What if the line between angel, alien, and algorithm is thinner than any of us assume? That’s the unsettling question at the center of D.W. Pasulka’s “The Others.”
Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, spends the book tracing a thread that runs from centuries-old accounts of angelic and demonic contact through the modern UFO phenomenon and into the current race to build artificial general intelligence. Her argument is that these are not three separate stories but one long human attempt to make sense of encounters with intelligence that isn’t ours, whether that intelligence arrives wrapped in religious language, saucer-shaped craft, or silicon. Along the way she folds in reporting on life-extension research and the people chasing forms of technological immortality, framing all of it as part of the same impulse: a hope, or a fear, that we are not alone at the top of the hierarchy of minds.
Pasulka’s academic training is the book’s biggest asset. She approaches ostensibly fringe material, UFO contactee testimony, esoteric religious history, Silicon Valley’s stranger AI ambitions, with the same careful, sourced rigor she’d bring to any subject in religious studies, and that seriousness gives the book credibility that a more sensational treatment would lack. She’s also a genuinely clear writer, able to move between centuries of theology and this year’s AI headlines without losing the thread, and she resists easy answers in favor of laying out patterns and letting readers sit with the discomfort.
Response has been mixed, which seems to be the point. Some reviewers have praised the book as a scholarly, compelling entry point into a subject usually left to cable-television speculation, crediting Pasulka with treating her subjects and her readers with respect. Others have found the connective tissue between UFOs, AI, and immortality research thinner than the premise promises, arguing the book is more compelling as three loosely related essays than as a single unified thesis. Even critics in that second camp tend to concede that individual sections, particularly her treatment of contact narratives and religious history, are genuinely illuminating on their own terms.
“The Others” won’t convert skeptics into believers, and it doesn’t seem to be trying to. What it offers instead is a scholar’s permission to take strange questions seriously without demanding you accept strange answers. Readers drawn to the intersection of religion, technology, and the unexplained will find plenty to chew on; readers wanting a tightly argued single thesis may find the book’s ambition outruns its structure. Either way, it’s a serious, unusual entry in a genre that rarely gets serious treatment.
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