From Deseret News:
The connection between UFOs and religion may not seem obvious, but Diana Walsh Pasulka, a Catholic religious studies scholar, has come to see the two as intertwined.
Pasulka, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, used to dismiss the whole UFO conversation. But as she was studying the archives of the Catholic saints like Teresa of Ávila and St. Francis of Assisi, she noticed parallels between their mystical experiences and modern-day alleged UFO accounts. She tracked Catholic accounts from the 13th and 14th centuries that referred to visions of “flying houses,” “balls of light” and “little people.” Centuries later, she argues, people reporting UFO sightings — like the wave of reports in 1947 — have similarly relied on religious language to make sense of extraordinary experiences.