Brenda Denzler

Brenda is a mostly retired writer, editor, and sometime speaker currently living in rural North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in religious studies from Duke University in 1998 and is the author of The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs, (University of California Press, 2001), a couple of invited chapters in scholarly books on religion and the UFO sub-culture, and a few articles on UFOs and religion. Her current interest is in mining humanity’s folkloric and religious traditions to better understand the provenance and nature of “the gods,” the gentry, elementals, jinn, angels/demons, and similar entities in terms that treat them as something other than fictions with no more substance than mirrors into which we look to regulate, console, or understand ourselves as human beings.

When she is not writing she reads voraciously, enjoys her grandkids, and grabs most of her opportunities to spend time with friends. She is at home on her 4 acres, where she is doggie mom to two large and energetic young pups and owned by a geriatric cat — all of whose pronouns are she/her. 

Is there other life in the universe, and if so, is it intelligent life? According to a Reuter’s poll in 2010, twenty percent of the world’s population believes that the answer is yes and that it’s living here among us already. However, Philippe Ailleris has pointed out that other intelligent life forms (like the non-human intelligences that seem to be behind the UFO phenomenon) might be so different from us that even if they were here, we might not be able to see them for what they are. Using frameworks derived from both science and religion, this talk presents one possible option for “seeing” who and what they are, where they come from, and what their relationship to us might be—and how science and religion could give us more and better answers if those disciplines will adopt slightly different approaches to this subject matter.