Saint Joseph of Copertino — Vatican Levitation Records and UAP

Who Was Saint Joseph of Copertino?

Giuseppe Maria Desa was born in 1603 in Copertino, a small town in southern Italy. Described by contemporaries as simple-minded, socially awkward, and prone to ecstatic religious states, he entered the Franciscan order and became a friar. He was canonized in 1767 — nearly a century after his death — becoming Saint Joseph of Copertino.

The reason for his canonization, and the reason Diana Pasulka has spent years translating his records with over a million dollars in Vatican grants, is what he reportedly did during his lifetime: he levitated. Repeatedly. In public. Before credible witnesses. For over forty years.

The Documentation

Saint Joseph's levitation events are among the most rigorously documented "miracles" in Catholic history. The Catholic Church's canonization process required meticulous evidentiary standards — sworn testimony from multiple independent witnesses, cross-examination, and official documentation. What this process produced for Copertino is extraordinary:

• Over 70 documented levitation events across four decades of his adult life
• Named witnesses of the highest possible social credibility: Pope Alexander VII, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, Prince Johann Friedrich of Brunswick, and hundreds of ordinary witnesses across multiple locations
• Events occurring in public settings: churches, courtyards, open fields — not in private or controlled conditions
• Duration ranging from brief ascents to what witnesses described as sustained aerial states lasting hours
• Consistent behavioral precursors: a high-pitched shriek or cry before ascent, followed by visible entry into an altered trance state
• Physical correlates: witnesses reported feeling heat, observing light, and experiencing emotional effects in proximity to the events

This is not medieval hagiography produced by credulous monks. This is sworn legal testimony produced by one of history's most demanding evidentiary procedures, involving witnesses whose social standing gave them every reason to lie in the other direction.

What Pasulka Found in the Broader Vatican Archive

With $1M+ in research grants, Pasulka began systematically translating and cataloguing the Copertino canonization records and related Vatican materials. What she found in the broader Archive extended far beyond one levitating saint:

Orbs Entering Convent Cells

Multiple convents in different countries and different centuries contain records of nuns witnessing luminous orbs — spherical objects of light — entering their rooms at night. The accounts are consistent: the orb moves through walls or sealed windows, emits light, and is sometimes associated with a sense of presence or message. The Vatican archivists filed these as standard mystical experiences. Pasulka notes the structural identity with modern UAP sphere reports, including the USS Omaha footage.

Flying Houses

A recurring category in medieval and early modern records: accounts of structures — houses, churches, entire buildings — moving through the air. The most famous is the Holy House of Loreto, allegedly transported from Nazareth to Croatia and then to Italy by angels. The Church treats this as miraculous transport. Pasulka notes the structural similarity to "sky island" and "mothership" UAP reports in modern classified briefings.

Instantaneous Transport

Saints and mystics across centuries are reported to have been instantaneously transported from one location to another — appearing in multiple places simultaneously (bilocation) or moving from one country to another in moments. The phenomenological parallel to modern UAP abduction reports — where witnesses describe being transported without traversing the intervening space — is exact.

Beings Appearing and Departing Without Physical Entry

Accounts across the archive describe encounters with beings — consistently described as non-human in presence, communication, and behavior — who appear and disappear without physical entry or exit. No door opened. No window was used. They were present; then they were not. The parallel to modern contact reports documenting "beings appearing through walls" is identical across a 400-year gap.

The Ontological Shock Thesis

Pasulka's broadest argument, developed across both her books and articulated most clearly in her podcast on "levitation, redaction, and the ontological shock of contact," is that genuine contact with non-human intelligence produces a consistent, cross-cultural, cross-historical psychological transformation she calls "ontological shock."

Ontological shock is the experience of having one's fundamental model of what reality is — what is possible, what is real, what self and world mean — shattered by an encounter that cannot be integrated into prior categories. It is described identically by:

• Medieval mystics after levitation events or angelic encounters
• 17th century canonization witnesses describing Copertino's ascents
• Modern UAP abductees after close-encounter events
• Military personnel after proximity events with anomalous craft
• Scientists after analyzing materials with no explicable manufacturing origin

The transformation is not just psychological. Gary Nolan's brain scans show it is neurological. The caudate-putamen hypertrophy he finds in modern experiencers — the physical remodeling of the brain's information processing hardware — may be the biological signature of ontological shock. Which raises an extraordinary possibility: the neurological changes documented in modern UAP experiencers may be the same changes that produced the documented behavior of levitating saints.

The Radical Implication

If Pasulka is correct, the implications are profound. "Disclosure" is not the revelation of something new. It is the official acknowledgment of something continuous — a phenomenon that has been documented, suppressed, reframed, and documented again in every culture and every century. The Catholic Church did not suppress UAP reports — it preserved them, in Latin, in the Vatican Archive, waiting for someone with the right framework to read them correctly.

Diana Pasulka is that person. And what she found in the Archive is that the phenomenon has been here the whole time.

"The Vatican records are UAP reports. They just used different words." — Diana Pasulka