American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology is a 2019 book by religious-studies scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka, published by Oxford University Press. Rather than trying to prove or disprove extraterrestrial visitation, Pasulka studies how belief, experience, media, secrecy, and technological culture produce a religious environment around UFOs. The book follows participants whose identities were partly disguised, including figures presented as a scientist and a technology entrepreneur.

A central argument is that modern screens and networks help create sacred-like encounters: images are copied, interpreted, and circulated until they shape memory and expectation. Pasulka compares this process with the formation of established religious traditions while taking participants' experiences seriously as lived events. She also examines alleged artifact-recovery trips, scientific interest in unusual materials, and the boundary between public ridicule and private elite engagement.

The book became influential in UAP & Religion because it treats UFO culture as more than a collection of sighting claims. Its ethnographic scenes show how authority is built through credentials, secrecy, conversion narratives, and access to hidden knowledge. Later public identification of some pseudonymous participants has encouraged readers to use the text as a guide to specific UAP networks, but those identifications do not turn every reported episode into a verified physical event.

American Cosmic is strongest as analysis of a belief system in formation. It documents what people say, do, and value around technology and Extraterrestrials, while leaving the ontological status of encounters open. Readers should distinguish Pasulka's observed social facts from claims relayed by her subjects. That distinction is consistent with the book's larger point: stories, media, objects, and institutions can have real cultural power before their ultimate interpretation is settled.