Diana Pasulka Says Historical Catholic Reports of Orbs and Angelic Events Look Strikingly Similar to Modern UAP Encounters
*Consciousness
In a Shawn Ryan Show interview, Diana Pasulka describes how her research into Catholic history led her into a very unexpected area: historical aerial phenomena.
Pasulka says that while studying Catholic reports from roughly the twelfth through eighteenth centuries, she began finding accounts of people seeing things in the sky that they could not identify. In some cases, the witnesses described orbs. In other cases, they interpreted the phenomena through the religious framework available to them.
One example she gives is especially interesting.
People would report seeing an orb in the sky, admit that they did not know what it was, and then interpret it as a soul from purgatory. Their response was not to classify it as a craft or a UFO, but to pray it back to where they believed it belonged.
That is the key point.
The same type of aerial anomaly could be interpreted in very different ways depending on the culture, theology, and language of the witness.
Pasulka says she collected many of these cases. Some witnesses saw things that they described as flying houses. Some thought they were angels. At first, she did not know what to make of the reports, so she put them aside. But she says the cases were too strange and too numerous to ignore, and the patterns kept repeating.
When she showed the material to a friend, he told her that the reports looked like Steven Spielberg films. In other words, they looked like UFO cases.
Pasulka says she initially rejected that interpretation. She did not make the UFO connection at first. She had been reading the accounts more symbolically, as metaphors or religious interpretations. But when other people looked at the same material, they treated the reports as descriptions of events that the witnesses believed had actually happened.
That caused her to re examine her own approach.
She says she began looking at the accounts from the perspective of the people who reported them. They were not asking only what the symbols meant. They were asking what they had actually seen in the sky. They were also asking what happened to the people involved, including whether they were injured.
That shift seems to have been important for her.
Pasulka says she came to think that these events were probably real in some sense, and that realization shocked her for about a year.
The Vatican archive then becomes central to the story.
She explains that the archive once known as the Vatican Secret Archive is now called the Vatican Apostolic Archive, and that it is the pope’s archive. She says access requires certain scholarly credentials, and that she had those credentials. This allowed her to examine primary source material related to saints in the Catholic and Christian tradition, including cases involving angel events, levitation, and anomalous activity.
This is where the discussion becomes especially relevant to modern UAP studies.
Pasulka says that once you look at primary source material, the earliest accounts can look different from later official versions. She gives the example of Teresa of Avila, who wrote about her own experience. According to Pasulka, Teresa said the event was not a vision, but happened in reality. She described seeing an angel, but she also said it was short, shiny, and did not look the way she expected an angel to look. Pasulka says Teresa seemed confused and concluded that it must be a cherub.
Pasulka then compares the experience to modern UFO abduction reports.
She also discusses Joan of Arc. In Pasulka’s framing, a light appears to Joan, gives her instructions, and eventually Joan interprets the source as Saint Michael. Pasulka connects this to the modern UAP idea of downloads, meaning experiences in which people report receiving information from whatever they believe the phenomenon is.
This is one of the most important parts of the clip.
Pasulka is not simply saying ancient people saw UFOs. She is saying that anomalous experiences appear across history, but the interpretation changes. In one period, a person may call it an angel, a soul from purgatory, or Saint Michael. In another period, a person may call it a UFO, UAP, non human intelligence, or a download.
The pattern may be similar.
The explanation may change.
She also gives a warning.
Pasulka says people should not accept downloads too easily. She says she has met many people who are brilliant and successful and who believe their success is connected to a download experience. But she also says these experiences can be psychologically difficult, because some people feel overwhelmed by information they believe they must deliver to others.
That caution is important.
It prevents the topic from becoming simple belief or simple debunking. Pasulka is treating these experiences as powerful, recurring, and sometimes transformative, but also potentially dangerous or destabilizing.
Near the end of the segment, she says that if we were to call these things anything, they would be in the realm of the angelic and the demonic.
That statement is provocative, but it fits her broader academic point: religious language may not be irrelevant to the UAP phenomenon. It may be one of the oldest interpretive systems humans have used for encounters with anomalous intelligences, lights, aerial phenomena, and information experiences.
This does not prove that saints were abductees.
It does not prove that all angelic encounters were UFO events.
It does not prove that modern UAP are religious beings.
But it does raise a serious question.
Are modern UAP encounters a completely new phenomenon, or are they a modern interpretation of a much older category of extraordinary human experience?
Pasulka’s work matters because she is not approaching this only through pop culture. She is comparing modern UAP reports with religious history, primary source material, witness interpretation, institutional redaction, and the way extraordinary experiences become structured into belief systems.
That may be one of the most important angles in the entire UAP discussion.
Not just what people see.
But how people interpret what they see.
And how institutions later rewrite, preserve, suppress, or sanctify those interpretations.