The Vatican Archives, Angels & the Government Email That Changed Everything

September 29, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Vatican Archives, Angels & the Government Email That Changed Everything

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of religious studies who refuses to walk into a house if somebody tells her it is cursed. But put a blindfold on her, drive her into the New Mexico desert with a man who has government clearance, and hand her a shovel—she is in. She has read sworn testimony in the secret archive of the Vatican: thousands of signatures from the 1600s, real people swearing under oath that they watched a monk float off the ground. Her new book, The Others, argues that a new religion is forming around UFOs right now, and somebody is already writing its Bible.

The Scholar Who Doesn't Cheer

The single most important fact about Pasulka is what her job actually is. When people hear "professor of religious studies," they imagine something like a priest with tenure. That is not the job. Theology is done from inside—a theologian starts with a commitment and reasons outward from it. Religious studies works from outside. The question is what people actually do, what they report, what they build, what they write down at three in the morning when something has just happened that they cannot explain. It is closer to anthropology.

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

Never miss an episode of Ancient Mysteries

Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Navigation Outline
2 (01:00) **Who Diana Walsh Pasulka Is and Why She Matters** - Introduction to a religion professor whose research led her into contact with aerospace contractors and government officials
3 (01:56) **The Misunderstood Profession: Religious Studies vs. Theology** - The crucial distinction that explains why Pasulka became the most quoted academic in UFO research despite not believing in aliens
4 (06:11) **The Weird Stuff and the Abandoned Archive** - Pasulka's early specialization in anomalous events that historians and theologians both ignore
5 (11:51) **Children Who Died and Came Back** - Her first real publication on 19th century near-death experiences of children, and why the pattern matters
6 (17:54) **The Three-Piece Pattern That Keeps Repeating** - The stable, cross-cultural, multi-millennial structure of near-death testimony
7 (24:48) **Purgatory: The Doctrine That Disappeared** - How a central Catholic teaching became invisible within one generation, and what it reveals about institutional rebranding

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

What happens when centuries-old Vatican records begin attracting the attention of people connected to the aerospace world?

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of religious studies who spent years studying extraordinary accounts preserved in historical archives — from reports of angels and mystical encounters to sworn testimony describing events that witnesses struggled to explain.

Then something unexpected happened.

Around 2015–2016, emails began arriving at her university address from aerospace companies, contractors and individuals connected to programs they could not openly identify. They weren't asking for her published research. They wanted the original material — archival references, primary documents, witness testimony and the sources hidden behind her footnotes.

Why were they interested?

In this documentary, we follow Pasulka's journey through religious history, the Vatican archives, centuries-old reports of unexplained phenomena, modern UFO culture and the surprising connections between ancient testimony and the people studying unusual aerial phenomena today.

The story includes Vatican archive research, Joseph of Cupertino, María de Ágreda, historical accounts of extraordinary encounters, aerospace researchers and the mysterious emails that connected two worlds that seemingly had nothing to do with each other.

Were centuries-old religious accounts simply products of their time — or could some of them contain observations worth examining with modern eyes?

This documentary explores the evidence, competing explanations and unanswered questions without assuming that extraordinary claims are automatically true.

Watch to the end and decide what the evidence means for yourself.

🔔 Subscribe for more documentaries about hidden history, unexplained phenomena, science, religion and mysteries buried in the archives.