Pasulka teaches religious studies in North Carolina and wrote her first book on purgatory. Digging through old Catholic accounts, she kept hitting things that sounded oddly familiar: orbs of light, luminous beings, spinning suns, discs in the sky. She spent six years researching UFO belief, not asking whether any of it is real but watching a kind of religion assemble itself in real time, with its own prophets, relics, pilgrimage sites, and converts. The people she finds aren’t cranks. They’re aerospace engineers, biotech guys, Silicon Valley money, all keeping quiet at work. Two of them, whom she calls Tyler D. and James, drive her out to a no-fly zone in New Mexico to hunt for pieces of a craft, with the last forty minutes done blindfolded so she can’t find it again. Agree or not, her viewpoint is refreshingly novel in a canon populated by true believers with something to sell (mostly that UFOs are real).