People

Steven Brown, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Teaching Philosophy, The Ohio State University

Steve received his B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University. His work primarily focuses on cross-cultural philosophy of religion, virtue ethics, and the promotion of global flourishing. He has recently taken an interest in UFOs and related phenomena, exploring their potential impact on our self-understanding as humans, especially with regard to our place in the universe.

Steve has lectured on the epistemology and practical importance of recent UAP-related events in Washington, D.C. and is currently working with a team of research scientists attempting to understand the Nazca Mummies.

In 2023, Steve was awarded the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching for his work at Ohio State.

Janis Whitlock, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Research Scientist Emerita

Janis received a B.A. from UC Berkeley, an M.P.H. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University. In addition to over a decade of direct service in the areas of human health and wellbeing, she has spent the last 25 years as a scholar focused on contextual and intrapersonal conditions that affect human development, perception, and emotional and mental (in)stability. She has been particularly interested in understanding the conditions under which challenging experiences cultivate wisdom, resilience, and prosocial impulses.

Janis’s scholarly work is informed by several decades of study of indigenous spiritual traditions and practice of yogic traditions, particularly those rooted in Kashmir Shaivism. It is the fusion of these broad domains that lead her to her current interest in consciousness and pathways for supporting individual and collective adaptation in the wake of ontological shock.

Alaina Hardie

Director of Technology

Alaina has worked in programming, engineering, robotics, software architecture, data science, and information security over 38 years. After completing the Graduate Studies Program (GSP ‘11) at Singularity University, she served as a Teaching Fellow in “Networks & Computing Systems” and “Digital Biology,” and held the position of Chief Maker. She is the co-author of the genetic testing e-book “Genetics: The Universe Within (2017)”, and is currently a Principal Engineer.

Her academic interests center on bioinformatics, particularly genomics and human migration, which she examines through the framework of population genetics. She is curious about how shifting genetic landscapes can shed light on shared human heritage. In addition to her work in genomics, she applies scientific methods to the study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), exploring how potential non-terrestrial evolutionary models might inform our broader understanding of life’s origins and possibilities.

At The Visible College, she oversees technical projects and collaborates with colleagues to blend computational approaches with research in various academic fields. Her background in technology and long-standing enthusiasm for interdisciplinary studies guide her investigations, while her practical experience supports a balanced perspective on emerging areas of inquiry.

Rebecca Krinke

Artist-in-Residence, The Visible College; Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota

Rebecca Krinke is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and educator whose practice, Earthling School, explores relational ways of learning and being between humans, all species, and the Earth — including non-human intelligences and the larger cosmos. As a lifelong experiencer of psi phenomena, she is dedicated to opening doors within academia to recognize these encounters as a legitimate and vital aspect of the human experience.

Krinke’s work is grounded in “two-eyed seeing,” a framework through which she investigates perception, consciousness, and synchronicity by collaborating directly with scientists and Indigenous Knowledge Keepers at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve and the Bernard Field Station. Krinke was recently invited to speak about Earthling School at “In the Cloud of Unknowing: Encounters with the UFO Phenomenon” at Mildred’s Lane. She disseminates her work through artist residencies, including at the Weisman Art Museum, gallery shows (the Pitzer College Art Gallery, 2025), writing (book chapter forthcoming in Artful Science, Ecological Arts: Transdisciplinary Curiosity for Creating Beautiful Futures, David Syring, PhD, editor), and experiential, participatory works. Krinke taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design before joining the University of Minnesota faculty. She is the recipient of the 2026 ASLA-MN Lob Pine Award for leadership in landscape architecture.

Sioux Oliva, Ph.D.

Historian and Author

Sioux earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California in 1999. Her career has centered on project management for high net worth individuals and institutions. Her first project was managing a non-profit website introducing the teachings of The Urantia Book to a wider audience, sponsored by Lyn and Norman Lear. Other notable clients include Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy, the Estate of Marilyn Monroe, and Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee (four family history projects), along with research projects for The Getty, the City of Los Angeles, and The Autry Museum of the American West.

Sioux is the author of Dr. Sadler and The Urantia Book: The Historic Origins of a Spiritual Revelation in the 20th Century. The book compares the work’s “origin story” — Dr. William S. Sadler’s claim that a group of non-human intelligences communicated through a sleeping man in Chicago from 1911 to 1923 — with the scholarly record of the facts and circumstances surrounding its publication.

Eighteen months of immersion in UFO/UAP research has led Sioux to rethink that biography. She now reads Sadler as an “experiencer” who had contact with non-human beings and observed UAPs for decades during his lifetime. Her forthcoming book, EPOCHAL: The Sadlers, Non-Human Intelligence and The Urantia Book, will be available in the summer of 2026.

Justin Sui, Ph.D.

Justin Sui is an M.D./Ph.D. student who recently completed his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Pathology. With a life-long passion for answering scientific questions in biology, he has worked with numerous model systems ranging from the fruit fly to mice. Supporting and supported by colleagues in The Visible College, Justin aims to use his medical and scientific training to help bridge the gap between the esoteric and traditional academia, and to contribute to educational efforts more broadly.

Craig Whitton, M.Sc.

Director of Student Affairs; Founder, Authentik Consulting & Training

Craig Whitton is a leadership consultant and higher education administrator focused on disruption, crisis response, behaviour management, and institutional resilience. He is the founder of Authentik Consulting & Training, where he supports leaders navigating complex social, technological, and organizational change.

Craig’s work spans emergency management, student conduct, restorative justice, behavioural risk management, and public-sector leadership. He holds a BA (Honours) in Political Science from the University of Guelph and an MSc in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management from the University of Leicester. He is an award-winning speaker with multiple “Best Of” presentation awards, as well as recognition from professional associations including the RLPA’s Josie Lamothe Memorial Award for contributions to Housing and Residence Life and NWACUHO’s David B. Stephen Award for Distinguished Service.

His current work explores the leadership and societal implications of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena and other major disruptors, with a focus on transparency, public trust, and helping institutions transform disruption into meaningful change.

John L. Roberts, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Psychology, University of West Georgia

After earning a B.A. from Virginia Military Institute, John received his J.D. from Cumberland School of Law, LL.M. from Tulane Law School, and practiced law in the areas of civil rights and plaintiff litigation. Returning to graduate school, John received an M.A. in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature, critical theory, and rhetoric.

John’s own profound and transformative experiences in humanistic psychotherapy led him to the psychology department at the University of West Georgia, where he earned an M.A. degree. He practiced psychotherapy for several years, and later returned to receive his Ph.D. He is the author of Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject (Routledge).

John’s interests include theoretical and philosophical approaches to psychology, histories of consciousness and subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.

Kharisma Montes de Oca, M.S.

Juris Doctorate 2025 Candidate, Urban Planner, Policy Writer & Project Manager

Kharisma’s areas of focus include constitutional, criminal, and anti-trust law, public policy, and public engagement.

Christian Peters, Ph.D.

Managing Director, Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), University of Bremen

Christian Peters holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from TU Dresden and École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France. His research and publications cover religion and politics, higher education policies, political epistemology, and the social science of UAPs. In 2023, he co-authored “It’s Time to Hear from Social Scientists about UFOs” in Scientific American.

Christian is an active (board) member of the Society for UAP Studies (SUAPS) and contributing member to SCU.

Mike Senter-Zapata, M.D.

Instructor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Senter-Zapata is a practicing, board-certified Internal Medicine attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and research faculty at the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. His medical research focuses on how clinical decision support tools and artificial intelligence can improve healthcare delivery and medical training. He serves as the Vice President of Research at the American Medical Extended Reality Association and as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Extended Reality.

Dr. Senter-Zapata earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in Human Evolutionary Biology and completed medical school at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. He then completed Internal Medicine residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School followed by a Healthcare Innovation research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Senter-Zapata is interested in the immediate and long-term biological effects of anomalous health incidents.

Tania Searle, Ph.D.

Tania is a sociologist in South Australia and teaches in both the social sciences and health sciences. Her research interests include Indigenous self-determination and the role of settler allies, posthumanism, and unsettling Western conceptions of humanness and sovereignty. Prior to her academic career, Tania worked in grassroots community organisations, including an Aboriginal owned art gallery and museum, progressive Judaism, and environmental activism. Tania is passionate about social justice and the development of meaningful relationships between humans, other life forms, and more-than-human Entities (nature, landscape, climate, water, and Spirit).

Brannon Wheeler, Ph.D.

Brannon is a historian of religion (PhD, University of Chicago) with over 30 years of experience studying religions, ancient texts, and paranormal phenomena. He has traveled to and done research in more than 50 countries across the world, conducting research in many unusual languages, and has been a visiting scholar at more than a dozen institutions in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and across the United States. He is currently a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, and has published eleven books. His current work focuses on how non-human intelligences communicate with humans.

Cosmo Corfield

Freelance Educator / Independent Researcher

Educated at William Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon school (King Edward VI) and Christopher Marlowe’s Cambridge college (Corpus Christi), Cosmo has freelanced in 300+ UK schools, colleges and universities. His research interest in Carl Jung’s reading of philosophical alchemy incubated during his undergraduate years at the University of St Andrews. (His other academic pursuits include Shakespeare studies, French language and culture and intelligence history.) As a “seventeener”, his interest in the phenomenon was merely piqued by the celebrated December 2017 article published on the front page of The New York Times. However, Ralph Blumenthal’s critically acclaimed 2021 biography of Dr John E. Mack subsequently created the conditions under which a hitherto unresolved dialectic between ontological shock and relief ultimately synthesised into membership of the Visible College. Cosmo is currently working on the psycholinguistic aspects of experiencer encounters with anomalous phenomena.

David Bertaina, Ph.D.

Ordinary Professor of History, University of Illinois, Springfield

Bertaina earned his M.T.S. from the Duke University Divinity School and a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in Semitic Languages and Literatures. His research and publications focus on the religious history of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world including encounters between Christians and Muslims. Bertaina’s book Bulus ibn Raja’: The Fatimid Egyptian Convert Who Shaped Christian Views of Islam (2022) includes an account of how Ibn Raja’s conversion to Christianity was tied to an NHI experience. His study of medieval religious experience with the divine connects historical research with contemporary concerns regarding UAP and NHI. Bertaina teaches a course on UFOs and National Security History as well as units on epistemological implications of NHI. In 2026, he was selected as UIS Professor of the Year by student vote.

Christopher Noel

Independent Scholar, Consciousness Studies and Sasquatch Field Researcher

Chris’s most recent work focuses on the underappreciated resonances between the UAP/”alien” phenomenon and other manifestations of consciousness such as psychokinesis and the afterlife. He has also written numerous books on Sasquatch, most notably linking their remarkable capacities to those of autistic savants of our own species.

Maryam Dilmaghani, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics, Saint Mary's University

Dr. Maryam Dilmaghani joined Saint Mary’s University as a tenure-track assistant professor of economics in 2011. Currently a full professor of economics, Maryam holds a PhD in economics from McGill University and other degrees from Université de Montréal and Université de Montpellier. Her research spans applied economics, public policy, and interdisciplinary social inquiry, with past work focusing on minority economic outcomes, gender, religion, and identity-related inequalities. Her scholarly contributions have appeared in economics and interdisciplinary journals, and she has participated in several research initiatives supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), including projects related to poverty, wellbeing, and entrepreneurship among underserved populations.

More recently, Maryam’s research has expanded into the governance and public administration dimensions of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Using national Canadian survey data from the Sky Canada Project, her emerging scholarship examines citizen attitudes toward disclosure, governmental legitimacy under uncertainty, security framing, and public responses to acknowledged institutional incompleteness. Her recent work proposes the concept of Acknowledged Ignorance Disposition (AID), which examines how citizens respond when governing institutions publicly acknowledge unresolvedness regarding governance-relevant phenomena.

Alexander Wendt, Ph.D.

Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science, Ohio State

Avi Loeb, Ph.D.

Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard University

Beatriz Villarroel, Ph.D.

Astronomy Researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics

Christopher "Kit" Green, M.D., Ph.D.

Professor in Forensic Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Wayne State University Medical School and Detroit Medical Center
Former Senior Division Analyst for Neurosciences, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Diana Walsh Pasulka, Ph.D.

Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Garry P. Nolan, Ph.D.

Executive Director of the Board, Sol Foundation
Professor in the Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine

Harold "Hal" Puthoff, Ph.D.

Founder and president, EarthTech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin
Former research scientist and consultant at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the National Security Agency (NSA)

Iya Whiteley, Ph.D.

Space Psychologist and Director of the Centre for Space Medicine, Department of Space and Climate Physics, University College London (UCL)

J. Allen Hynek, Ph.D.

Astronomer, Scientific Advisor to the US Air Force - Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book

Jacques Vallee, Ph.D.

Computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist, and astronomer

James E. McDonald, Ph.D.

Physicist, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences

Jeffrey Kripal, Ph.D.

J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University

Kevin Knuth, Ph.D.

Professor of Physics, University at Albany

Michio Kaku, Ph.D.

Theoretical Physicist

Stephen Finley, Ph.D.

Chair of African and African American Studies, Louisiana State University

Timothy Gallaudet, Ph.D.

Former Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy
Former Administrator, National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)