I’ve read all of Diana Pasulka’s books.  A religion professor with a range, she’s worked in Catholic Studies (and served as a consultant on The Conjuring), UFOs, and, more recently, in entities and consciousness.  The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny is an unusual book.  As a Catholic herself, she doesn’t come out and say that the secret forces are God, traditionally defined.  The book doesn’t answer the question directly as to what these forces are, but makes a good case that they’re there.  For a lifelong liker of the weird and unusual, and also an erstwhile professor of religion, I found this book intriguing as well as a bit of a head-scratcher.  As regular readers know, I’m no fan of AI.  Pasulka gave me a bit of pause here, but not enough to change my mind. She also engages with Catholic thinkers and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

Consciousness is the elephant in the room.  We don’t know what it is, where it comes from, or how far down it reaches.  I’ve read serious philosophers who suggest the planet is conscious.  If so, it stands to reason that the rest of the physical universe is too.  What we do know is that the government has been taking UFOs seriously since at least the forties.  We also find out, from books like this, that tech moguls use what we might well call the paranormal to guide their decisions, including about AI.  Meanwhile, the average person on the street scoffs at anything they’ve been conditioned to think of as “crazy.”  Those in places of power aren’t laughing.  Reagan believed in astrology.  I understand it’s kind of “in” these days among the rich and powerful.

I come away from books like this realizing just how little the average person knows about what goes on behind the walls of power.  Those walls enclose the government (or at least some in the government), the ultra-wealthy, and some research facilities.  While Pasulka doesn’t discuss this, I’ve always been fascinated that the very wealthy businessman Robert Bigelow makes no bones about his belief in aliens and their presence on earth.  I suppose if you have lots of money it doesn’t matter if people laugh you out of a job.  Meanwhile, such things are still used as measures of “sanity” for ordinary folk.  Who are the others?  We don’t really know.  We do know that there are those among our own kind who take such things very seriously.  And they are, generally, the ones calling the shots.  I still don’t think Al’s a good companion to the human race.