Why People Start seeing 'Souls of the Dead' as Orbs?

A religion scholar who chairs the death, dying, and beyond group at the American Academy of Religion says the reason she studies UFOs is because she studies purgatory, and that the souls people report seeing inside alien encounters are almost always someone who already died. This episode walks through that testimony, the doctrine behind it, and what the Bible actually says happens to a person the moment they die.

Diana Pasulka describes orbs being interpreted as the souls of the dead across cultures as far apart as Europe and Japan, and she traces the same pattern inside abduction cases, where witnesses report seeing people who have passed on. Writer John Keel placed Marian apparitions, angels, demons, UFOs, and the souls of the dead in a single category he called the super spectrum, treating them as coming from one source.

The episode traces that source back to Genesis, where the serpent told Eve she would not surely die, and follows Ellen White's writing on how the belief in a soul that survives the body built the doctrine of purgatory and, later, modern spiritualism. Contactee Chris Bledsoe's account of a being he calls the Lady is compared against the 1917 Fatima apparition and a reported 1850s sighting at Champion, Wisconsin, both identified by Rome as the same figure.

Against that testimony, the episode lays out what scripture says about death: that the dead know nothing, feel nothing, and take no part in anything done under the sun, that Jesus called this state sleep, and that even David has not ascended into heaven. It closes with the story of Saul and the witch of Endor, the cost that encounter carried, and Ellen White's description of how convincingly Satan can reproduce the appearance of the dead.