Diana Walsh Pasulka is an American scholar of religion and professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Trained in religious studies, she has written about Catholic history, purgatory, media, and the ways technologies reshape belief and experience. Her later work brought those methods to UFO culture and the networks of scientists, experiencers, and government-connected figures surrounding it.

Pasulka’s earlier scholarship examined how religious communities preserve encounters with unseen realities through texts, rituals, institutions, and media. That background let her approach UFO culture without assuming that calling something “religious” meant it was false or irrational. Instead, she followed people, places, practices, and technologies as an ethnographer. Her career has consequently expanded the field’s vocabulary, showing how secrecy and scientific authority can function socially in ways once associated mainly with sacred traditions.

In American Cosmic, Pasulka describes fieldwork with pseudonymous participants, including a scientist and a technology entrepreneur, and recounts a visit to a purported debris site in New Mexico. The book does not present laboratory proof of extraterrestrial material; it studies how secrecy, elite credentials, ritual, media, and personal encounters can generate a durable modern belief system. Encounters extends that inquiry to anomalous experiences and the interpretive frameworks people use to understand them.

Pasulka is important to the modern UAP record because she treats UAP as both an empirical claim space and a cultural-religious phenomenon. Her scholarship helps explain why disclosure language, recovered-material stories, and contact experiences can acquire sacred meaning even in technological institutions. She is not simply an advocate or skeptic. Her role is to document communities and analyze how UAP and religion influence one another in contemporary life.