As our Executive Director Dr. Cifone recently articulates in his essay in Mindfield Bulletin, UAP Studies could benefit from a strategic intersection of three areas of scholarship that don't typically talk to each other: mind-matter research and the philosophy of mind, anomalistics and the science and scholarship on the UAP as an empirical phenomenon in need of careful study.

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Among the Society's most philosophically ambitious research programs, the Empirical Weird Initiative addresses a specific and persistent gap in UAP Studies: the phenomena most frequently reported by credible observers — entity encounters, altered states, psychophysical events, high strangeness in its many forms — are precisely those that popular discourse sensationalizes and academic discourse reflexively brackets or dismisses. Neither response constitutes inquiry. The Initiative brings together scholars across philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, and the natural sciences to develop rigorous empirical and methodological frameworks adequate to the phenomena themselves.
 

Phase 1 will conclud with a structured interdisciplinary retreat at Fermil de Basto, Portugal (May–June 2026).

Phase 2 will center on the development of field-deployable methodology and will include a special issue of our flagship journal Limina.

The Forensic Methodologies Initiative addresses one of the most fundamental technical gaps in the UAP evidence base: the absence of a rigorous, cross-disciplinary forensic methodology for the analysis of UAP physical evidence and post-event data. The Initiative undertakes a systematic critical review of all prior forensic approaches in the UAP literature — from the Condon Study and BAAS field investigations through Nolan et al. (2022) and key comparative physical events — before constructing a new methodological framework grounded in established standards across the forensic sciences. Such a systematic re-grounding has never been accomplished for UAP, and the anticipated field-level impact is significant.
 

Phase 1 deliverables include a detailed project timeline (with six key stages) running to a September 2026 draft report, and regional scoping assessment.

The most foundational of the three active Initiatives, the UAP Standards of Evidence Initiative aims to develop a rigorous interdisciplinary framework establishing what constitutes good evidence, credible inference, and viable pathway from empirical data to theoretically-grounded understanding in the scientific study of UAP.

The Initiative is modeled explicitly on the astrobiology community's successful development of biosignatures standards of evidence (NASA, 2021–2022), with a primary deliverable of a white paper that similarly establishes community-endorsed evidentiary standards for UAP research — the first of its kind in the field.

The organizing team has pivoted to the AstroAccel 2026 Innovation Summit in Lisbon (August 15–17) as the anchor event for forming a core interdisciplinary advocacy group, delivering a funding pitch, and initiating the institutional partnerships needed to advance to a full workshop.

Alongside the empirical and methodological questions at the heart of UAP Studies lies an equally fundamental set of humanistic and social-scientific questions that the field has not yet addressed with the systematic institutional attention they deserve: What does it mean that human beings, across cultures and historical periods, have encountered, contested, and struggled to make sense of phenomena of this kind? How have political, cultural, and social structures shaped — and in turn been shaped by — the UAP problem? What can the long history of what Advisory Board member Dr. Greg Eghigian calls "human dealings with UFOs" reveal about the epistemic and institutional conditions under which anomalous phenomena enter or are excluded from scientific inquiry?
 

This Initiative will bring together historians, sociologists, political scientists, and cultural theorists to develop a research program that takes these questions seriously as foundational scholarly problems in UAP Studies — disciplines that the field needs but has not yet formally organized around a shared institutional agenda.