“Don’t look up?“ – Why it is past time for serious holistic research into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
Reacting to recent developments, Karin Austin, Michael Bohlander and Kimberly S. Engels argue that its time we listen to those that claim to have had close encounters with UAP.
For eight decades, since the sightings of the so-called “foo fighters” by WW II pilots, the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the Roswell crash in 1947, the debate about UFOs – now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – has both captured the popular imagination and suffered the disdain of natural scientists, who classified it as fringe pseudo-science. It has had an equally fraught relationship with the defence intelligence community, including disinformation campaigns. This is still more or less the case today, unlike in the traditional astronomical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which has, since its frowned-upon inception in the 1950s, acquired an aura of semi-respectability.
We argue that UAP research needs to be taken more seriously, domestically and on the international level, and should encompass all aspects of the phenomenon, not just the technological side. The enormity of the implications for humanity if some of the UAP are indeed of non-human origin is nothing short of existential. The time for indulging the “giggle factor” has long passed.
Sea change
Things have begun to change in recent years, with governments starting to acknowledge the existence of UAP. Encounters with US Navy aircraft during the 2004 USS Nimitz and the 2015 USS Roosevelt incidents have been widely commented upon in the UAP community, especially after a revelatory article in the New York Times in 2017. Germany and the European Space Agency have established portals for pilots who wish to report a sighting. The US Congress has held hearings on disclosure of information allegedly held by the government on crash retrievals and reverse-engineering. The Japanese parliament is considering increased official engagement. The Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada recommended creating a reporting facility in June 2025. China is tracking UAP with AI. Academia – the natural and social sciences, including law – also increasingly addresses UAP on a multi-disciplinary basis such as at the international symposium held at Durham University in April 2025. Several submissions on SETI and UAP were filed with the House of Lords Select Committee on UK Engagement with Space – none of which, however, received any mention in the Committee’s report.
Military relevance and national security
Here, the topic has caused conflicted messaging: The UK government, for example, while not explicitly denying a possible non-human origin, has maintained since 2009 that it did not consider UAP a military threat and would no longer be conducting research. Curiously enough then, on 24 May 2023, the UK joined the initial meeting of the Five Eyes UAP Caucus organised by the US All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, but flatly denied this in responses to four written parliamentary questions by Clive Lewis MP in summer 2025 – despite Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough affirming in June 2024 that the UK continued to be a member. The categorical denial is in stark contrast to its reaction to an earlier FOIA request about that meeting, when it refused to confirm or deny holding the information sought on the basis of the FOIA exemptions of security bodies, defence, national security and international relations. There is also a question mark over whether the RAF has standing orders to engage UAP, and whether in individual cases instructions to open fire had been given.
More than technology
But that is only the half of it. Unlike SETI, UAP research also deals with "high strangeness" aspects reported by the so-called "experiencers", such as abductions or other encounters with non-human entities or objects, which in many cases contain aspects usually classified as paranormal. These defy scientific methods and related research is mostly discarded as unreliable – not least by part of the UAP research community itself – facing critique from psychology, with explanations referencing mental states such as sleep paralysis or psycho-social responses to prominent societal issues during certain periods in history. These experiences are thus seen as expressions of purely human causes. However, on the one hand, serious evidence in favour of the reality of the high strangeness experiences has accumulated over decades, and on the other hand, the critics have after all not been able to effectively disprove it.
J. Allen Hynek introduced one of the earliest systematic frameworks for categorizing close encounters with UAP. In his original scale, a close encounter of the first kind refers to the observation of a UAP at relatively close range, typically within approximately 500 feet. A close encounter of the second kind involves not only a sighting, but also accompanying physical evidence—such as impressions on the ground or radar confirmation. A close encounter of the third kind occurs when a sighting includes the presence of non-human entities, whether visually observed or inferred through communication with the object.
Beginning in the 1960s, and more significantly in the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of individuals began reporting experiences commonly referred to as “abductions.” These accounts typically included being taken into a craft or alternative environment, undergoing physical procedures, and receiving communication from what were perceived as non-human intelligences. The content of these encounters often included introductions to human/non-human hybrid beings and warnings about nuclear escalation, environmental damage, and humanity’s future. To account for these experiences, researchers extended Hynek’s original system to include a close encounter of the fourth kind, describing events in which an individual is allegedly taken onboard the UAP.
Such reports were long dismissed outright in both public and academic contexts and frequently ridiculed in the media. However, a small number of academics and professionals took the phenomenon seriously, most notably, Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack. With the renewed interest in UAP, there is an increased need to take these testimonies seriously as human experiences that warrant rigorous study. In Europe, organizations have emerged for studying and documenting contact experiences like INREES (Institut de Recherche sur les Expériences Extraordinaires) and CERO France (Contact et Enlèvement lors de Rencontres OVNI).
In the United States, the John Mack Institute continues Mack’s legacy, offering support for experiencers, taking testimony seriously, and advocating for the representation of experiencers in public discourse. Rice University’s Center for the Impossible has collected thousands of detailed accounts from individuals who, despite recognizing the seeming impossibility of what they report, nonetheless are adamant the experiences unfolded as they describe. The Center’s Metadata Research Study aims to analyze experiencer testimony using a phenomenological method that brackets assumptions about the ultimate cause or ontological status of the experiences. The goal is to examine overarching patterns in what is experienced, rather than prematurely concluding how or why it occurs.
Experiencers frequently describe significant psychological and social consequences following their encounters. Many struggle with profound self-doubt, confusion, and difficulty integrating the experience into dominant worldviews. They often report social isolation, as disclosure of their experience tends to result in disbelief, ridicule, or pathologization. Attempts to seek mental health support are commonly met with immediate diagnosis rather than curiosity or care. For many, these experiences disrupt personal relationships, sometimes leading to estrangement from family members, partners, or communities unable to understand or accept their experience.
Yet these encounters also frequently produce transformative effects. Some experiencers describe lasting shifts in values, including increased concern for ecological systems and non-human life. Many report reassessments of metaphysical assumptions, becoming open to possibilities about mind, matter, and identity not encompassed by standard naturalistic frameworks. Experiences of “high strangeness”—such as non-local communication, altered states of consciousness, or perceived separation of mind and body—lead experiencers to question inherited boundaries between the physical and the mental. Interpretations of the entities themselves vary. Some experiencers understand them as threatening or invasive; others regard them as benevolent or helpful. In practice, many adopt non-dual frameworks that acknowledge the answer likely lies somewhere in between.
Despite the depth and significance of these impacts, experiencers are rarely treated as credible knowers. Their testimony is frequently dismissed before consideration, resulting in epistemic injustice in which individuals are not treated as reliable interpreters of their own experience. Given the growing acknowledgment that experiencer testimony is central to understanding UAP phenomena, it is necessary to involve experiencers directly in research, discussion, and policy development. They should not be considered case material for analysis, but as central to the conversation, providing essential insight into the experience and nature of contact. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that individuals reporting contact events, including abduction experiences, are not more likely than the general population to suffer from mental illness. Thus, immediate pathologization is neither empirically grounded nor ethically justifiable.
Finally, there is an emerging need to consider the ethics of contact. If individuals have been taken or subjected to procedures without consent, this raises ethical questions about autonomy and dignity. At the same time, purely human-centered ethical frameworks may be insufficient for interpreting interactions with an intelligence not assumed to share human norms. While not jumping to conclusions, the ethical conversation must be allowed to occur, guided by the experiences of those most directly affected.
Conclusion
A serious inquiry into UAP contact must include the voices of those who have experienced these events firsthand. Only by acknowledging experiencers as genuine epistemic agents can research, policy, and public understanding move forward responsibly. Recognizing experiencers as credible knowers is not only a matter of epistemic accuracy—it is a matter of justice.
Karin Austin is the Director of the Center for the Impossible, Rice University, and of the John Mack Institute
Michael Bohlander holds the Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at Durham University
Kimberly S. Engels is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Molloy University and Research Director of the John Mack Institute.
Photo by Francesco Ungaro
