The Emerging UAP Nexus
CRITICAL ESSAY · NATIONAL SECURITY, SCIENCE POLICY & THE UAP NEXUS
National Security, Privatized Legitimacy, and the Reorganization of the Unknown
Dr. Michael C. Cifone
STATUS: CRITICAL ESSAY — INDEPENDENT RESEARCH · COMPANION TO “ON DISCLOSURE” · NOVEMBER 2026
ABOUT THIS ESSAY
This essay, the sequel to “On Disclosure,” sets aside what the Pentagon’s new UAP files say about the phenomenon and asks what they reveal about the institutional architecture through which anomaly is now managed. In the post-2017 moment, which the culture reads as disclosure, it finds the reorganization of the unknown through a hybrid ecology of state offices, convening nonprofits, philanthropic capital, media, and private technical ventures. That ecology produces the appearance of scientific seriousness while deferring its substance. It does so by way of managed ambiguity, the securitization of anomaly as a problem of “domain awareness,” the placing of investigation with private contractors, and what I call privatized legitimacy: the detachment of scientific standing from scientific obligation. Tracing the passage from AATIP to AARO, the fate of the UAP Disclosure Act, and the five evidentiary regimes that meet in the field, the essay argues that the UAP hovers between a plane on which it is administered and a plane on which it stands as the occasion of a science not yet made. It closes by asking what an independent research order adequate to such an object would require.
On May 8, 2026, the United States Department of War launched a public website at war.gov/UFO hosting the first 162 declassified files accumulated across eight decades of government contact with anomalous phenomena. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth spoke of “an earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency.” The internet obliged with the usual mixture of awe, ridicule, and conspiracy. The initiative — grandly titled the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, abbreviated PURSUE — arrived as part of a broader wave of politically managed releases, the Kennedy assassination files and the King surveillance records among them. PURSUE was named by the White House and is hosted by the Pentagon.1
The preceding essay in this series, “On Disclosure,” argued that the government files on UAP issue from something close to what I called an epistemological black hole. They consume resources and attention without producing scientific knowledge, because classified research — until it becomes meaningfully public, that is — cannot be peer-reviewed or built upon.2 Setting aside what the files tell us about the phenomenon (and we must understand what the limits there are likely always going to be), we may ask what they tell us about the institutional architecture through which anomaly is now managed, and about the system the post-2017 moment has produced for anyone who wants knowledge in place of spectacle. That moment, for all the talk of “disclosure,” amounts to the reorganization of anomaly through a hybrid ecology of state, nonprofit, academic, and private actors. Its consequences run well past the “ufological” (itself a contested term).
The dominant public narrative of the post-2017 moment runs roughly thus: UFOs — long dismissed, stigmatized, and relegated to tabloid culture — have returned to serious institutional life. Military videos were leaked, credentialed witnesses testified before Congress, a government office was established, a prestigious university launched an instrumented observation program. This account, true so far as it goes, mistakes renewed visibility for historical explanation.
Advocates, and a few sympathetic senators, brought the state to the subject. The preceding essay found the movement assembling itself, live, in a campaign chairman’s inbox (Podesta) a year before it presented itself to the public as a kind of revelation. Once there, we argued, the state reinterpreted unresolved anomalies as indicators of vulnerability — as signs that its surveillance systems and attribution frameworks (increasingly automated and AI-assisted ones among them) do not fully close over the environments it is charged to govern. This is indeed my decided view of the nature and function of AARO, however much the post-2017 UAP/UFO community has wanted to malign that Office. This reinterpretation fixed the terms on which the object could thereafter be funded and thought, and its new respectability followed from its new operational relevance. Securitization, in the sense Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde gave the word, is the move by which an issue is presented as an existential threat and lifted out of normal politics into a register of emergency.3 The UAP case runs the other way. The securitizing move carried the object out of public argument and into routine administration, where it could be managed without being debated. Alexander Wendt’s recent book, compelling on its own terms, carries this logic into a further register, since the Pentagon’s 2021 report is there said to scientize and to securitize the phenomenon at once, and the argument then takes what I would call an “emergencizing” turn, passing from the old question of whether the UAP are real to a scenario in which authorities conclude, and disclose, that UAP are flown by extraterrestrials, so that the question becomes what such a conclusion would do to the legitimacy of the state.4 The scenario is one of local discovery in place of the Hollywood scenario of contact, which strikes me as more probably fantasy than fact, and I take it, as Wendt does, as a conditional to reason from, since the present essay holds the question of the phenomenon’s nature open.
When the national security state encounters UAP it encounters them at three analytically distinct levels. At the first, they are observational or experiential events: reported occurrences that appear anomalous relative to ordinary expectations and frequently resist explanatory closure. They become forensic cold cases, whose significance depends on the rigor and independence of the investigation brought to bear on them. At the second, “UAP” is a classificatory device by which military, intelligence, scientific, and public institutions sort reports and organize a field of uncertainty for management. At the third, which the institutional narrative most consistently passes over, unresolved phenomena register as symptoms of infrastructural weakness, the places where the gaps in surveillance and attribution show.
The NASA UAP Independent Study Team conceded as much in 2023, in the plainer idiom of instrumentation: “At present, analysis of UAP data is hampered by poor sensor calibration, the lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata, and the lack of baseline data.”5 That absence of purpose-built sensors records, at the least, eight decades in which no one with a budget decided to look, feeding the dismissal cycle that is supposed to change — or end — in the post-2017 world. Seen from this third level, the post-2017 shift looks like a mundane and institutionally necessary response to operational ambiguity, however it has been dressed for the culture (witness Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, released in June 2026, or the documentary Age of Disclosure, mentioned in the companion essay). Securitized as a domain-awareness problem, the phenomenon now sits where knowledge becomes structurally difficult (if not impossible) to produce.
The terminological shift from “UFO” to “UAP” named an object calibrated for management. Reporting systems, defense offices, and scientific panels could take up the new category without the tabloid freight of the older word, and the shift redistributed legitimacy, changing who may speak seriously and in what institutional settings. Thomas Gieryn gave the name “boundary-work” to the performative process by which scientists police the border between legitimate and illegitimate inquiry. In the renaming, the state drew that border itself. Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, whose seminal (now classic) account of the anthropocentric metaphysics underlying modern sovereign authority the preceding essay set out, explain why such boundary-work was possible in the first place: the “UFO” threatened that foundation directly. “UAP” (one may add, since their paper predates the official term) abstracts and neutralizes the threat into a technical problem of domain management, and so alters what can be thought and funded.6
The category also brings new objects into existence, reportable events and admissible experiences among them. A pilot who witnessed something inexplicable in 2003 had, in the social sense, witnessed nothing — there was no official space (the nearest thing being the telephone hotline of NUFORC, run by Peter Davenport)7 in which that experience could be registered, still less acted upon, without professional cost. The same experience, reported in 2021 through updated Navy procedures, became a data point, a case file, a potential security datum, because the conditions under which it could be marked as “real” (in the institution’s sense of the word) had changed in the interval. The work of naming, classifying, and routing a report (‘performative’ in the sociologist’s sense, though it conjures nothing out of nothing) decides which phenomena can enter the space of legitimate knowledge, and which remain esoteric or simply unspoken. Because the shift happened recently and in public, we can watch a domain of the knowable being produced by institutions, and its outer boundary redrawn, in something close to real time.
Every previous episode of official engagement since the late 1940s has passed through the cycle that Greg Eghigian’s history documents, and that may be schematized as interest, investigation, inconclusive findings, and dispersal.8 Whether the domain now being produced will survive the fourth phase is for the next decade to show.
The symbolic break point came, as we are supposed to know, in December 2017, when the New York Times and Politico revealed the existence of the so-called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Navy cockpit videos accompanied the stories, showing objects performing maneuvers that the pilots could not explain. A category of experience that had oscillated between secrecy and ridicule for seventy years was re-entering public life under the authority of official military footage and credentialed witnesses — a re-entry continuing to this day, in what might be called the era of the UAP “whistleblower.” By 2019 the Navy had updated its procedures to encourage formal reports of such encounters, and in 2020 an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was formalized. In June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its Preliminary Assessment, in which 143 of 144 reviewed incidents remained unexplained.9 The finding amounted to a public admission that a category of events existed at the intersection of operational uncertainty and insufficient data — events the state could not resolve, and could no longer conceal its inability to resolve.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established in 2022. The move from “unidentified aerial” to “all-domain anomalous” — and note the dropping of ‘UAP’ from the office’s name as it takes over from the UAP Task Force — extended the state’s concern beyond airspace to maritime, orbital, and transmedium environments.10 Whatever its association in the public mind with the “disclosure” of long-held secrets, the sequence from AATIP to AARO and PURSUE has built an administrative infrastructure for managing the UAP question within controlled boundaries. Chief among them is the military category of “domain awareness,” inside which the public resolution of the question has no evident place. The French, as the preceding essay recalled, lodged civilian investigation inside their space agency and published what it found, where the United States chose classification and managed release.
AARO may be described as an office of managed ambiguity: an institution that stabilizes a (potentially, at least) politically volatile category of unresolved events (as matters of “domain awareness”) while improving the state’s ability to classify and triage them. For an office situated within a Department of Defense whose political culture depends on projecting competence and control, an unresolved anomaly is an institutional embarrassment as much as an analytic problem. AARO must take anomalous reports seriously enough to justify its existence while resolving enough cases to project competence. It must acknowledge operational ignorance while avoiding ontological disruption, or the loss of effective domain sovereignty. Managed ambiguity, in practice, means admitting just enough to justify institutional adaptation while conceding nothing that would unsettle the official narrative. AARO came to occupy that position by the logic of its placement, whatever its staff intend. Its public formulations answer in the negative the question whether these are aliens, and leave aside the one an office of domain awareness might have been expected to put first, namely why unresolved objects continue to appear within environments over which the United States claims extraordinary levels of surveillance.
AARO’s consolidated annual report for 2024 counted 757 reports received between May 2023 and June 2024. Of these, 49 had been resolved as balloons, birds, or drones, 243 more were recommended for closure on the same grounds, 444 went into an “active archive” for want of data, and 21 were judged to merit further analysis.11 The managed-ambiguity reading predicts that this pattern will hold: the resolutions will mount while a residue stays unexplained, and neither the sensor data nor the protocols by which cases are closed will pass to outside review. An office that published its resolution protocol and submitted it, with sample data, to independent scrutiny would count against the reading, and the refutation would be welcome. (And we should hasten to add that this situation is likely to remain even as the Advisory Council settles into its own.)
“The UFO can be ‘known,’” in Wendt and Duvall’s phrase, “only by not asking what it is.”12 AARO’s working function follows from that: to render the category more manageable, improving intake and eliminating false positives, in the manner of a triage mechanism for which the “truth” of UAP is a secondary concern. The office carries their impossibility into a new institutional form: permitted to ask what UAP are only so far as the answer serves domain awareness, it continues by administrative means the taboo they describe.
AARO’s Historical Review, released in March 2024 and much contested in the emerging UAP science community, reported that the office had “found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.” The Defense Department’s press statement the same day spoke of “no verifiable evidence.”13 The finding stands in direct contradiction to the sworn testimony of a former intelligence official, David Grusch. Before a House Oversight subcommittee in July 2023, Grusch alleged that the U.S. government possesses downed “craft,” some of them transferred to classified reverse-engineering programs, together with “non-human biologics” associated with them.14 We decline, for now, to adjudicate between them. Within the black hole described in the preceding essay, the conditions for verifying either claim do not exist.
The state’s characteristic response to persistent and politically consequential uncertainty, of which UAP is a limit case, is to redistribute the problem across offices, committees, reports, external partners, and quasi-private channels. Anomaly is thereby rendered administrable, and the conditions under which it might come to be known are compromised in the same process. Wendt and Duvall name the techniques by which the modern state has kept the UFO out of serious inquiry — authoritative representations, official inquiries (which they liken to show trials), official secrecy, and discipline in Foucault’s sense. They trace these to a structural incapacity: sovereignty “cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision.”
The taboo thereby engendered is a kind of active unknowing, an “epistemology of ignorance” (their phrase, borrowed from Nancy Tuana) that protects the state’s metaphysical foundations. It also gives the state strategic cover for its own inability to track and resolve the hardest of the cases it receives. In work still in progress I call these the “recalcitrant residuum”: the small fraction of cases that, though sufficient information is available, cannot be resolved in terms the state deems administratively sufficient or actionable. The placing of UAP investigation with a private contractor, in at least one documented instance taken up below, can then be understood as a governance strategy for managing a politically difficult problem without internalizing it. It follows from the ordinary logic of governance under uncertainty, whoever does or does not intend it.
The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, modeled on the JFK records law and championed by the Senate Majority Leader, would have created an independent, presidentially appointed review board to rule on the release of UAP records. It would also have required the government to exercise eminent domain over any “recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence” held in private hands. Both provisions were stripped in the closed-door conference on the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. What passed establishes a records collection at the National Archives, but leaves the decision to postpone disclosure with the very agencies that hold the records, and leaves private contractors under no legal requirement to surrender alleged materials.15 The structure came through the most serious legislative attempt yet made upon it intact.
Beneath the familiar quarrel of believers and skeptics (a quarrel the press finds endlessly convenient) runs a struggle over epistemic governance. At stake is who sets the evidentiary thresholds and who certifies seriousness, and so the institutional terms on which anomaly may enter public seriousness at all.
The UAP domain brings into contact at least five distinct evidentiary regimes, each with its own certifier. The first, military-operational triage, sorts reports for action, and the chain of command certifies its results. The second, scientific observational data (calibrated instrumentation, reproducibility, multimodal correlation), answers to peer review and replication; it is the regime the field aspires to and has rarely achieved. The third, forensic case investigation, works retrospectively on case files, traces, depositions, and documents pried loose through freedom-of-information requests, and is certified by the investigator’s documented method and by whoever later checks it. The fourth is narrative and qualitative testimony, certified, so far as it is certified at all, by corroboration and by the comparative study of its structure, which its critics seldom examine. Thomas Bullard’s folkloristic study of abduction reports found their episodes recurring in a stable order across accounts, and concluded that “the order of these narratives belongs to the structure of the alleged experience itself.”16 The fifth, charismatic assertion and proprietary claim, rests on personal standing or alleged classified access. It has no certifier beyond the claimant’s own position.
Charismatic assertion and proprietary claim cluster around particular institutional positions — the former intelligence official with alleged classified access, the defense-adjacent scientist whose credibility derives partly from what cannot be publicly verified, the nonprofit leader whose authority rests on proximity to state actors in place of published findings. The danger of the regime lies in the foreclosure of verification, since its authority is constituted through its resistance to the scrutiny that would ordinarily be required to earn it — a positional power, the power to speak authoritatively about a domain while declining the obligations by which authority in it is conventionally established. Positionality, the researcher’s included, accordingly belongs at the center of UAP Studies as an analytical object. The field cannot be understood without asking who is positioned to claim what, on what institutional basis, and at whose expense: which actors are authorized to mark certain claims as serious and others as residual, which forms of testimony are admitted as evidence and which are consigned to the esoteric remainder.
The older “UFO” field (what I like to refer to as classical ufology) was dominated by what might be called a forensic loop: a field built on retrospective traces that struggled to mature into a science of real-time observation (captured within well-funded research programs devoted to it). James McDonald, the atmospheric physicist who pushed back vociferously against the University of Colorado study the Air Force had commissioned to settle the scientific value of continued research, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1969 that he believed “science is in default for having failed to mount any truly adequate studies of this problem.”17 The default, on my reading of his indictment, lay with institutions whose research had been suppressed or discredited, or which had been structured to produce negative findings on schedule. The Colorado project’s own coordinator, Robert Low, had written in an August 1966 memorandum that the trick would be to describe the project so that to the public it would appear “a totally objective study.” To the scientific community it would present “the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.”
From that default comes the dismissal paradox, in which insufficient evidence justifies insufficient study and insufficient study produces insufficient evidence. The subject is not taken seriously because no institution has sustained its study across more than one funding cycle, and it is not studied because it is not taken seriously! The trap is held in place by the absence of any institutional infrastructure that could produce data worth (institutional, mainstream) attention. In the absence of such, bad faith is scarcely relevant, for without institutional legibility or perception, the subject remains a non-issue.
Out of the post-2017 moment has emerged a hybrid ecology of partially overlapping actors (state offices, academic convening spaces, nonprofits, journalists, research groups, philanthropic nodes, private firms), each trying to define what UAP are and who may speak about them with authority. Legitimacy within it is produced relationally, through exchange and adjacency.
Of the ecology’s four principal layers, the first, the state, holds formal authority but operates under the constraints, as we have argued, of managed ambiguity — Congress included, whose hearings since July 2023 have given witnesses a sworn platform. In the second, convening and legitimating spaces — the Sol Foundation, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), and the Society for UAP Studies (which I direct)18 — function as what David Guston calls boundary organizations.19 These are institutions that straddle the border between science and other social domains and answer to principals on both sides of it, which is where the intellectual and ethical challenges begin to appear. Here the principals are, on one side, the scientific community whose norms they invoke, and on the other the donors, witnesses, and state offices whose attention they court. Part of what they offer, my own Society no less than the others, is adjacency: the structured proximity of scientific credentials to the UAP problem, which, because of the contested status of the subject, often comes before published knowledge and sometimes stands in for it — a placeholder of legitimacy that, all other things being equal, must be earned.
The third layer, the media and attention infrastructure (specialized reporters, podcasts, newsletters, documentary makers — a seemingly endless proliferation in today’s media landscape), shapes what it reports. In a field where legitimacy remains fragile and emergent, amplification and distortion are often produced together. The fourth, philanthropic and donor-facing actors, provides capital that is rarely visible and that determines a great deal; donors reward particular framings, the dramatic among them.
Sheila Jasanoff’s idiom of co-production, on which knowledge and institutional order are produced together, applies here, I think. The arrangements under construction now, before any settled body of knowledge exists to organize around (and which the new organizations are themselves actively producing), will determine what comes to be known and whose claims are taken seriously.20 Her idiom already implies what the UAP case shows in the open, that the boundary between the legitimate and the esoteric is itself among the things co-produced. The ecology continuously reproduces (and negotiates) the distinction between what counts as serious anomaly research and what remains consigned to the paranormal or the merely credulous. That boundary is remade through every institutional gesture — every decision about which speakers appear on which platforms, which findings are published and which remain proprietary, which forms of testimony are admitted as data and which are quietly set aside, which organizations receive philanthropic capital and which do not. Among the ecology’s products, then, is the marking of certain practices and experiences as esoteric — an unstable product, since what is esoteric in one configuration may become admissible in another (the UFO-to-UAP shift is the standing instance), and it is in this sense that the ecology is a field of ontological politics (an unstable one, to be sure).
Distinct from the rest are the demonstrative (as opposed to the merely forensic) organizations pursuing real-time instrumented observation of the kind that escapes the limitations (at least in principle) of the classical ufological pursuit of the cold case. Project Hessdalen in Norway, on whose board I sit, has studied a valley with recurrent luminous phenomena since 1983, and an automatic measurement station has operated there since August 1998, producing decades of time-series data. The Galileo Project at Harvard has designed and deployed multi-sensor systems purposely built to detect anomalous objects and processes in real time, and has submitted its instrumentation to peer review.21 UAPx, whose work has been taken up by the University at Albany (SUNY) as UAlbany Project X, has done similar work, and has similarly published its work in peer-reviewed journals.22 Organizations like these are slowly but decisively setting the conditions that help establish the phenomena within accepted parameters of evidentiary “proof”. (But there remains the much harder question of what to do when the experiences exceed, or seem to, even these parameters. We leave this important question — which I have specifically addressed in a series of lectures in Europe this past September — to the side for the moment.)
Among the alignments of the contemporary field, the appearance of the Skywatcher group on the Sol Foundation’s 2025 program is instructive for what it shows to be structurally possible in the new ecology (and here I should say that I make no claim about the intentions of anyone involved). The Sol Foundation, launched in 2023 by the Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan and the anthropologist Peter Skafish, presents its work under the heading “Science, Policy, and Public Education for the Post-UAP World.” Skywatcher is, in the description of senior correspondent Greg Bishop — who attended the symposium and wrote it up for the Society for UAP Studies — an organization of former military personnel claiming continued interactions with, and recordings of, apparent UAP at undisclosed locations in the American Southwest.23
By privatized legitimacy I mean the detachment of scientific standing from scientific obligation: the appropriation of academic credentials to operate in the space between classified government programs (closed research) and public science (in the commons), without being subject to the full requirements of either. Transparency can coexist with a deeper opacity: a symposium may be open to anyone who registers while instrumented claims presented at it rest on data that have been neither published nor offered for review, and in a field as symbolically overloaded as UAP studies the prestige of an open venue can lend such claims a standing they have not yet earned.
Skywatcher, which by its own account operates ground instrumentation to detect and track UAP, gestures toward what the field needs, a move from happenstance military recordings to persistent multi-sensor observation. It does so within an institutional configuration that bears examining. The symposium was held at Baveno, on the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, and its program for Saturday, October 25, listed a “Conversation with Dr. Garry Nolan and Jake Barber.” Bishop, who describes it as an evening chat, records Skywatcher’s stated goal of allowing anyone a firsthand experience of the phenomenon, and then writes: “Asked about the science behind their method of research and reporting, Barber said ‘If we can get to a place where we have a meaningful impact, then we don’t care about peer review.’” I take the remark only as Bishop reported it, from an informal evening conversation. It illustrates a configuration at the venue: a convening held under the banner of scientific seriousness gave a platform to instrumented claims whose presenter, on Bishop’s report, did not rank peer review among his aims. In fragile, prestige-sensitive fields, such platforms let legitimacy circulate apart from the obligations that ordinarily earn it.
A precedent from the state side of the ecology shows how a public question can pass into commercial confidence. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2008 contract for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program went to a privately held company, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. In 2011, answering a request for the contract under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency asked the company to explain what competitive harm release would cause. A later request yielded pages withheld under exemptions that include the one for trade secrets and confidential commercial information, an arrangement since characterized in investigative reporting as “commercial in confidence.”24 The tertium comparationis is narrow and structural: public scientific credibility lending standing to data held in private hands, while the obligations that credibility implies stay behind. Any arrangement in which instrumented UAP data are gathered privately, presented at scientific venues, and kept from peer review shares that structure, whoever is involved and whatever anyone intends.
On the plane along which this essay has so far moved, the UAP appears as an object of governance, and the attention proper to it is external and sociological (etic, in the anthropologist’s word). In work still in progress I have called it the Plane of Affect, since what the institutions are forever managing and never quite containing is an affect in Spinoza’s sense — a capacity to disturb and to be disturbed, felt before it is understood — that passes through bodies and offices and headlines alike.
The renaming, the securitizing reflex, and the careful theater of managed ambiguity are labors of containment performed upon a force that exceeds the thing itself. Kant placed the sublime in the one who undergoes it, and Deleuze read it as “a terrible struggle between imagination and reason.” In the UAP a sovereign order undergoes something of the kind, its categories suspended, if only for a moment, before an object it cannot place.25 The State, for which a balloon is a routine matter, manages (must manage) the vertigo of an unassimilable possibility: the dim apprehension that the axioms organizing the real are contingent and might be otherwise, which no quantity of intake forms and resolution statistics has ever laid to rest.
On a second plane, the Plane of Empiricism, the question this essay has bracketed — what, after all, are these things? — returns, transformed. The UAP figures there as the candidate object of a science that does not yet exist, an insistent remainder left over once the conventional explanations have done their honest work. Co-production tells us that an object and the order that knows it are made together, and leaves open why this object, unlike the gene or the ozone hole, has for eighty years refused to be made. The likelier answer is that the order meets it as an affect long before any datum is in hand. I propose that the UAP, as we encounter it in this historical moment, is constituted in the passage between the two planes. It hovers (if I may hazard the pun the subject so insistently invites) where the institutional marking of the anomalous as esoteric and its force as affect are forever converting into one another, and where the scientist’s hope of a clean datum is shadowed, always, by the political economy of secrecy that decides in advance which data may be gathered at all. Whether the hovering is the object’s own manner of being, or only the signature of our present ignorance, I am content, for now, to hold open.
A field that institutionalizes itself around the first plane alone will produce what we already possess in abundance, the endless administrative metabolism of an affect it can neither digest nor expel. A field built around the second alone, as though the instrument floated free of the hands that hold it and the powers that fund it, will discover, as ufology has discovered more than once, that the datum it most needs is the one the first plane has arranged not to exist. An adequate order must hold the two planes together without collapsing either into the other. It must do so reflexively, knowing (as I, who helped to build some of the institutions here under analysis, am bound to know) that whoever studies this field is already a body through which its affect passes.
Six requirements define such an order. The first is role clarity: a defense office concerned with technical surprise, a learned society concerned with scholarly standards (and, like any society, with its donors and its prestige), a media entrepreneur concerned with visibility, and a private-sector technical entity interested in proprietary development are not interchangeable participants in a common cause. The collapse of these distinctions into a vague rhetoric of “the community” lets cooperation slide into confusion. Role clarity is also the means of managing the tension between academic and governmental interest in UAP that runs through everything above. The second is differentiated but explicit standards of evidence, a methodological pluralism that keeps the evidentiary regimes distinct. Unacknowledged differences allow one regime’s standards to delegitimize another’s, and the most rigorous standards to be invoked selectively against inconvenient evidence. The third is publication integrity: no actor should acquire scientific standing through access or technical mystique alone, and no claim of national-security adjacency should waive the publication standards that bind everyone else. A field that lets proprietary assertion stand in for accountable method becomes a reputational marketplace in which credibility trades like any other asset.
The fourth is firewalling between donor, investment, and contract interests and public-facing scientific claims, on the model of the conflict-of-interest disclosure rules of medical research, imperfect and contested as those rules remain. The fifth is the development of civilian and international infrastructures not reducible to defense priorities, which would distribute the field’s knowledge across jurisdictions that no single security apparatus can wholly command. The sixth is a set of norms for handling unresolved claims: protocols by which whistleblower testimony, historical allegations, and proprietary narratives of hidden knowledge can be registered, contextualized, and held at the appropriate level of suspension where they cannot yet be resolved.
The governing principle for a mature research order is what Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”26 Its institutional counterpart is disciplined suspension, the willingness to hold questions open while pursuing the means to answer them. By it a field learns to dwell with an object that hovers, and to refuse the administrative haste that would resolve it into a category as firmly as the credulous haste that would resolve it into a revelation.
The preceding essay closed by asking its readers to build the independent instruments, and an image often repeated in the emerging UAP science community makes the same appeal: the telescope is already being built, as it were, and the only question remaining is whether we will consent to look through it — consent as a community, in the open commons of Nature where anyone can look, and check. The image is a good one, and it carries the right note of exasperation at a culture forever poised on the threshold of an inquiry it cannot bring itself to begin. Taken alone, though, it is far too innocent an image, for it imagines the instrument standing free in a clearing, awaiting only the courage of an eye, or a community of seekers, when the telescope is always already held in particular hands, funded by particular powers, and raised or lowered according to a prior decision — rarely spoken, often not even conscious — about what shall count as worth the seeing. Here the politics of UAP turns on what we are willing to fund, engage publicly, or organize around. Building the instrument is the lesser part of the work, and what comes first is the collective, institutional part, which no single private venture, whatever its intentions, has much commercial reason to supply. Securing the conditions under which what it gathers might become knowledge, without vanishing into the classified dark or dissolving into the spectacle the culture stands ready to make of it, belongs to the empirical plane and the affective plane alike.
The UAP turns back upon the state and the culture that would study it, since the administrative gesture that consigns an unresolved object to the residuum of the unserious is, in the same motion, the cultural act that charges that object with its uncanny power. The more strenuously the institutions labor to contain the UAP on the plane of governance, the more luxuriantly it flowers on the plane of the imaginary, returning to trouble the order that sought to be rid of it — a circuit that eighty years of episodic official attention have traced and retraced (one that threatens to return, in the words of Bullard’s title, to the durable myth and mystery of the UFO).27
It has arrived before, more than once, the moment Eghigian’s history taught us to recognize — when interest gives way to investigation, investigation to inconclusive findings, and the findings, at last, to the long dispersal of serious attention back into noise. We stand somewhere in the third movement now. The fourth waits, as it has always waited, in the gap between a question that will not go away and the institutions that cannot bring themselves to house it. What we call science was itself once a disruption of the settled order of its day, an unruly and disreputable thing that grew sober and powerful only after it had won, against considerable resistance, the institutional stability that let it accumulate across generations. The science of UAP, should there ever come to be one in this accumulative sense, will have to win that same stability against a resistance subtler than that of the cardinals of 1633 — one that speaks, with perfect sincerity, in the idiom of an evidence whose conditions of production it has never been asked to supply, until today. The telescope is being built, and whether the institution that could make sense of what it sees will be built alongside it remains, as it has always remained, ours to answer.
NOTES
PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, carries a White House name and is described as an interagency effort, with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Energy Department, NASA, and the FBI named alongside the Pentagon; its public face is the Department of War’s release site, war.gov/UFO, where the first 162 files appeared on May 8, 2026, with further releases promised on a rolling basis. Secretary Hegseth’s phrase is quoted in Micah Hanks, “Pentagon Launches UAP Transparency Effort With First ‘PURSUE’ File Release,” The Debrief, May 8, 2026; for the file count and the participating agencies, see “Pentagon Publishes UFO File Collection Online, Tells Public to Make Up Their Own Minds,” CBS17.com, May 8, 2026; the release is also reported, with the agencies named, in “The Newly Released Government UFO Archives Will Leave You Shrugging,” The War Zone, May 8, 2026. ↩︎
Michael C. Cifone, “On Disclosure” (also titled “The Disclosure That Cannot Come”), Society for UAP Studies, 2026 (revised November 9, 2026), https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/post/on-disclosure. The present essay presupposes that essay’s account of classified research as an epistemological black hole, of the WikiLeaks control case and the movement’s self-assembly that it surfaced, of the French civilian program, and of the case for independence from the apparatus, and does not rehearse them. ↩︎
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998). On the advocates who brought the subject to the state, see the preceding essay (note 2); on the senators, Harry Reid with the support of Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens, see “Secret Pentagon Program Spent Millions to Research UFOs,” NPR, December 17, 2017, summarizing Politico’s reporting. ↩︎
Alexander Wendt, The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2026), ch. 1, “The Trouble with Aliens,” doi:10.1093/oso/9780197841167.003.0002 (published online September 17, 2026; print edition January 14, 2027). Oxford’s abstract for the chapter describes the Pentagon’s 2021 report as both scientizing and securitizing UAP and develops a scenario of local discovery without contact, and the book’s own description frames its central case as one in which global authorities conclude and disclose that UAP are flown by extraterrestrials. “Emergencize” is my own coinage; Wendt’s term for the first step is securitization. ↩︎
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Report (Washington, DC: NASA, September 14, 2023), 3. ↩︎
Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 781–795, where boundary-work is something scientists do; its extension to the state is mine. Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO,” Political Theory 36, no. 4 (2008): 607–633. The article predates the official adoption of “UAP”; the reading of the renaming as a neutralization of the threat is also mine. ↩︎
The National UFO Reporting Center, founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble, has been directed by Peter Davenport since 1994; before its website began operating in 1995, reports reached it mainly by telephone hotline and by mail. See “About Us,” National UFO Reporting Center, https://nuforc.org/about-us/. ↩︎
Greg Eghigian, After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024). The four-phase schema is my compression of the recurring pattern of official attention that his history documents from the late 1940s onward. ↩︎
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (Washington, DC: ODNI, June 25, 2021). Of the 144 reports reviewed, one was identified with high confidence as a large, deflating balloon; the rest remained unexplained. On the Navy’s new reporting guidelines, see “US Navy Drafting New Guidelines for Reporting UFOs,” Military.com, April 24, 2019; the task force was announced in Department of the Navy, “Establishment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force,” press release, August 14, 2020 (the Deputy Secretary of Defense having approved the task force on August 4). ↩︎
Department of Defense, “Establishment of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office,” memorandum, July 15, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Jul/20/2003039074/-1/-1/1/ESTABLISHMENT-OF-THE-ALL-DOMAIN-ANOMALY-RESOLUTION-OFFICE.PDF, issued under section 1683 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022. The memorandum has AARO carry out the duties assigned to the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, directs the Navy to disestablish the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and transfer its data and material to the new office, and describes AARO’s remit as “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged, and transmedium objects.” ↩︎
Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (released November 14, 2024), https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/DOD-AARO-Consolidated-Annual-Report-on-UAP-Nov2024.pdf; the figures are as summarized in “Annual UFO Report Finds 21 Cases of More Than 700 Received Need More Analysis,” CBS News, November 14, 2024. Of the 757 reports, 485 concerned events within the reporting period and 272 earlier events not previously reported. ↩︎
Wendt and Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO,” 607, in the abstract, where the sentence quoted below on sovereignty’s incapacity also appears; the four techniques are set out at 625–626, and the borrowing of “epistemology of ignorance” from Nancy Tuana at 611. ↩︎
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, released March 8, 2024), as quoted by Agence France-Presse, “Pentagon Says No Evidence of Secret Work on Alien Tech,” March 8, 2024. The report attributes the reverse-engineering claims in large part to “circular reporting.” The press statement, by Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, is reproduced at The Black Vault, https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/report-on-the-historical-record-of-u-s-government-involvement-with-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-uap-volume-i/. ↩︎
Testimony of David Grusch before the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, hearing on “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency,” July 26, 2023; see also “U.S. Recovered Non-Human ‘Biologics’ from UFO Crash Sites, Former Intel Official Says,” NPR, July 27, 2023. ↩︎
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, Pub. L. No. 118-31, §§ 1841–1843 (December 22, 2023), which establishes a UAP records collection at the National Archives without the review board or the eminent-domain provision of the Senate’s UAP Disclosure Act. See Stephanie Barna, “Implications of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Amendment in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),” Inside Government Contracts (Covington & Burling), January 9, 2024; on the model of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, see the press release of Senators Schumer and Rounds introducing the amendment, Senate Democrats, July 2023. ↩︎
Thomas E. Bullard, “UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological Guise,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 404 (1989): 147–170. Bullard’s fuller comparative study is UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, 2 vols. (Mount Rainier, MD: Fund for UFO Research, 1987). Many full abduction narratives were obtained under hypnosis; the regularity is Bullard’s finding, and its interpretation remains contested. ↩︎
James E. McDonald, “Science in Default: Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations,” paper presented at the General Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston, December 27, 1969; published in Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, eds., UFOs: A Scientific Debate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 52–122. Robert J. Low’s memorandum, “Some Thoughts on the UFO Project,” dated August 9, 1966, is quoted in John G. Fuller, “Flying Saucer Fiasco,” Look, May 14, 1968. ↩︎
I direct the Society for UAP Studies and edit its journal, Limina, and I serve on the board of Project Hessdalen, which the essay discusses below as a demonstrative-science organization. Readers should weigh what follows accordingly. ↩︎
David H. Guston, “Boundary Organizations in Environmental Policy and Science: An Introduction,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 26, no. 4 (2001): 399–408. Guston’s boundary organizations have distinct lines of accountability to each side of the boundary; the identification of the two sets of principals in the UAP case is mine. ↩︎
Sheila Jasanoff, “The Idiom of Co-Production,” in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–12. ↩︎
On Hessdalen, see Massimo Teodorani, “A Long-Term Scientific Survey of the Hessdalen Phenomenon,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 18, no. 2 (2004): 217–251; Project Hessdalen began field observation in 1983, and its automatic measurement station has been in service since August 7, 1998 (https://old.hessdalen.org/station/local.shtml). On the Galileo Project, see Wesley Andrés Watters et al., “The Scientific Investigation of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Using Multimodal Ground-Based Observatories,” Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation 12 (2023): 2340006. ↩︎
Kevin H. Knuth, Robert M. Powell, and Peter A. Reali, “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles,” Entropy 21, no. 10 (2019): 939, https://doi.org/10.3390/e21100939; M. Szydagis, K. H. Knuth, B. W. Kugielsky, and C. Levy, “Initial Results from the First Field Expedition of UAPx to Study Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” Progress in Aerospace Sciences (2025), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paerosci.2025.101099. The original UAPx was a nonprofit; UAlbany Project X, launched in November 2025 under an endowment gift, is its academic continuation, with Knuth, Matthew Szydagis, and Cecilia Levy among its scientists. See Micah Hanks, “‘UAlbany Project X’: How a Team of New York Physicists Is Launching a Cutting-Edge Investigation into Aerial Mysteries,” The Debrief, December 2, 2025. ↩︎
The Sol Foundation, https://thesolfoundation.org/; the 2025 Sol Foundation Symposium, Lake Maggiore, Italy, October 24–27, 2025, whose program lists “Conversation with Dr. Garry Nolan and Jake Barber” for Saturday, October 25 (https://thesolfoundation.org/events/the-2025-sol-foundation-symposium/). Greg Bishop, “Across Languages and Landscapes: Reflections on SOL 2025,” Society for UAP Studies, November 26, 2025, https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/post/across-languages-and-landscapes-reflections-on-sol-2025, which places the symposium at the Hotel Dino in Baveno. For Nolan’s materials work, see Garry P. Nolan, Jacques F. Vallee, Sizun Jiang, and Larry G. Lemke, “Improved Instrumental Techniques, Including Isotopic Analysis, Applicable to the Characterization of Unusual Materials with Potential Relevance to Aerospace Forensics,” Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128 (2022): 100788. ↩︎
The contract was HHM402-08-C-0072. A July 2011 letter from the Defense Intelligence Agency asked Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies for “a detailed explanation of any competitive harm to your company should the material be released”; a 2019 request yielded pages withheld under FOIA exemptions 3, 4, and 6, the fourth covering trade secrets and confidential commercial information. See Jack Brewer, “DIA Withheld AAWSAP Contract Awarded to BAASS in 2011 FOIA Response,” The UFO Trail, August 1, 2019; and Keith Basterfield, “AAWSAP Was a ‘Commercial in Confidence’ Agreement,” Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – Scientific Research (blog), February 15, 2020, https://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2020/02/aawsap-was-commercial-in-confidence.html, which reproduces the DIA letter and credits the characterization to Tim McMillan’s reporting in Popular Mechanics. ↩︎
Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1984), xii–xiii, on the “terrible struggle between imagination and reason” and the “discordant accord” of the faculties that Deleuze calls “the great discovery of the Critique of Judgement”; Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), the Analytic of the Sublime; and, for affect as a capacity to affect and be affected, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For the thought that the Kantian sublime may be conceptually generative in the face of anomalous experience I am indebted to Bryan Sentes, Canadian poet and for many years an eloquent blog writer on UFOs and UAP; any confusions are my own. ↩︎
John Keats to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 27 (?), 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:193–194. ↩︎
Thomas E. Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). ↩︎
SOCIETY FOR UAP STUDIES
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