I was very reluctant to even read this book due to some extremely negative reviews on Amazon.com. And I began it fully prepared to mentally debunk it. But I can’t find anything objectionable enough about it to do so. The book attempts to describe the adventures of a scholar of religion with two very twenty-first century, cutting-edge technology wonks, Tyler and James. The adventure begins with a visit to a UFO crash site and ends at the Vatican. Jacques Vallee is heavily cited throughout. Although it reads like fiction, it may well be true. If it’s true, it’s certainly not the most outré UFO-related document ever published. If it’s true, it’s not as cosmos-shattering as the human abduction accounts of the 1980s, which turned out to be probably not true. Pasulka suggests that visions and encounters with UFOs are indicative of the emergence of a new religion. There may be some linkage between the two, but my personal opinion is that one is not causing the other.
We are probably too close to current events to detect a final outcome, but we can see trends. Technocracy is emerging as a religious-type belief, while traditional religious behavior is declining. A generation that lauded the birth of the Jesus Phone a few years ago might be attracted to the idea of a Jesus UFO. People, quite simply, need to *believe*.
While it’s undeniable that UFOs began buzzing military and nuclear installations only within the past few decades, what is more significant is that ordinary people are able to see UFOs on a daily basis and under circumstances that make little cosmic sense. What purpose would a UFO have to make itself visible to three or four people in the middle of nowhere where there are no nukes, cattle, or even advanced avionics?
Perhaps UFOs have always been “there” in some fashion, but suddenly, we are able to see them. Maybe a shift in consciousness is allowing increasing numbers of people (self included) to see what hitherto had been inconceivable. As a visually-oriented species, the first step in our embracing the reality of a thing is to see it. This isn’t, necessarily, a call to worship the wonder that we are suddenly seeing, but a cause to wonder why.
