{"id":85190,"date":"2026-08-05T08:51:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T12:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/?p=85190"},"modified":"2026-08-05T08:52:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T12:52:07","slug":"what-ufos-and-religion-have-in-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/what-ufos-and-religion-have-in-common\/","title":{"rendered":"What UFOs And Religion Have In Common"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <em>Deseret News:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Pasulka, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, used to dismiss the whole UFO conversation.\u00a0But as she was studying the archives of the Catholic saints like Teresa of \u00c1vila and St. Francis of Assisi, she noticed parallels between their mystical experiences and modern-day alleged UFO accounts.\u00a0She tracked Catholic accounts from the 13th and 14th centuries that referred to visions of \u201cflying houses,\u201d \u201cballs of light\u201d and \u201clittle people.\u201d Centuries later, she argues, people reporting UFO sightings \u2014\u00a0<a title=\"https:\/\/airandspace.si.edu\/stories\/editorial\/1947-year-flying-saucer\" href=\"https:\/\/airandspace.si.edu\/stories\/editorial\/1947-year-flying-saucer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">like the wave of reports in 1947<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 have similarly relied on religious language to make sense of extraordinary experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Deseret News: The connection between UFOs and religion may not seem obvious, but Diana Walsh Pasulka, a Catholic religious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-85190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-news","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85192,"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85190\/revisions\/85192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}