UFOs exist. On that we can all agree. The question is not whether they are but what they are.
The same is true for all numinous experiences, or, better, encounters. People have them. They have always had them. The issue, therefore, is not their reality but the nature of their reality.
In itself, there is nothing odd or extraordinary about the existence of life, including intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe, beyond Earth. From the perch of any other globe, we ourselves would count as “extraplanetary” life. Such a discovery would be, by comparison with the discovery of a new species in the ocean, a difference in degree, not in kind.
What makes reports of encounters with extraterrestrial life—as with religious studies scholar D.W. Pasulka, we’ll place these under the umbrella term “the phenomenon”—feel remarkable, then, is not the bare facts. It’s the social stigma, for starters: Such things are not supposed to happen; believing that they do makes you a quack or some kind of religious fanatic. It’s also the character of the phenomenon. Encounters are never run-of-the-mill. By turns, they effect paralysis, induce lost time, stupefy witnesses, facilitate self-knowledge, or illuminate the mind.
Stripped of proper nouns, a description of the phenomenon might reasonably be mistaken for Saul’s journey on the road to Damascus. The blinding light, the voice that sounds like thunder to onlookers, the commission and bestowal of a new vocation: These are the raw elements of thousands of similar encounters ever since. That modern-day witnesses identify the phenomenon with aliens rather than Jesus is neither here nor there to the point. Or, rather, it is the point. What is noteworthy about ufology is how much it reads like theology. Ufology is theology, in style and often in substance.