The sociologist Robert Bellah once observed the practice of what he called an American civil religion—a collection of symbols and rituals that embody those values to which America aspires and which sometimes parallel religious imagery and practices. In his famous 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” for instance, he invokes the “reenactment of the sacrifice theme” of Christ in relation to the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy.
Robert Bellah never wrote about UFOs, but Diana Walsh Pasulka has. Like Bellah, Pasulka is concerned with the religious dimensions of Americans’ cultural lives. You might even say she argues for an American cosmic religion. In American Cosmic, her 2019 road trip through the evolution of America’s increasingly UFO-tinged spirituality, Pasulka chronicles how those symbols and rituals Bellah once observed have transfigured into something alien.
I had the opportunity to observe this myself recently at the first annual Bucks County Para-con, a one-day paranormal convention held at the Zlock Performing Arts Center in Newton, Pennsylvania. The event, ostensibly a survey of all things spooky (subjects included ghosts, cryptids, and aliens), was in fact a glimpse into the cosmic rites of paranormal America.
All photos by the author.
The event was sponsored by Eric Mintel, an entrepreneurial paranormal investigator who hosts a YouTube series aptly named Eric Mintel Investigates—a cross between Ghost Hunters and a Tubi cryptid documentary. Mintel kicked the event off by playing an episode of his show on the Beast of Bray Road, a folkloric wolf-like creature that is alleged to hunt the forests of Wisconsin. Even paranormal investigators occasionally need to engage in a little self-promotion.
Our first speaker of the day was Pennsylvania state section director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) James Krug, who offered a brief lecture titled “Aliens on the Moon?”. Krug discussed topics ranging from strange structures and Hollow Moon theories to my personal favorite, the doomed Apollo 20 mission. If you’re unfamiliar with Apollo 20, that’s because NASA covered up its existence due to alien contact. Krug’s advice to would-be ufologists: learn to use PRINT SCREEN, because NASA is quick to delete the evidence.
After the first lecture, I took an opportunity to tour the scene. The event was confined to a small section of a performing arts center at Bucks County Community College, so vendors were grouped in one row leading towards the theater. This meant mediums and psychics were placed alongside vampire hunters and MUFON flacks, creating a true melting pot of high strangeness. You could align your chakras while learning about the latest developments in UFO disclosure.
I was unable to catch the second presentation, a lecture by Mintel and his partner Dominic Sattele, so next was the star of the day, former British civil servant Nick Pope. Pope worked for the Ministry of Defense’s UFO desk investigating sightings in the 1990s, meaning he’s the closest thing anyone here will ever come to meeting a real-life Fox Mulder. Naturally, the theater, with a 339-seat capacity, was packed. As I waited for Pope, I eavesdropped on nearby conversations. By chance I caught two men walking in, and one, particularly excited for the lecture, told his friend that he couldn’t get along with certain people because he vibrates at a higher frequency. He didn’t think he’d have a problem with Pope.
Pope’s lecture was in many ways representative of the new American religion, ufology. Although not American himself, Pope has lived in the US since 2012 and is a part of the American disclosure movement—a group of activists with the Millennial belief of a transparency to come. Merging a religious fervor for UFOs with a lobbying strategy akin to the most aggressive K Street firms, this motley collection of ex-military and intelligence officers, dissident scientists and academics, and cable television personalities believe that if they centralize their efforts into a coordinated UFO Lobby, they’ll force the government to reveal its deepest, darkest ufological secrets. As such, Pope railed against elements in the government that were preventing disclosure, at one point revealing unnamed members of Congress stood in the way because of a belief extraterrestrial life might be demonic entities. In spite of this doom and gloom, he closed his sermon on a hopeful note. “The day after disclosure,” he rhapsodized to the crowd, “will look very different than the day before.”
If Pope was the high point for the audience, a crowd of around 300 to 400 Bucks Countyians primarily in their late forties and early fifties, then for me it was the speaker that followed. Bill Birnes co-wrote The Day After Roswell, a book Diana Walsh Pasulka notes in American Cosmic “fueled a modern version of the myth of Prometheus.”1 Essentially, Birnes and his co-author Army colonel Philip Corso theorize that alien gods descended from the heavens to gift America with the technology that would make it a superpower. His lecture elaborated on this notion in unusual detail.
“The first president to see a UFO was George Washington,” Birnes declared. He wasn’t joking, and no one laughed. He followed up by asserting that America won its independence thanks to extraterrestrial intervention: at Valley Forge, Washington spoke with an alien in white, flowing robes which laid out his battle plan for him. If not God’s favorite country, America has certainly been Xenu’s.
Birnes’s lecture was “UFOs and the White House,” a 45-minute fever dream of UFO conspiracy theories that reshape American history, the most notable of which involved JFK. Unlike Robert Bellah, who suggested JFK strikes a Christ-like pose in the American psyche, Birnes believes our 35th president was a flawed man undone by alien forces deep within our government. You see, while high on methamphetamines JFK revealed secrets about UFOs to Marilyn Monroe, who was being spied on by Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. This, of course, leads to Dealey Plaza and November 22, 1963.
If there’s anything to take from the first annual Bucks County Para-con, it’s that America is rapidly changing into a country where we worship strange gods. Whistleblowers in Congress talk about crash retrieval programs, and members of Congress tweet about the Book of Enoch. What comes after the day after Roswell? The day’s final UFO speaker, an earnest Roswell enthusiast named Thomas Carey, seemed puzzled by the inability of UFOs to take their rightful place in American history books. “The only thing we’re missing,” he stated, glumly, “is a piece of inconvertible evidence.”
