English university to hold UAP symposium

 Academic articles

In a recent article on this blog, I explored the work of a number of academics who have, over the years, published articles on the topic of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

Recently, there has been a flurry of academic articles on the topic of UAP. In January 2025, Harvard Law School's "National Security Journal" published an article by Dillon Guthrie titled "Flying saucers and the Ivory Dome: Congressional oversight concerning Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena." This article explores the recent and sustained interest in the topic of UAP, shown by the U.S. Congress 

Also, in January 2025 there appeared an article by William C. Lane in the "European Journal for Philosophy in Science" tilted "The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: an epistemological case for removing the taboo."  The article argues that the extraterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation for UAP needs to be evaluated together with other hypotheses. 

In February 2025 appeared a multi-authored paper, by Kevin H. Knuth et al, titled "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace - Undersea Phenomena (UAP)." The article reviewed about:

"...20 historical government studies dating from 1933 to the present (in Scandinavia, WWII, US, Canada, France, Rusia, China), several historical private research studies (France, UK, US) and both recent and current scientific research efforts (Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, US.)"

Durham University

Now, an English tertiary education institution, Durham University' Law Department, has announced a one-day symposium on UAP titled "Grounding the SETI and UAP debate: Law, evidence and anticipated futures" to be held on 24 April 2025, both in person and via the Internet. 

Speakers and the title of their talks are as shown below:

Philippe Ailleris "Towards a Systematic Framework for UAP Evidence Evaluation: Introducing the Rainier Scale."

Mike Cifone "Down to Earth: Characterizing the landscape of (scientific) UAP studies."

Beatriz Villaroel "Searches for Near-Earth Extraterrestrial Artifacts with Hypothesis-Driven Science."

Chris Senn "Structuring archiving and search parameters for the 'Archives of the Impossible' as an example of facilitating coordinated access to historical encounter evidence."

Andreas Anton (with Michael Bohlander and John Elliott) "The global survey 'Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence - A study of projected perceptions and reactions among the world's societies' - First results.

Christian Peters " Alien Minds and the Problems of a political Epistemology of the UAP - Phenomenon."

Eric Hilgendorf "Conemplating the alien - The impact of SETI on human self-image."

Michael Bohlander "Alien encounter narratives in the courts - Part 2: Findings"

Jia Wang "Monopolizing high-tech in the hands of powerful humans after contact with extraterrestrial civilizations."

Abstracts and biographies of the above speakers can be found in the Symposium leaflet available online here.