Researchers Push to Make UAPs a Legitimate Academic Field — A New Society Seeks Rigorous, Interdisciplinary Study

Researchers Urge Academia To Treat UAPs As A Serious Scientific Field

A coalition of academics and investigators, led by the Society for UAP Studies, is urging universities and research institutions to formally study unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). The group wrapped up an international conference intended to lay the groundwork for a new, rigorous discipline dedicated to unexplained aerial and anomalous events.

Michael Cifone, the society's co-founder and president, describes his focus as the “empirical weird” — phenomena that sit at the margins of the spiritual, paranormal, parapsychological and aerial-anomaly domains and that resist easy categorization. Cifone, who holds a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Maryland, College Park, says he wants research on UAPs to follow the same methodological standards used in established academic fields.

The society acknowledges the challenge: unlike many sciences that rely primarily on laboratory experiments, UAP research must combine observational data, instrument records and theoretical work across disciplines. That requires an unusually collaborative, interdisciplinary framework that values careful evidence-gathering and methodological neutrality over speculation.

“We like to emphasize positional neutrality,” Cifone said. “Our goal is methodology and standards of evidence, not advocacy.”

Cifone co-founded the nonprofit with Michael Silberstein, a philosophy professor at Elizabethtown College. Cifone is also a research fellow at the Center for Alternative Rationalities in Global Perspectives at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany. The society's advisory board and leadership include scholars from philosophy, law, natural sciences and the humanities drawn from multiple countries.

Cifone says his personal interest deepened during the COVID-19 lockdowns after watching lectures by physicist Kevin Knuth, a former NASA research scientist. Reading Knuth’s academic work convinced Cifone that there are anecdotal and instrument-based reports that are not easily dismissed by routine explanations.

The society points to several widely discussed incidents, including 2004 encounters reported by U.S. Navy pilots and radar operators aboard the USS Nimitz and USS Princeton, where observers described objects performing maneuvers beyond known aircraft capabilities. The topic returned to the national stage with congressional hearings in 2024 and further sessions in 2025 after hundreds of new reports.

Government investigation offices, such as the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), have acknowledged unexplained data and described reporting biases tied to locations near U.S. military assets and sensors. While the Pentagon has said it found no definitive evidence of extraterrestrial origins, it has confirmed the presence of anomalous observations worth systematic study.

At the society's conference, keynote speaker Steve Fuller (University of Warwick) urged preparedness and open-minded scholarly inquiry, while remaining agnostic about extraterrestrial explanations. The founders emphasize that creating a new academic discipline will require funding, institutional backing and time; the society currently relies on private and philanthropic donations and receives no government funding.

Despite obstacles, Cifone says resistance has been limited so far. The initiative tends to attract researchers who value an evidence-first, scholarly approach. “The subject is the thing we do,” he said. “We're focused on research for an enduring and rigorous understanding of the phenomena in all its aspects.”

Note: This account summarizes reporting from USA TODAY and statements from the Society for UAP Studies and related officials.