How do historians interpret angel encounter accounts?

Yesterday's angel may be today's UFO report: the same strange presence in the sky, filed under whatever the era believed in.

Historians usually read an angel story for what it says about the church and the times. A bolder line asks about the experience itself. Beings in the air, voices, people lifted off the ground: the reports keep coming, and only the labels change, from angels to natural wonders to visitors from space. Maybe the witnesses were consistent and we kept changing the dictionary.

• What it could changeTreating old encounter records as data would give researchers centuries of reports on the same strange experiences.
• How it touches todayResearchers now note that ordinary people hear religious voices without any other sign of disorder.
• Our futureWhat we call contact today may have a much longer history than we were taught.

• Some interdisciplinary scholars argue that extraordinary aerial or visionary experiences may be historically continuous, even when cultures interpret them as angels, natural events, or extraterrestrial agents.researchgate
• Psychological and theological research challenges the simple equation of spiritual voices with mental illness, noting that ordinary people may report religious voices without other evidence of disorder.exa
• Accounts of levitation, ecstasy, and supernatural encounters have prompted historians to debate whether modern skepticism dismisses experiences that earlier communities considered real.nybooks