Diana Walsh Pasulka never imagined that her scholarly work in the field of religion would lead her to skulking around in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, with one of the world’s top scientists and a former high NASA official. She tells the story in her riveting 2019 book American Cosmic, in which Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, surveyed the then-current state of knowledge of UFOs and related phenomena. Then came the shocking 2021 revelations by the U.S. government that it had been investigating UFOs—then renamed ‘unidentified aerial phenomena,’ or UAPs. In a...