonstrated in the last few years that if you want to be a U.F.O. whistleblower, the cigarette smoking man is not going to bundle you into a car and take you away. You can go be a U.F.O. whistleblower. And if that's true and the whistleblowers say they want to reveal something and then it doesn't get revealed, then I default back toward the Wall Street Journal narrative, where it's probably layers of disinformation concealing top secret drone programs, which, by the way, one reason we're having this conversation that is also a really interesting story. Like, if it is the case that you, as a serious academic, are being made use of by people in the government who want to cover up crazy drone technology, that would be pretty interesting to I think all the answers here are interesting. I just would like to know what they are. Yeah, so I don't think we can have those answers. So I'm here to study this. I've studied it. And I think that the transparency that people want from the government is not forthcoming. Sorry that you want that answer. I just don't think it's coming. But I don't want transparency from the government writ large. I want the next whistleblower who's a human being, a representative of the government, to come forward and take the further step of saying, hey, someone showed me an alien spacecraft. And by the way, it was in this base here, and Congress people can go see it. Or here is the document that I was given that persuaded me. That's what I want and I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to ask. And again, I just think the retreat to unknowability and mystery takes me back towards information, and that there's nothing truly concrete here that should convince me. What do you think is going to happen in the future. O.K, so probably more of the same. I mean, I'm not here to try to advocate for you to believe, frankly. So what do you think is going to happen. I don't know. That's why I'm interviewing people who have spent a long period of time talking to people who are researching, researching this issue. So, but you're saying, basically we should expect over the next 10 years, every six months to two years someone with a national security credential comes forward with a somewhat compelling account that can't be verified of some kind of U.F.O. encounter that the government was studying. And this will just go on. And the internet will cycle. Yeah Yeah. And we should the internet will cycle. We should look away. Yeah, we should look away. All right. Good so this would be the last public interview ever conducted about this subject, and people will just look away for the foreseeable future. No it's not. That's O.K. So, about the government's response to it. That's what I'm suggesting. So my last book was encounters, and that book basically said, why are we spending so much time paying attention to what the government has been telling us since the 1940s. People are actually having real experiences. Let's turn to them and talk about this. So that's what I would suggest. So yeah, if we're going to focus here on I can see you're very upset about that or you're just not happy. But why do we I mean, I'm never as an interviewer. I'm never upset. O.K I just have- I have a persistent level of frustration with things that seem to me to be secrets that are within the capacity of human beings, journalists, and so on to uncover. If you just want to tell me that there are weird things in the world, there are more things in heaven and Earth, Ross Douthat, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I obviously believe that. And I'm certainly comfortable with the idea that there are phenomena that people encounter that are not amenable to study by scientific authorities or anything like that. I'm just frustrated by the persistent claims that there's something more here that does seem amenable to Revelation, that I would just like to know a little bit more about. I think you can know more about it, but you're looking in the wrong place. So I've said before, I'm separate from the government. I'm not advocating for a position. And it could very well be that what the government is doing is purposeful. So this, arena of confusion that you're frustrated by, that's actually purposeful. And so they've done a good job. Because they've done a good job. You are interviewing me. We could have been actually talking about the phenomena and people's experiences of it, but we're talking about why the government is not being forthcoming. And my position is because that's not what they intend to do. Their intention is to make it confusing. And they've done a very good job of that. O.K, so let's do two final questions. You've talked about going from being skeptical and agnostic to believing. You've talked about the apparent unknowability of what is actually going on here. You've also mentioned that me, a Roman Catholic of some. If I forced you through, some truth serum developed on Alpha Centauri by aliens to make a bet on what it is, the phenomena, extraterrestrials, the supernatural, the lost civilization of Atlantis hidden beneath our seas. For Lo, these thousands of years. What would you bet? It's a variety of things. It's more than one thing. It appears to be. O.K. Give me two examples of what that thing is. To its variety. Just two. Two different things. What is it? It appears to be a perennial thing. So there appears to be something that interfaces with humans and has been identified in the various traditional religions. And I identified as what. Well, I'm not going to name it, because in some traditional religions it's named in different ways. So it could be bodhisattva's, angels, demons, things like that. So it's no. That's good. So it is intermediate intelligences between God and human beings, some of whom have our best interests at heart and some of whom don't. And those different religious traditions have protocols for dealing with these. So O.K, so there's that. But that was a Yes. You agree. That's part of what you think it is. I think some of the phenomena is that not all of it. And yeah, then there appears to be some type of technology that is either in my opinion, this is the truth serum. In my opinion, either is ours or if it's not ours, it's amazing. And that would. But you think it could be ours. And so Yes in that. So in that theory, just would have a kind of loop of on the one hand, authentic experiences that map onto the great religious traditions and at the same time, some kind of government cover up or secrecy around remarkable technologies that we aren't aware of. Are those two things linked, or is it just is it just a marriage of convenience, then, that the government is happy that people have these kind of supernatural experiences because it makes it easier to cover up the amazing technology. Yeah, that's the question I ask myself. I don't know if they're linked. O.K all right. So then last. All right. So a last question, because you have been trying to pull me away from the government and back towards the personal experiences. And so on. What can nice secular readers of the New York Times, who have been baffled by this conversation, let's say, take away from the personal side of it the direct encounters that people report having? O.K, so I think what's really important is that most of us grew up with and were educated within this worldview, and I call it the Thomas Jefferson worldview. And Thomas Jefferson didn't believe that Jesus was divine. He believed that Jesus was a really good person, and he even went so far as to rewrite the New Testament. And he took out all the references to miracles and all the things that all the references to angels and demons and exorcisms and healings and things like that. And there was the Jeffersonian Bible. So I would say that for me, what these experiences did was it. I had a Jeffersonian worldview. I was a secular Catholic. O.K what these experiences did was they jolted me out of that worldview and into the Shakespearean worldview, where there are things that we don't understand. And why don't understand that we don't understand them instead of just doing the Wall Street Journal did and just say, 'no, nothing to see here.' Well, the world in the cosmos is a really beautiful place with a lot of mystery. So that's what I would suggest. O.K, I endorse that take very strongly. I'm going to give you one more chance to tell me who it was, who told you they had seen an alien spacecraft and where because it's The New York Times. It's an audience of at least dozens, if not millions. Don't you want to be the person who blew the lid off the secret government conspiracy, Diana? No, I don't aspire to that. All right. Diana Walsh Pasulka, thank you for bearing with my frustrations. And thank you for this conversation. Thank you so much. Below is an edited transcript of an episode of 'Interesting Times.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat and this is 'Interesting Times.' There have been a bunch of flying saucer crazes in American history, but the one we're living through started in 2017, when my newspaper, The New York Times, reported on these weird encounters experienced by U.S. military pilots. Since then, we've had congressional hearings, would-be U.F.O. whistle-blowers 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 era has left me with a lot of weird unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistle-blowers actually know — or think they know — about unidentified aerial phenomena? Does at least part of the U.S. government really, really want Americans to believe in U.F.O.s? And if so, why? To help me search for answers, I asked Diana Walsh Pasulka to join me. She's a religious studies professor who writes about U.F.O. 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. Diana Walsh Pasulka, welcome to 'Interesting Times.' Diana Walsh Pasulka: Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Douthat: We're going to start by talking about what the U.F.O. phenomenon is, especially as it relates to your own academic work. 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. You're a professor of religious studies. Why don't you talk about how religious studies led you into the U.F.O. experience or the U.F.O. debate? Pasulka: So I've been studying religion for many years. I study at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. I've been a practicing Catholic for almost my entire life. And I study Catholic history. I've done a lot of looking into popular culture and how it informs belief about Catholic ideas, like afterlife, other worlds, things like that. I didn't believe in U.F.O.s. I had never seen 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' I wasn't a person who was interested in that topic. But I was interested in the ways in which people thought of transformation, spiritual transformation, but also transformation that happens on Earth through these narratives of going into another place, an 'other world' journey. Douthat: How did that pull you into studying people who claim to have had a U.F.O.-style encounter? Pasulka: When I was doing my work for the book about the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, that brought me to a lot of archives. I'd go into the archives — and archives are places where things aren't digitized — and I started to look into how Catholics viewed how souls ascended into Heaven or Purgatory. What I found was a lot of documents from 1,000 years ago, 800 or 500 years ago, about recorded sightings of aerial phenomena that Catholics had from Europe. Douthat: And these are things flying in the air? Pasulka: Yeah, aerial phenomena. And they interpreted these in different ways. Here's a good example: In the 1800s, there's this young nun and she's living in a convent. Every night, this ball of light comes through her cell, and she's pretty upset about this. So she tells the Mother Superior and she says: This is happening. And the mother superior says: You're having a bad dream. The nun is pretty certain this is happening — it happens nightly. At one point the Mother Superior says: OK, I'm going to be with you at night to see what's going on. And they determine that this is a soul from Purgatory that needs to be prayed back into Purgatory. So the whole convent gets together and they go through a process of prayers to kick this orb or this flame of light out of her cell. I saw these kinds of things, and I started to keep track of them. Sometimes they were interpreted as flying houses. Sometimes they were interpreted as little beings about three feet tall and shiny. I shared this with a couple of friends of mine and I said: What do you all think of this? One of them said: It looks like modern-day reports of U.F.O.s. That shocked me. I didn't accept it, to tell you the truth. I thought it was hogwash. I was like, no, it can't be that. There was a U.F.O. conference in town called MUFON — the Mutual U.F.O. Network — and I decided to check it out. When I was there, I heard people talking about their experiences encountering U.F.O.s, and it sounded very similar to the log I had of reports of Catholics in Europe talking about this. So I started to do a lot more intensive work. I met academics who were studying this. Before I knew it, people who were a part of aerospace companies and the military began to want to correspond with me and see the data and the research that I had been doing. That's what got me into this topic. Douthat: We're going to save the aerospace communications for a little further on in the conversation. I want to talk about the details of U.F.O. experience. When you say you went to a conference and you started talking to people who had these experiences, are we talking about the classic 'X-Files' abduction narratives, where people report being taken up into spacecrafts? Are we talking about things that are more intimate and personal? Give me a couple of examples of what we talk about when we talk about U.F.O. encounters in the 21st century. Pasulka: The people who were at the conference had had U.F.O. encounters. Often what this entails is a person will see something in the sky, an aerial phenomenon. If it's an intense encounter, they will call themselves an experiencer, where they have an experience of a being, or some kind of telepathic communication with the aerial phenomenon itself, and this will shift their world. This will change them. Some of the people believe that they're getting special information, or they've had this experience and none of their neighbors have had this experience, so they feel kind of special about it. But the experience is a pattern match to the experiences that I saw from 500 years ago, 200 years ago. Douthat: When people report having a telepathic connection, you said they get information from, or they feel like they've gotten information from, these experiences. What kind of information do they get? What does that mean when people report this? Pasulka: A lot of the people would report the information as something that had to do with the future. They would have ideas of basically an apocalypse, a bad scenario for the future. The people who I talked to at this conference were pretty convinced that we were going to face some type of cataclysm. So I talked to them a little bit about how people have thought that for about 2,000 years. [Chuckles.] Douthat: Give or take. Pasulka: And it hasn't really happened like they thought that it would. So when they have these experiences and they get this information, a lot of times it makes them upset, because they're thinking that the end of the world is going to happen. Douthat: Are a lot of these people who you've talked to having what we think of as the classic abduction story, where they feel like they've been taken to a different place, taken onto a ship, these kinds of things? Or is it more just interpersonal communication with some kind of light or being? Pasulka: It's both. So in the classic image of the alien abduction, you see a farmer, generally, being abducted into a spaceship. That's the meme that we see. We also see a cow — they're ascending into a spaceship. If you were to see how souls in Purgatory are shown in paintings from the 1400s, the 1500s, you'll also see them ascending into aerial spaces. So the ascent is there. Are people experiencing journeys into other spaces? Spacecraft? Are they seeing things that are not of our reality? Yes. They're having those kinds of visions. Definitely. Douthat: I read a book around the time that U.F.O.s came back into the news, which would've been when my own newspaper, The Times, reported on weird sightings of aerial phenomena by U.S. pilots. I had not watched 'The X-Files' in the 1990s, had not been a U.F.O. person in any meaningful sense of the term, but I got sucked into reading a little bit of the literature. One of the most persuasive books that I read was by a famous U.F.O. researcher shrouded in mystery, a guy named Jacques Vallée. He wrote books pretty early, I think, in the modern U.F.O. phenomena, where he connected this not just to past religious experiences but also to a whole realm of folklore around, let's say, fairy abductions. And I thought Vallée's argument was quite persuasive, that there is this persistent phenomenon in human history that suddenly gets reinterpreted as the space age dawns, in terms of creatures from other planets, but in fact is this kind of folklore substrate that just takes different forms depending on the cultural context. That seems to be a version of the argument you're making in linking modern U.F.O. sightings to the experience of Catholic nuns or religious mystics in the past. So you think that whatever we call the U.F.O. phenomena doesn't start in 1947 with Roswell or anything like that, but rather, there's some consistent historical phenomenon that's part of human religious sociology. Pasulka: Yeah. One of the first books I read when I made the turn to study U.F.O. beliefs and practices was Jacques' 'Passport to Magonia,' which is a great book. Douthat: One of the many great titles of books in the U.F.O. literature. Yes. Pasulka: Yeah, it's a really great book. And to me it really looked like a religious studies book. By the way, he's a really interesting person who's an information scientist. He was able to do this work on archival materials, just like I did. So Jacques links it to fairy folklore, but he also goes back and looks at the phenomena until 1860, something like that — the Industrial Revolution — when he stops because he knows that by that time, we have things in the sky that are ours. 1947 marks a specific time period where the idea of the U.F.O. basically hijacks this perennial idea of angels and things like that — aerial phenomena in the sky. That's not when it begins, but that's when it gets hijacked, in my opinion. Douthat: Right. That's when it becomes a narrative that is connected to ideas about space, alien life, visitors from literal other worlds, not from supernatural dimensions and so on. Pasulka: That's right. Douthat: But one thing that's been really striking to me is that there are ways in which U.F.O. experiences look like this raw material of religion that hasn't yet been forged into any kind of fully coherent belief system. You're writing about this as a religious studies professor and framing it in part as almost the development of a very American 20th- and 21st-century form of religion, but it seems to be a form of religion that is completely agnostic and uncertain about what it's actually describing. There are people with every theory under the sun to explain what they're experiencing. I'm curious: What are the actual beliefs of the U.F.O. community, to the extent that you can describe them? Do you think that there's a coherent religious vision? Or is it just this raw material, where every person has a different interpretation? Pasulka: That's a great question. What I'm suggesting — and I say this in my book 'American Cosmic' — is that this is actually a new form of religion. Coherence is not going to be a feature of this religion. This is a religious development, and it's decentralized. The reason it's decentralized — it doesn't have a pope, it doesn't have the one experience, although there are U.F.O. religions, like Raëlism, which come about in the 1940s to the 1960s. But then what you see when we get the internet —— Douthat: Just to pause, Raëlism was a cult. Pasulka: Yeah, it's still around. Douthat: Remind everyone what Raëlism was, or is. Pasulka: It is a U.F.O. religion that originates with Raël — I can't remember his actual name. He's a Frenchman. In the 1970s he has a U.F.O. experience, and he's abducted — or I don't think he'd call it that, because it's a pleasant experience for him. Douthat: He's enlightened. Pasulka: Yeah. And he spreads the message, and this is now religion. It's called a new religious movement — that's how we would describe it in religious studies. Another is the Nation of Islam. I can talk about both of those. These are both apocalyptic religions in that they believe that the end is soon, and that the end will come with the arrival of a spaceship. Douthat: But the spaceships are the good guys. Pasulka: Yeah, in both of those religions, the spaceships are the good guys. That's correct. Douthat: So they're bringing peace, enlightenment. But when we say it's a religion, do we mean that there is a supernatural component, are people praying to the aliens? What makes this different from —— Pasulka: Traditional religion? Douthat: Is it that the line is just totally blurry? That they're acting like the spaceships are angels, but they're calling them spaceships? Pasulka: Well, you have an advanced being here who's going to bring a wondrous world to these people. So it may not conform to what you consider to be a traditional religion like Catholicism, but Buddhism doesn't conform to Catholicism either. Each of those — Nation of Islam and Raëlism — these are traditional religions. They conform to what people in my field would call a religion. Do they pray? Do they have practices? Yeah, they do have practices. They're different — the Nation of Islam has a completely different type of practice than Raëlism. Douthat: Just to clear, the Nation of Islam basically folds a kind of extraterrestrial narrative into a sort of Islamic style of monotheism. It's effectively integrating ideas about other worlds into an Islamic framework. Pasulka: Yes, it does. And it's specifically an American religion — Islam does not recognize them. Douthat: Right. So those are examples where U.F.O. experience basically takes a traditional religious shape. There's someone who has an experience, they have a prophetic narrative. And there's a set of rituals and beliefs, and people subscribe to it. But then, talk about the decentralized form. Pasulka: So that's the religion of the past. We're not going to see that anymore. So the internet comes along, and what it does is it creates a decentralized space. When people now see aerial objects, what do they do? They take their phones out and they record their experiences and they upload them to social media platforms. This then gets folded into different narratives. We're not going to see a coherent, traditional religious framework right now, because we're in a different infrastructure. Things aren't going back. We're not going to see this kind of coherent U.F.O. narrative unless it comes from the government itself, which I think is happening. Douthat: So it's the internet that is fundamentally decentralizing. Pasulka: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Douthat: Because people who have these experiences can go online and see, for instance, that they're not unique, that there are other people who've had these kinds of experiences. That means they're less likely to think: Ah, there must be one special prophet of the U.F.O. message. And they're more likely to —— Pasulka: That's because there's so many prophets now. So many people. Douthat: So everyone is entering into this ongoing conversation in which each new experience is just something to talk about and argue about. Pasulka: Right. And there is, at least here in the United States, there's a give-and-take with the narrative that comes from D.C., Congress, about the topic of U.A.P. [unidentified anomalous phenomena]. That's an ongoing feature of this what I call religiosity. It's a new form of religion — it is a religiosity. It's different from traditional religions. Douthat: OK, I've been resisting it, but let's go toward Washington, D.C. Someone could take up the argument you're making and say: Ah, yes, there are these experiences throughout human history, and they reflect some kind of Jüngian unconscious manifesting itself in dreams and hallucinations, or they reflect persistent patterns in mental illness that are material causes that are understandable. I think what makes this different, as you keep suggesting, is that it interacts with the government, with the national security state, with people inside the government who have beliefs about U.F.O.s and may try to leak or make claims about U.F.O.s and so on. I want to stick with your biography for a minute. You mentioned that once you started researching this subject, you started getting communications from people inside the government or inside the aerospace industry. What form did those communications take? Pasulka: Correct. When I started the research for 'American Cosmic,' I said: OK, this is going to be pretty easy, because we have the internet here and we have all of this data and it's pretty obvious what's happening. About a year after I started to do this, I would get emails. Oftentimes people that I knew would reach out to me and say: So-and-so got a hold of me, this is a person who works at this company doing space-related research, and they would like to talk with you; are you comfortable talking with them? People who emailed me, again, were from legitimate aerospace companies and were interested in the research that I did about angel contact events and things like that. So then I began to share information with these people. I had read Jacques Vallée's books and other people's books, and I recognized that I might be identified as a person who could spread disinformation. That was always on my mind as well, as I was working with these people. At this point, these people didn't care if I was going to ever publish anything again. They were just interested in what I had done, and they wanted to look at it. And they had actual jobs doing this work, so that was eye-opening for me. Douthat: Without obviously betraying confidences, when you say they had jobs doing this kind of work, what does that mean? They were employed by NASA or Northrop Grumman, or someone like that, to research aerial phenomena? Like, their job was director of aerial phenomena research? What do we mean? Pasulka: I mean, no, they wouldn't have a title like that. At this point, this is pre-2017, when Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean and [Ralph] Blumenthal wrote the New York Times article. Douthat: For the audience, pre-2017 is when The New York Times published stories about military pilots encountering aerial phenomena, and it opened an era of new debate about these things. Pasulka: Yes, that's right. So this is around 2013 to about that time period. And they have various titles. They have quote-unquote 'day jobs' as, say, a mission controller at Cape Canaveral, things like that. And almost all of them called it this: They said, 'my hobby job.' They would call it their hobby. Some of them would go to places that they called 'crash retrieval' places, and they would look for debris from U.F.O. crashes. Then they would find scientists who would be able to look into the debris and find out if it was anomalous. So this is the type of research that they were doing. Some of them worked with astronauts — trained them and so forth. So it was various types of people and jobs. Douthat: But their hobby jobs, as you call them — this is off-the-books work. The U.S. government is not paying them to do the research you're describing. They're doing it on their own. Pasulka: I don't actually know that, but that's what they implied. Douthat: That's what they mostly said. Pasulka: This is my job, and that's — yeah. They made a differentiation. Douthat: OK, so you had this contact with them. This is all before The Times reported on these things. How did that develop to the point where you took the idea that there's an objective reality here seriously? Pasulka: Even after writing 'American Cosmic,' I still was not a nonbeliever. [Chuckles.] And I wouldn't say I wasn't a disbeliever, but I was open to being convinced, OK? I was open to being convinced. And there were a lot of scientists around me. I was part of their community — and still am, actually. This afforded me an insight into their lives, and their lives were basically dictated by this type of study. So some of them had constrained lives. What I mean by that is that they had security clearances and things like that. If I went with them to a conference, they had to know all of the people who would be at the conference. So in a sense, they were most likely part of intelligence communities, too. Douthat: And when they would reach out to you, they would send you an email? Pasulka: Sometimes it was an introduction. So after the first few emails with certain of them, I got an introduction from an experiencer to a person who I met at a conference, which was an American Academy of Religion conference. I met this person publicly — like in a public space, because I wasn't used to talking to people like this for most of my life. And I got insight into the lives that they led, and I became convinced that the government was definitely doing something related to this. Whether or not it was actual U.F.O.s, I honestly don't know, but I know that it's something that these people are definitely involved in doing, and it's part of a secret program. That was something that came out in the 2017 New York Times article, that there's a government program studying this — U.F.O.s, U.A.P. Douthat: Right. But the official line of all these entities has been that the U.S. government doesn't have a secret program that, for instance, has a lot of material that we think is from other planets or anything like that. What you're talking about is, in effect, private information. You have private reasons to think that the U.S. government effort goes beyond just collecting data and videos and trying to resolve anomalies. Pasulka: I mean, this has been stated by people who are affiliated with the military. So it's not necessarily private information to me or to people who have been watching the news. Douthat: My understanding is that there's a set of people, including former Defense Department officials, various people who have said: consistently, there's a bunch of aerial phenomena that we don't understand, that our pilots see, that we have video of. Some of the video has been released. Some of it, as far as I can tell from my own private conversations, is classified. But that's publicly stated, that there's some things we see in the sky that we don't understand. Then we have also publicly stated that, look, the U.S. government, we research this stuff. We've set up dedicated groups that are researching it. But those groups, their public statements are limited to: We're trying to resolve anomalies. We don't know anything about secret programs. Then you have, starting after 2017, a set of whistle-blowers — or would-be whistle-blowers — who have come forward, who have testified before Congress, who have written books saying: Actually, people in the U.S. government know more about this than the public statements are letting on. There are secret programs. There are materials held by defense contractors that people think come from other worlds — these kinds of things. I'm just trying to distinguish between those two layers. There's public information —— Pasulka: Yeah. OK. So I have a question for you. The people who are the whistle-blowers — are these not also people who were part of our government? Douthat: Yes. They are. Pasulka: And were employed by our government? Douthat: Absolutely. Pasulka: Yeah. OK. So what's the difference then? Douthat: OK. No, that's fair —— Pasulka: I agree with you —— Douthat: So —— Pasulka: Well, wait, wait, wait. This is what's confusing — and I think we should be rightly confused here, because I believe that this confusion keeps people from wanting to do the research. Because you have government. You have the whistle-blowers who are working for the government, and people who have written the books, like Luis Elizondo, had been working for the government in one of these programs say this is still happening. We also have people like Tim Gallaudet, who's a rear admiral. You have Col. Karl Nell stating that there's no doubt that this is happening, that aliens exist or that this phenomena exists and we're studying it. You have those people coming out, and then you have another part of the government who's coming out and basically denying this. It's very confusing to a person who wants clarity. As for me, I try to stay out of it. I'm not on any side. I'm watching this happen just like you are and just like other people are. I might have more insight into what's going on because I know several of these people on both sides, both on the part where people are basically saying it's all not real — I know those people — and I know the people who are saying that it's real. It's definitely something that's not transparent. Douthat: It's definitely not transparent. And I think that what you just described is a good description of my own perception that there are people who work within the government, some of whom themselves believe that there is a real phenomenon, or — related to or overlapping with that — want Americans to think there's a real phenomenon, and then there is an official government narrative that there's some weird stuff out there, but the government doesn't know any more than you or I do. But I'm trying to push through that a little bit. Pasulka: OK. Douthat: So I want to go back to your own story, because you said you're an observer. At a certain point in the mid-2010s, you're talking to people connected with the government who, let's say, overlap with the kind of people, in terms of their perspectives, who came forward as whistle-blowers, saying: Look, there's real stuff here, and the government knows it. What convinced you? Because you just said you weren't a believer, implying that you became a believer. What about those conversations convinced you that you aren't just doing sociology of religion here, that there are actual things in the sky or wherever else that people are in touch with? Pasulka: OK. So part of it was that — and by the way, I don't advocate believing this for anyone. They have to do their own research. So I'm not advocating belief in U.F.O.s or U.A.P. But I became convinced that there was definitely something to this when I met so many people who interfaced with the phenomena through their jobs, which happened to take them high into the stratosphere, launching rockets into space so that they had a view of what was happening in space. They've witnessed aerial phenomena that are not ours, and they are not Russia's or China's. And when you meet 10 of these people and they all have similar reports, it's interesting. It changes one's view. These people are not public — some of them are, but most of them are not. They don't want to be associated with this work that they do. They don't want people to know about it. And they're everyday Americans. Douthat: So basically, what we have in terms of videos of fast-moving objects is, if not the tip of an iceberg, at least a piece of a larger hidden phenomenon that many people have encountered who go into the sky or into space. Pasulka: That's correct. Yes. Douthat: OK. Is there anything else that has convinced you? Pasulka: Yes. I've also had insight into the counterintelligence that's against the outing of this information. And it's a rough situation here because you have people that are out there talking about it and saying: We need to be transparent about this, this is real — like Ryan Graves. Douthat: Who is one of the Navy pilots who have become advocates for this. Pasulka: Yeah, one of the fighter pilots. Exactly. And then you see pushback against him, public pushback. You see, even on Wikipedia, Dr. Garry Nolan. He's at Stanford University. He studies this and he has a foundation called the Sol Foundation. And their Wikipedia page was taken down. My own Wikipedia page was changed a bit. So this is why I'd like to stay out of this space for the most part, because when people are talking about it in a way in which they're advocating for transparency, I see that they do get pushback. Douthat: I want to talk more about the pushback, but just on the experiences themselves, what do the inner circle people who communicate with you think they're studying? Pasulka: So there are inner circles and inner inner circles. Douthat: Always. Pasulka: Yeah. So the people who I think have most interface with this, they don't know what it is. That's my opinion. But they think that it's very important to study because it seems to be taking an interest in us. There is another inner circle that, again, doesn't know what it is, but is able to do some physics work and recognizes how advanced the propulsion mechanisms are, but also these people have interfaced with it enough to know that it has some trickster elements. They have a name for it — it's called the hitchhiker effect. The idea that when a person has an experience, it often sticks to them. It's like a hitchhiker: It goes home with them. And say they have an experience and then they have sometimes poltergeist activity in their home — they might move and it moves with them. This is something that, to me, seems to be straight out of religious traditions because it looks like the tricksters of religious traditions. And some of these people are able to extract themselves from this through their own religious tradition. So this is how religion then comes back in an unexpected way to me. Douthat: So for example, this would be a case if someone has one of these bizarre experiences and then they go home and they suddenly have what looks like poltergeist activity or something around their house. And they call their Catholic priest to say some prayers of exorcism. Is that what you're describing? Pasulka: Yes, yes. Things like that happen. Douthat: So they attempt a kind of religious resolution of what starts out seeming like a science fiction issue. Pasulka: Absolutely. Yeah. Douthat: And we were talking earlier about the concrete religions that have formed around U.F.O.s. Are there people inside the government who you think have those kinds of concrete beliefs who are like, OK, these are angels or demons? If they're Christian, maybe they think they're demons. Or these are literal aliens from another planet who we are speaking to. Are there people who get that concrete in the inner circles you're describing? Pasulka: OK. So the people that I know are not being that concrete. However, they still experience the hitchhiker effect. Some of them know that if they utilize the tools of their own religion, whatever that religion is — Anglicanism or Catholicism — that it seems to help the hitchhiker effect. But they also think that there's a real phenomenon that they would like to back-engineer and utilize. Douthat: Real technology? Pasulka: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Douthat: Machines? Pasulka: Yes, yes. They believe that. I have not seen machines or anything like that, but I have —— Douthat: You have not seen? Pasulka: No, no. Douthat: Have you talked to people who claim they have seen machines? Pasulka: Yes. Douthat: OK. Where do those people say they've seen the machines? Inside —— Pasulka: Well, I can't say that, but I can say that I've talked to them about the machines and they have not told me where they've seen the machines. Douthat: OK. So this is — all right —— Pasulka: Listen, I don't know if they've seen the machines or not, or if it's an elaborate setup where they're seeing something. That's why I like to stay away from most of the government information about the topic. And these are people that are working for the government, with the government. Douthat: OK. I want to pursue a kind of frustrated line of inquiry here. So, just a few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a couple of stories, but the first one was the most important one that was drawing on a different set of government reports, basically, and leaks about the U.F.O. phenomena that emphasized the degree to which a lot of U.F.O. material is based on deliberate disinformation. The running claim in the story was that repeatedly and consistently, the U.S. government has welcomed stories about U.F.O.s and mysterious aerial phenomena as a cover for various high-tech national security experiments. One example in the story was, there's a famous case — cases, really, but one famous case — of a U.F.O. encounter involving a nuclear facility where nuclear weapons were shut down mysteriously in association with an aerial phenomenon. The claim in the Journal story was that the U.S. government was testing the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, in fear that the Soviet Union would use this pulse against our facilities. And the pulse created a weird experience for the people in the facility. And the government was happy to have them believe it was aliens, rather than come clean about how we were testing our own defenses. That would be one example. Related to that, the piece also suggests that there's hazing and initiation rituals inside the military where people will be told: Hey, we're studying U.F.O.s. No, I can't show it to you. You can never tell anyone about it. Goodbye. And this is like a prank, or it's a test, that this is part of military culture. So that's that story. You could take that story and say: OK, this kind of layering of deliberate disinformation, pranks, rumor and so on helps explain why so many people in the U.S. government believe there are U.F.O.s, real U.F.O.s. And then you also have this persistent religious, spiritual phenomena that is like other religious and spiritual phenomena — it's not really amenable to scientific study. It's amenable to sociological or religious studies. So why shouldn't I, as a curious journalist, or listeners of the show just take the Wall Street Journal narrative as normative and say: Look, if somebody really had a piece of a spaceship and you have these whistle-blowers willing to talk about it, wouldn't someone actually just show us the spaceship? That was a very long question. But tell me what you make of anything I've just said. Pasulka: I mean, the person who wrote the Wall Street Journal article, which of course I read, seems to have a conclusion, and I don't. There's a conclusion that, no, there's nothing to see, and I don't think that's true. But the conclusion that there is something to see and it's an alien spacecraft also doesn't feel right to me. And also, the idea that it's a coverup for tech absolutely could be true. But then you have to take this into context. We had a government program called Project Blue Book, and it was run by J. Allen Hynek. Douthat: This is in the 1950s. Pasulka: All the way up through the 1960s. And with this program, there was a disinformation campaign by the government to identify people who were believers and spreading belief and basically stigmatizing them. This is something that we have inherited. We've inherited the Project Blue Book. And then we have the Wall Street Journal article coming out: No, it's just the opposite. The government wanted you to believe in that. I mean, I'm sorry. It's just a very confusing scenario, and I choose not to pay attention to that. There's disinformation about this. I think that's the first thing people need to know, is that you're not going to get the straight story, like I said earlier, from the government. The government is telling us two different contradictory things. The story lies elsewhere, or the answer lies elsewhere. Douthat: Wait. OK. But I don't agree with that. Pasulka: OK. Douthat: So first, where does the answer lie? If it doesn't lie with the government? Pasulka: I don't know, but I'm not going to say that the answer is that there's nothing or that there's specifically this thing. OK? So I think it's a lot more complicated. Douthat: Right. You're saying that there is a phenomenon that appears to have both spiritual and science fiction elements that is accessible in some way, not just to a crazy person in a field late at night, but to members of the most high-tech military the world has ever seen. And it seems to overlap with people's perspectives about visitors from other planets, trickster gods, angels, demons. That's really interesting. But you're also saying that there are different factions within the government that have different agendas about how much people should know about this. One of those factions you're friends with, by your own description, and that is the faction that, from your point of view, wants us to have a conversation like this one for The New York Times. My question is: If that faction — not the whole government, just that faction in the government, the kind of people you're talking to — if they have some evidence that goes beyond powerful personal anecdotes, why can't they just give it to us? Pasulka: That's where I think The Wall Street Journal actually gets it right, because most likely it has to do with something that the government needs to keep secret. And I respect that. Douthat: You think that the —— Pasulka: So there's going to be —— Douthat: Wait, wait. So something that even the faction — so there's this term that people in the U.F.O. world use, called 'Disclosure' with a capital D, which is the idea that there's secrets that the government knows that will be disclosed, or there are people who want there to be disclosure, but this hasn't happened yet. But you're saying that even the people who are pro-modified-limited-disclosure agree that there are things here that are so secret that they just can't reveal them? Pasulka: I mean, I think that if they thought that there were national security issues, they would definitely think that we should not disclose them. Absolutely. Douthat: But then why are they coming forward and testifying before Congress? So there's a guy — one of the names we haven't mentioned is David Grusch, who is another whistle-blower. Again, he had completely legitimate government credentials, both inside and also outside organizations that were doing some of these investigations. Grusch came forward as a whistle-blower, did the podcast rounds. He was on 'Joe Rogan,' for a long conversation on 'Joe Rogan.' Testified before Congress, said a lot of really wild stuff that goes beyond the more limited nuance —— Pasulka: Yes, I saw. Douthat: And then essentially disappeared as a figure in the public eye. But if you listened to David Grusch, you had the sense that David Grusch and people like him want something to be revealed, if you take them seriously. Pasulka: Yes, they do. Yeah, yeah. Douthat: OK, no one assassinated David Grusch. He was written about in The New York Times; he testified before Congress. You talked earlier about like, oh, there's pushback to this stuff, and it's harsh edits on Wikipedia pages. I feel like we've demonstrated in the last few years that if you want to be a U.F.O. whistle-blower, the Cigarette Smoking Man is not going to bundle you into a car and take you away. You can go be a U.F.O. whistle-blower. And if that's true and the whistle-blowers say they want to reveal something and then it doesn't get revealed, then I default back toward the Wall Street Journal narrative, where it's probably layers of disinformation, concealing top secret drone programs. Which, by the way, one reason we're having this conversation: That is also a really interesting story. If it is the case that you, as a serious academic, are being made use of by people in the government who want to cover up crazy drone technology, that would be pretty interesting, too. I think all the answers here are interesting. I just would like to know what they are. Pasulka: Yeah. So I don't think we can have those answers. I'm here to study this. I've studied it, and I think that the transparency that people want from the government is not forthcoming. Sorry that you want that answer. I just don't think it's coming. Douthat: But I don't want transparency from the government writ large. I want the next whistle-blower, who's a human being, a representative of the government, to come forward and take the further step of saying: Hey, someone showed me an alien spacecraft, and by the way, it was in this base here and congresspeople can go see it. Or here is the document that I was given that persuaded me. That's what I want, and I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to ask. And again, I just think the retreat to unknowability and mystery takes me back toward the disinformation, and that there's nothing truly concrete here that should convince me. What do you think is going to happen in the future? Pasulka: Probably more of the same. I mean, I'm not here to try to advocate for you to believe, frankly. Douthat: Uh-huh. Pasulka: So what do you think's going to happen? Douthat: I don't know. That's why I am interviewing people who have spent a long period of time talking to people who are researching this issue. But you're saying, basically, we should expect over the next 10 years, every six months to two years, someone with a national security credential comes forward with a somewhat compelling account that can't be verified of some kind of U.F.O. encounter that the government was studying. And this will just go on? Pasulka: Yeah. So we should probably look away. Douthat: And the internet will cycle. We should look away. Pasulka: Yeah, we should look away. Douthat: OK. Good. So this will be the last public interview ever conducted about this subject, and people will just look away for the foreseeable future. Pasulka: No, it's not that the — OK, so about the government's response to it, that's what I'm suggesting. So my last book was 'Encounters.' And that book basically said: Why are we spending so much time paying attention to what the government has been telling us since the 1940s? People are actually having real experiences; let's turn to them and talk about this. So that's what I would suggest. If we're going to focus here on —— I can see you're very upset about that, or you're just not happy, but why do we —— Douthat: I am not. As an interviewer, I'm never upset. I just have a persistent level of frustration with things that seem to me to be secrets that are within the capacity of human beings, journalists and so on to uncover. If you just want to tell me that there are weird things — there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Ross Douthat, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, I obviously believe that. And I'm certainly comfortable with the idea that there are phenomena that people encounter that are not amenable to study by scientific authorities or anything like that. I'm just frustrated by the persistent claims that there's something more here that does seem amenable to revelation that I would just like to know a little bit more about. Pasulka: I think you can know more about it, but you're looking in the wrong place. I've said before: I'm separate from the government. I'm not advocating for a position, and it could very well be that what the government is doing is purposeful. So this arena of confusion that you're frustrated by, that's actually purposeful. And they've done a good job, right? Douthat: They've done a good job. Pasulka: Because here you are interviewing me. We could have been actually talking about the phenomena and people's experiences of it, but we're talking about why the government is not being forthcoming. And my position is because that's not what they intend to do. Their intention is to make it confusing. And they've done a very good job of that. Douthat: OK, so let's do two final questions. You've talked about going from being skeptical and agnostic to believing. You've talked about the apparent unknowability of what is actually going on here. You've also mentioned that you're, like me, a Roman Catholic of some sort. If I forced you, through some truth serum developed on Alpha Centauri by aliens, to make a bet on what it is, the phenomena — extraterrestrials, the supernatural, the lost civilization of Atlantis hidden beneath our seas for lo these thousands of years — what would you bet? Pasulka: It's a variety of things. Douthat: It's more than one thing? Pasulka: It appears to be. Douthat: OK. Give me two examples of what that thing is. It's a variety. Just two different things. What is it? Pasulka: It appears to be a perennial thing. So there appears to be something that interfaces with humans and has been identified in the various traditional religions. Douthat: Identified as what? Pasulka: Well, I'm not going to name it, because in some traditional religions it's named in different ways. So it could be bodhisattvas, angels, demons — things like that. Douthat: OK, that's good. So it is intermediate intelligences between God and human beings, some of whom have our best interests at heart and some of whom don't. Pasulka: And those different religious traditions have protocols for dealing with these. So, OK, there's that. Douthat: But that was a yes. You agree. That's part of what you think it is. Pasulka: I think some of the phenomena is that — not all of it. Then there appears to be some type of technology that is either, in my opinion — this is the truth serum — in my opinion, either is ours, or if it's not ours, it's amazing. Douthat: OK. But you think it could be ours. Pasulka: Yes, it could be. Yeah. Douthat: And so in that theory you would have a kind of loop of, on the one hand, authentic experiences that map onto the great religious traditions, and at the same time some kind of government coverup or secrecy around remarkable technologies that we aren't aware of. Are those two things linked? Or is it just a marriage of convenience, then, that the government is happy that people have these supernatural experiences because it makes it easier to cover up the amazing technology? Pasulka: Yeah, that's the question I asked myself. I don't know if they're linked. Douthat: OK. All right. So then, last question, because you have been trying to pull me away from the government and back toward the personal experiences. What can nice secular readers of The New York Times who have been baffled by this conversation, let's say, take away from the personal side of it, the direct encounters that people report having? Pasulka: I think what's really important is that most of us grew up with, and were educated within this worldview, and I call it the Thomas Jefferson worldview. Thomas Jefferson didn't believe that Jesus was divine. He believed that Jesus was a really good person, and he even went so far as to rewrite the New Testament. He took out all the references to miracles and all the references to angels and demons and exorcisms and healings and things like that. And there was the Jeffersonian Bible. I would say that, for me, I had a Jeffersonian worldview. I was a secular Catholic. What these experiences did was they jolted me out of that worldview and into the Shakespearean worldview, where there are things that we don't understand, and why don't we understand that we don't understand them? Instead of just doing like The Wall Street Journal did and just say: No, nothing to see here. Well, the world and the cosmos is a really beautiful place with a lot of mystery. So that's what I would suggest. Douthat: OK. I endorse that take very strongly. I'm going to give you one more chance to tell me who it was who told you they had seen an alien spacecraft and where. Because, you know, it's The New York Times — it's an audience of at least dozens, if not millions. Don't you want to be the person who blew the lid off the secret government conspiracy, Diana? Pasulka: No, I don't aspire to that. Douthat: All right, Diana Walsh Pasulka, thank you for bearing with my frustrations, and thank you for this conversation. Pasulka: Thank you so much. Thoughts? Email us at interestingtimes@ This episode of 'Interesting Times' was produced by Katherine Sullivan, Andrea Betanzos and Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Raina Raskin. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker and Sophia Lanman. Cinematography by Marina King, Robert Cummins, Joshua Hildebrand and Laura Tippett. Video editing by Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@ Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
New York Post
a day ago
- New York Post
Mom freaks out, fires babysitter — just for ordering DoorDash on the job
Many parents have rules when it comes to others babysitting their little ones. No posting on social media, excessive screen time, or leaving the kids unsupervised come up a lot. No visitors is also a common one. But what happens when the 'visitor' is a delivery driver from DoorDash, bringing you some food? For one mom, this exact circumstance sent her spiraling. I got in trouble for ordering food while babysitting 4 Sharing the text exchange online, the babysitter wanted to know if she legitimately did the wrong thing. AFP via Getty Images A young woman took to Reddit recently to share an encounter between her and a mom she was babysitting for that left her absolutely baffled and questioning whether or not she was in the wrong. 'I ordered DoorDash while babysitting because I hadn't eaten since lunch and was getting a headache and they were 2 hours late. The kids were asleep, the food was left on the porch, and I stepped outside for 10 seconds to grab it,' the babysitter explained in the caption. 'The mom told me she was uncomfortable that someone came to the door and that I 'left the kids alone.' When I got home I was told they can't trust me anymore and I was fired,' she added. Sharing the text exchange online, the babysitter wanted to know if she legitimately did the wrong thing. Especially considering the mom found her on Facebook and did little background checks before hiring her for the evening. 'Was something delivered?' 4 'Yes, I didn't eat dinner so I ordered DoorDash,' the babysitter replied. Reddit The exchange began with the babysitter asking for a rough ETA from the mom after she claimed she'd be back at 8 p.m. – two hours prior. With a new confirmed arrival time of 11:30 p.m., the babysitter decided to order some dinner via DoorDash. As it turns out, it was the wrong thing to do. And an SMS was received shortly after the doorbell rang. 'Hey our Ring just showed someone at the door. Was something delivered?' the mom asked. 'Yes, I didn't eat dinner so I ordered DoorDash,' the babysitter replied. And that's when things spiraled. 'Okay, we'll talk when we get home, but I'm really concerned that you would do that without asking first. I would never be okay with a stranger coming to the door while my kids are sleeping. I really wish you had asked me before doing that,' the mom shot back – clearly not mincing her words. 'Please check to make sure the storm door is locked and the chain is locked as well since you opened them.' 'I get that you were hungry…' 4 Unfortunately for the babysitter, the clarification of events still wasn't enough. Reddit The babysitter apologized and went on to explain that she didn't anticipate still being at their home looking after the children after dinner, but due to the time change, she needed to order something. 'I'm sorry I made you uncomfortable. I just hadn't eaten since lunch and I thought I'd be done by 8 like you mentioned. I started getting a headache and I really needed to eat something. I've ordered food before while babysitting and it's never been a problem, so I didn't think it would be an issue,' she wrote back, while also offering some reassurance that she did all the right things. 'They left it at the door, and I waited until they were gone before I went out to grab it and locked the doors the way they were when I came back in.' Unfortunately for the babysitter, the clarification of events still wasn't enough. 'I get that you were hungry, but it's more about the fact that someone came to the door without my knowledge and you left them in the house alone while you grabbed it. If something had happened it just makes me really nervous,' the mom replied. 'You could have eaten from the cabinet. This is my home and my kids and I need to be able to fully trust who's here. We will talk later. Just please double check the doors.' The exchange ended with another apology from the babysitter. Babysitters weigh in with their horror stories 4 Plenty Reddit users agreed that this level of concern wasn't warranted from the mother. Simone – The post attracted many babysitters sharing their own horror stories – and this one is pretty tame compared to some. 'One time I babysat for people who found out that I went downstairs after putting their kid to sleep upstairs and they not only fired me, but talked sh** about me to other clients and I lost a couple jobs because of it,' someone commented. 'I'll be honest, my first instinct is this person is up to something that puts them at real risk. I have babysat for people who were pretty paranoid, but absolutely no one was to this level,' another added. Another babysitter shared: 'Once when I was a teen, I was babysitting regularly for a couple who had a young boy with autism, about 5. One night, they were supposed to be home by 7, but there was massive flooding and they couldn't get home until the next morning. About 5 a.m. they walked in the door and shook me awake cuz I'd fallen asleep on the couch. They then fired me for sleeping.' And plenty agreed that this level of concern wasn't warranted. 'This is ridiculous. Not only is she wildly inconsiderate for staying out 3.5 hours later without even asking you if that was okay…but you had to reach out to her to find out when she was coming home?' someone said. Others agreed that the mom was 'overreacting' and that the babysitter should 'drop her' as a client.
