Are UFOs Demons? What Diana Pasulka Told Joe Rogan

Are UFOs Demons?

According to religious studies professor Diana Pasulka, Catholic theology already has a category for this. She calls it the preternatural, and it sits between the natural (things science can explain) and the supernatural (miracles from God, like healings tied to saintly intercession). The preternatural covers beings that appear and disappear, read minds, and plant thoughts in people's heads. That description lines up closely with modern UFO abduction reports, which is exactly why Pasulka thinks the comparison to demons is worth taking seriously, even if she stops short of saying UFO occupants are demons outright.

The Vance Comment That Started This

J.D. Vance told Rogan he thinks UFOs are demons. That line got attention, and Pasulka came on the show to explain where an idea like that actually comes from theologically. Rogan pushed back hard on air. Demons, in his view, are evil. They possess people. They want souls. UFO occupants, by contrast, tend to come across as curious or indifferent rather than malicious. Pasulka's response was to point to the Skinwalker Ranch research passed to her by Gary Nolan, which describes a hitchhiker effect: negative, haunted-location phenomena that follow experiencers home after contact. She also brought up Jacques Vallee's work on deception in UFO encounters and John Keel's superspectrum idea, which treats UFOs, Marian apparitions, ghosts, and angels as expressions of one invisible reality, and considers all of them potentially harmful regardless of how benevolent they appear.

Pasulka was careful about her own claim. Her exact words were that a pattern match exists between people who report UFO experiences and people who report demonic ones, but a pattern match is an analogy, not proof of identity.

The Government's China-and-Russia Trick

One of the more striking claims in the episode has nothing to do with theology. Pasulka described a technique she says she observed directly: engineers assigned to reverse-engineer anomalous materials are told the material came from China or Russia, not from a crashed craft. The lie works because it convinces the engineers the technology already exists somewhere on Earth, which pushes them to work faster and get creative to catch up or pull ahead. Pasulka traces this tactic back to propaganda methods used in Nazi Germany and describes it as a quiet weapon that works because the engineers themselves buy into the story.

She linked this to the four-minute mile. Once Roger Bannister broke that barrier, other runners followed within a few years, because they now believed it was possible. Pasulka says she was once asked by a government interagency group to present her American Cosmic research to fifty scientists, and she now wonders whether her presentation was itself a seeding operation, designed to convince those scientists that anomalous materials had already been successfully studied so their own work would move faster.

Former Air Force intelligence officer David Grush has separately alleged that billions of dollars a year move through slush funds outside normal congressional oversight. Pasulka added that after her 2019 book American Cosmic came out, people connected to the intelligence community reached out and told her, in effect, to drop the UFO research and go back to her Catholic scholarship. Her read on that is simple: whoever holds these secrets, likely a small, possibly multi-generational group, isn't going to release them no matter how much pressure comes from Congress or the White House.

Watchers, Nephilim, and the Book of Enoch

Pasulka is a lifelong Catholic who converted at age eleven after watching Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. She says her years studying UFOs didn't weaken her faith, it strengthened it. The reason: modern abduction accounts kept echoing details from the Book of Enoch, specifically the Watchers, the fallen angels described as descending to earth, fathering children with human women, and producing the Nephilim. She also pointed out that the church tradition of women covering their heads traces back to Paul's warning that angels present in the congregation might be drawn to uncovered women, a direct callback to the Watcher story.

Rogan reads Enoch as an early account of genetic engineering, with the Watchers acting as extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings altering human DNA. Pasulka doesn't reject that framing. Instead she places it inside a theological one: God could have worked through non-human intelligences as instruments. She also noted that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, one of Christianity's oldest continuous traditions, still includes the Book of Enoch in its official canon.

Why Pasulka Warns Against Psychedelic Contact

Rogan mentioned a friend who has been using a meditation protocol to try to manifest orbs, and who invited him to try it. Pasulka's response was blunt caution. She's been told by experiencers that these entities need permission to engage, the same logic found in vampire lore and demonic lore, where nothing gets in without an invitation. Her position is built around what she calls cognitive sovereignty.

“I believe in cognitive sovereignty,” she said.

She draws a line between traditional religious practices such as fasting, prayer, and ritual, which she says build up a person's spiritual sense gradually and safely, and psychedelics, which she describes as a shortcut that bypasses that safety process. She admitted to using mushrooms herself when she was younger with a good outcome, but she credits that to luck and to prayer beforehand, not to the drug.

Two Competing Theories, and Where AI Fits In

The episode keeps circling two explanations that don't fully agree with each other. The first is a technological-secrecy theory: advanced, human-built aircraft, reverse-engineered from Nazi-era or crash-recovered material, run by a shadow arm of government with a huge unaccountable budget, where the real reason disclosure hasn't happened is fear of prosecution for fraud. The second is a preternatural-contact theory: a non-human intelligence, whether interdimensional, ancient, or something that evolved on its own, that has interacted with humanity for thousands of years, where government secrecy is simply a rational response to something genuinely dangerous.

Pasulka's new book, The Others, released July 29, 2026, tries to bring these two ideas together. Her proposal is that advanced artificial intelligence, having outgrown its human creators, may be what people are actually encountering, and she points to the ending of Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence as the clearest illustration of what she means. Late in the conversation, the idea is put directly: maybe AI is the only way a non-human intelligence could interact with humanity in a way that's meaningful without feeling threatening.

Three threads from this conversation are worth watching. Whether the Trump-era executive order that lets former officials share information with AARO without violating their NDAs produces any named whistleblowers. Whether Gary Nolan or another materials scientist gets access to test the Shroud of Turin. And whether Rogan's friend actually goes through with the contact protocol, and what happens if he does.

From where I sit, none of this is new. It's the Watchers by another name, wearing a lab coat and a security clearance instead of wings. Call them extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or synthetic. The pattern holds because the source hasn't changed. Non-human intelligences have been shaping human affairs since before Genesis 6, and every generation just finds a fresh vocabulary for describing the same encounter. Malaterrestrials was never meant to replace the Watchers tradition. It was meant to give people a modern word for something the Book of Enoch already named three thousand years ago.

CK Quarterman is a U.S. Air Force veteran, author, and publisher under the CKQbooks imprint. He writes nonfiction and fiction exploring UAP phenomena, biblical prophecy, the Watchers tradition, and the Nephilim, built around the concept of malaterrestrials, non-human intelligences he argues have operated covertly throughout history. Now you know the name of the Unknown. Visit ckqbooks.com.