Joe Rogan Experience #2533 — Diana Pasulka

Joe brings up JD Vance's recent appearance on the show, where Vance used the word "demons" to describe UFOs — and Joe pushed back on it at the time. Diana, laughing, first has to clarify she's speaking as a private individual, not on behalf of her university. She's a professor of religious studies with a background in the history of Catholicism — she's Catholic herself — who started researching UFO experiences in 2012. Her read on the Vance moment: the headline was "demons," but what he actually said was more nuanced, and she wants to unpack why he'd frame it that way.

She lays out Catholic theology's three-part taxonomy for anomalous phenomena. The supernatural covers events considered miracles — someone terminally ill prays for a saint's intercession and is healed in a way doctors can't explain; that's attributed directly to God. The natural covers everything ordinary science can explain — hurricanes and the like. Between those sits a third, older category: the preternatural — events that can't be explained but don't rise to the level of a miracle. Catholic theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, have used this category since at least medieval times. If UFOs have been around a long time, Diana argues, whatever people were seeing in the medieval period needed a category too — and preternatural events, per Aquinas, are either angelic or demonic (fallen angels), part of a broader set of things God created that remain unseen. Beings that appear and disappear, beings that seem to read your mind — that's the preternatural, and it's what she believes Vance was reaching for.

Joe presses on the substance: when people think of demons they think of malice — possession, murder, something trying to steal your soul. That doesn't match what UFO experiencers describe, which sounds more like encountering a superior intelligence, superior technology, something that communicates telepathically but isn't vicious. Why call that a demon unless it's just an old word ancient people reached for because they lacked better vocabulary? Diana concedes this was exactly her position before 2016 — until deeper research changed her mind, a shift she traces directly to what she learned about Skinwalker Ranch.

The two also detour into a grim, well-documented case: 20-year-old Australian pilot Frederick Valentich, who vanished during a routine 1978 training flight over Bass Strait after radioing that a strange metallic aircraft with four bright lights was hovering above him and "it's not an aircraft." His transmission ended with 17 seconds of metallic scraping sounds, then silence; neither he nor his Cessna was ever found. Diana connects this atmosphere of unresolved cases to Jacques Vallée, noting the French scientist character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is based directly on him, and that Vallée — like John Keel — ultimately concluded the phenomenon is deceptive.

Diana explains the turning point in her thinking: Skinwalker Ranch. She first heard about it around 2013 from Stanford immunologist Gary Nolan, who told her a lot of his friends worked out there and wanted him to come study the anomalous phenomena — UFOs showing up, and more. When she asked if he was going, he said no. Why? "Because it's really negative," he told her — people who spend time there report something called the hitchhiker effect, where the scary stuff associated with a haunted place follows them home.

Diana met many people who this happened to — people with UFO experiences who then had this "hitchhiker" phenomenon attach itself to their lives afterward. She's careful to say not all UFO experiences are like this, but enough of them are that she personally will never seek one out, and it cemented her sense that the preternatural remains the best available category for understanding it. Not all preternatural phenomena are negative, even by Catholic reckoning — some are genuinely positive. The core problem, she says, is that human beings struggle to tell the difference, because deception is baked into a lot of these encounters.

Gary Nolan — who has no religious affiliation and "no dog in the race" — has also said publicly, including to Tucker Carlson, that these entities "lie." Diana gives it texture: among the roughly a thousand experiencers she's spoken with, some regularly receive what they describe as prophetic messages — some of which come true, most of which don't. One or two correct predictions build trust; then the false ones pile up, and the person who goes public gets branded a liar or delusional. Joe pushes on whether this could simply be mental illness, or ordinary dreams misclassified as visions — noting Western culture tends to lump all dreams into one bucket, unlike traditions (the biblical Joseph, Australia's Martu people and their "dreamtime") that distinguish prophetic dreams from ordinary ones. Diana's answer: caution is warranted precisely because there's no reliable way for the experiencer, in the moment, to tell the difference.

Diana frames the broader danger as a disinformation strategy: take a kernel of truth and staple absurd, easily-debunked claims onto it so the whole package gets dismissed together. That segues directly into the Bob Lazar discussion, since Diana raises exactly this dynamic — the risk that credible witnesses get deliberately positioned "on the edge of credibility" so they can be discredited whenever it's convenient.

Joe lays out why he trusts Bob Lazar: they've had dinner together several times, hung out in the studio, and Lazar even showed Joe his most recent documentary before release. Joe describes himself as generally suspicious of people who claim insider knowledge — he can usually spot an agenda — but he's not suspicious of Lazar. Lazar is obviously intelligent and deeply fluent in science, in elements and particles, and when he describes the craft and his experiences at S-4, he comes across as telling the truth.

The corroborating detail Joe keeps returning to: nobody knew about the S-4 facility back when Lazar started talking about it, yet he knew exactly where it was, knew about the flights that shuttled people out there, and had total command of the Los Alamos Labs layout — when George Knapp took him back, he knew everything about the facility. The government initially claimed Lazar never worked there; he was then found on the employee roster. Joe's read: they lied because he'd been involved in something they wanted kept secret. Footage released after a 2017 New York Times story also mirrors, in Joe's view, the way Lazar described the craft moving decades earlier — an eerily specific thing to have gotten right in 1989.

Diana corroborates from her own reporting: "Tyler," a source featured in her book American Cosmic, told her Lazar was the real deal, even as physicist Eric Davis and others insisted otherwise. Since most of what Tyler told her has since come true, she's inclined to believe him on Lazar too. Joe frames the stakes starkly: if Lazar is telling the truth, a small group within government possesses knowledge the public doesn't and has decided, for whatever reason, not to share it — which he calls a crime against humanity. Diana offers the counter-argument some of her sources have given her directly: what if it isn't alien technology at all, but something built domestically, and Lazar simply stumbled onto it? Joe's rebuttal: that doesn't fit the story Lazar tells, where he was brought in and asked how the craft worked, with an American flag sticker on it — not brought in to improve something they already understood, but to explain a technology nobody in the room seemed to grasp.

Diana widens the lens to disinformation risk more broadly. She describes the case of Paul Bennewitz, who believed he'd intercepted alien communications and uncovered a secret facility called Dulce Base — a belief, she says, that was deliberately cultivated by a government disinformation campaign (including planting fabricated files directly on his home computer while he was out) that eventually contributed to his psychiatric hospitalization. She also references a well-known figure within ufology, Richard Doty, whom insiders including "the invisible college" crowd all recognize as someone who has knowingly and purposefully seeded misinformation into the public UFO discourse for decades. Her broader point: the government is not a unified actor on this topic — different factions work against each other, and anyone who goes public with new UFO files risks being targeted by counterintelligence, producing a fog that requires serious discernment to navigate.

Diana recalls an episode from around 2014 that shaped her thinking. Through her connection to Gary Nolan, she learned of government-associated laboratories ordinary people simply couldn't access, staffed by researchers — laser specialists in particular — described as better than anyone at Yale, Harvard, or Stanford. Nolan himself was invited in because they were trying to determine if he could help figure out what they were studying. Diana also points to Harold Malgrim (var. spelling), a Cornell physicist recruited into a high-clearance advisory role to multiple presidents at age 27 — evidence, in her view, that talented physicists really do get quietly absorbed into classified programs, sometimes issued cover job titles specifically so outsiders can't trace their real clearance level.

Joe then raises Eric Weinstein's specific version of this theory: that there's a particular upstate New York university with a physics department wildly overqualified for the research output it actually produces — and that department happens to be linked to a hedge fund posting suspiciously flawless, "Bernie Madoff–style" numbers. Diana immediately recognizes the reference once Joe names it: Stony Brook and Renaissance Technologies. Weinstein's argument is that if there's a real secret program hiding in plain sight, that's where you'd find it — brilliant physicists who'd get fired anywhere else for not publishing, kept financially afloat by a fund whose returns don't make conventional sense, which Weinstein reads as a mechanism for quietly funneling money into classified research.

Diana adds a personal data point: she knows a man who was simultaneously a university professor and a CIA operative — literally involved in gunfights one week, teaching university courses the next. Joe calls it "Indiana Jones on steroids." If a program like this exists, Weinstein's theory holds that its publicly visible "research" is essentially nonsense cover, while the real work is something like a genuinely novel propulsion system — meaning a meaningful share of what people see in the sky could be American technology rather than anything extraterrestrial.

The conversation turns darker from there. If the technology genuinely involves folding space and time — arriving instantaneously rather than traveling any finite distance, even at light speed — the same principle could be weaponized: instead of a missile requiring flight time to reach Beijing or Moscow, a warhead could arrive and detonate instantaneously. Diana notes this is essentially the argument she's heard directly from sources close to these programs — that developing it first, however unsettling, is framed as a matter of national security, because the alternative is China, Russia, or Iran getting there first.

Joe brings up Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the extent to which it drew on real UFO lore — including its French scientist character, based on Jacques Vallée. Diana confirms Vallée, like John Keel, ultimately concluded the phenomenon is deceptive; Vallée spent his career studying it and wrote a book called Messengers of Deception on exactly that theme.

Keel, Vallée's friend and the author of The Mothman Prophecies (the basis for the film of the same name), goes further and is, in Diana's words, "a doomer with respect to aliens." Keel's framework echoes Catholic theology's preternatural category but under a different name: the "Super Spectrum." It's an invisible reality that's been here all along, surrounding us, that most people can't perceive but some do — and for those who can, he considered them unlucky, because engagement with it invites consequences, including Men in Black-style visitations.

Keel's most sweeping claim is that the origin of religion itself traces back to encounters with beings from the Super Spectrum — that Marian apparitions, ghosts, and UFOs are all expressions of the same underlying, invisible source, and that even angels belong to it. Unlike the Catholic framework, which allows for both benevolent and malevolent preternatural entities, Keel collapsed the distinction entirely: everything in the Super Spectrum, in his view, ultimately serves a controlling function over humanity. Diana recommends Keel's book, and the film adaptation of Mothman Prophecies, as the clearest entry point into his thinking.

Joe closes the topic with a broader epistemological point that threads through the whole conversation: humans perceive the world through five senses — sight, sound, touch, smell, taste — and reality is almost certainly far larger than what that narrow sensory bandwidth can register. We're operating, he says, inside a deeply limited framework, which is precisely the opening Keel's "invisible, all-around-us" Super Spectrum concept is built to fill.

Joe raises the ritualistic practice — sometimes associated with Steven Greer's CE-5 movement, though not always directly affiliated — where people meditate to "manifest orbs." Diana says she does believe something real happens when people do this. Joe describes a close friend, someone thoroughly rational and intelligent with no history of unusual belief, who recently tried it and told him: "This is gonna sound nuts, but if you do this, and if you do it and give it enough time, they will show up." She wasn't taught by Greer directly but learned the technique from someone who was, did it once in a group setting, and has since done it alone successfully.

Joe says he plans to try it himself. Diana is blunt about her own position: she believes it happens, but she wouldn't do it — because she believes in cognitive sovereignty, the idea that people should remain sovereign over their own minds rather than opening themselves to something interacting with them mentally and spiritually. She says this sovereignty is frequently, and literally, at stake: a recurring theme from the people she's interviewed over the years is that contact requires giving explicit permission first.

Diana confirms the parallel isn't accidental — the same "you have to invite them in" logic shows up in both vampire folklore and demonic lore. Joe, only half-joking, admits he's now second-guessing his plan to try orb meditation.

The conversation widens into psychedelics, which Diana sees as another route into the same territory — encounters with genuine entities, in her view, but via a "quick" and comparatively dangerous shortcut rather than the traditional, disciplined path. She frames human beings as innately oriented toward the sacred, with a "spiritual sense" that religious practice — fasting, ritual, particular ways of living — has historically existed to cultivate deliberately. Psychedelics can hijack that same sense open quickly (as in the Native American Church's sacramental use), but she argues it isn't the ideal route, and notes that modern digital culture is actively eroding people's spiritual sense in the background, making the deliberate, disciplined path even rarer than it used to be.