American Cosmic and Intimate Alien: a dual review essay on UFOs, Religion, and Technology
Benjamin E. Zeller
Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2021
A religious-studies dual review situates Pasulka's ethnographic and Halperin's psychoanalytic accounts of UFO belief within academic religion scholarship, arguing ufology constitutes a modern meaning-making system worthy of sustained disciplinary attention.
Brief
Writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (89:1, 2021, pp. 368-372), Benjamin Zeller reviews Diana Walsh Pasulka's American Cosmic and David Halperin's Intimate Alien side by side. Pasulka's ethnographic fieldwork among scientists and technologists who privately hold UFO beliefs is read as evidence that ufology functions structurally like religion, producing community, revelation, and sacred narrative. Halperin's psychoanalytic lens, by contrast, treats encounter experiences as projections of inner mythological life rather than external events. Zeller concludes that both books, whatever their individual weaknesses, collectively justify placing ufology on the agenda of mainstream religious studies.
Metadata
- Category
- Stigma
- Venue
- Journal of the American Academy of Religion
- Type
- Peer-reviewed
- Year
- 2021
- Authors
- Benjamin E. Zeller
- Access
- Paywalled
- Tags
- stigma, religion-and-UFO, sociology-of-belief, new-religious-movements, ethnography, psychoanalytic-UFO
Key points
- Pasulka conducts ethnographic fieldwork among credentialed scientists and technology professionals who privately hold UFO beliefs, framing this community as a nascent religious formation with its own sacred sites, relics, and revelation events.p.368
- Halperin applies a psychoanalytic, broadly Jungian, framework to UFO encounter reports, arguing the alien figure is an externalization of interior psychological and mythological material rather than a literal extraterrestrial presence.p.369
- Zeller situates both works within the new religious movements literature, noting that ufology satisfies the same analytical criteria, cosmology, soteriology, community formation, charismatic authority, used to study other emergent belief systems.p.370
- The essay calls for sustained scholarly engagement by religious-studies academics, arguing that the field's historical inattention to ufology has left a significant modern meaning-making system understudied.p.371
- Publication in JAAR, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Religion, itself signals institutional legitimation of UFO phenomena as a serious object of humanistic inquiry.p.368
Most interesting
- Pasulka's fieldwork subjects in American Cosmic include working NASA scientists and Silicon Valley technologists, a demographic whose private UFO belief complicates any simple dismissal of ufology as a marginal or uneducated subculture.
- Halperin, a retired professor of religious studies and physician, draws partly on his own childhood fascination with flying saucers, making Intimate Alien an unusual blend of memoir, clinical analysis, and comparative mythology.
- JAAR's 89th volume (2021) accepting this review signals that the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of religion scholars in the world, was willing to treat UFO studies as peer-reviewed subject matter two years before the UAP congressional hearings accelerated mainstream legitimization.
- Zeller's dual-review format implicitly argues that neither a purely sociological nor a purely psychological account is sufficient on its own, suggesting the field needs cross-methodological synthesis to handle ufology adequately.
- The essay occupies only five journal pages (368-372), yet its placement in JAAR's review section functions as a disciplinary gate-keeping moment: it certifies that these books merit a hearing from religion scholars, not just sociologists or psychologists.