Inaugural teach-in at Yale University

During the Vietnam war era, students and activists all over the country and around the world gathered together to raise awareness, protest, and mobilize in support of productive change. Though the current cultural moment is different in many ways, we believe a similar global movement is beginning to emerge. The key difference, of course, is that the issues surrounding UAP/NHI are not on the nightly news for all to see. At most, they hover on the fringe of most people’s thoughts.

One of the challenges we face right now is the substantial gap between the status quo orthodoxy and what seems to be the truth regarding UAP/NHI. Scholars like J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee have gathered massive amounts of information going back to the late 1940s and beyond. There are thousands upon thousands of reports, photographs, videos, and physical traces to investigate. And while scholarly investigation of these topics is rewarding and productive, everyone walks away puzzled in some way or another. The Phenomenon, as we call it, resists simplification.

For a newcomer, these topics will be jarring. It is one thing to hear and try to take seriously the idea that flying saucers are real and that the US Government is hiding important information about them from the public. It is quite another to listen to experiencers report personal encounters with beings that look like large insects or reptiles. Somehow, we must all learn to sit with our discomfort as we live on the edge of a major paradigm shift. The anomalies, the strange things we don’t understand at all, those are what will lead us to new insights and, eventually, a more wholistic understanding of the world we inhabit.

Though all the lectures given at this event were fascinating, here are a few we’d like to highlight:

• Kevin Knuth demonstrates how we can use relatively simple physics to model apparent capacities and related energy requirements of UAP.
• Steven Brown engages in some speculative exploration of possible non-human motivational structures as they relate to the history of UAP/NHI encounters.
• Daniel Stubbings discusses the studies he has already completed involving UAP experiencers and lays out a vision for a much larger series of research projects in the future.
• Michael Glawson warns us against the temptation to oversimplify the realm of anomalous phenomena and invites us into a larger exploration of strange and profoundly interesting things.