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. So she spent six years on UFO belief, not asking whether any of it is real but watching a 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. She also argues that movies did much of the work, that people who watched Close Encounters and The X-Files ended up with a template for what they later remembered seeing.