Book · 2023

Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences

Name: Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences
ISBN: 978-1-250-87956-1

Also known as Encounters (Pasulka)

D. W. Pasulka · St. Martin's Essentials · ISBN 978-1-250-87956-1

Glimpses

“It’s a one-way ticket,” Tyler D. said.
Chapter 1, “The Space Psychologist” · Macmillan excerpt

When astronaut Edgar Mitchell saw Earth from his tiny capsule floating through space, his mental state altered so much it changed his life and its direction.
Chapter 1 · Macmillan excerpt

Dr. Iya Whiteley contacted me through a series of emails in 2020. The subject line of the emails caught my attention right away: “Space Psychologist—researcher at a university in London. Developing communication means with unknown phenomena.”
Chapter 1 · Macmillan excerpt

Cover of Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences

Encounters (St. Martin's Essentials, 2023) follows American Cosmic. Diana Walsh Pasulka turns from the institutions around UFO belief to the experiences themselves: people across science, technology, the arts and religion who describe contact with nonhuman intelligences through dreams, synchronicities, visions and inspiration as well as sightings of craft. Its approach is closer to Jacques Vallée's than to the nuts-and-bolts tradition.

Reviewers were divided. Supportive readers praised it as an approachable, sympathetic guide; a critical review noted that much of it rests on testimony from people in the U.S. military and intelligence world and asks too few questions about that apparatus. Like her first book, it reports what people say they have experienced; it is not evidence of the phenomenon's nature.

Macmillan has published the first chapter, "The Space Psychologist". It sets the altered states reported by astronauts, from Edgar Mitchell's experience on the way back from the Moon to William Shatner's grief after his 2021 spaceflight, beside the work of the space psychologist Iya Whiteley, who wrote to Pasulka about developing ways to communicate with unknown phenomena.

Sources: Bookshop.org · Tanner F. Boyle · Macmillan