Guest Editors: Marco Bastos (University College Dublin & City St George's, University of London) & Marisa Duarte (Arizona State University)
Critical study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) has entered a new era. The 1950s-era fascination with little green men and stealth aviation that historically shaped UFO lore (Eghigian, 2024) has given way to a more institutionally grounded discourse, driven by the 2017-2025 congressional testimonies of pilots and private security contractors attesting to the existence of multi-million dollar programs to investigate UAP (Baio, 2023). Government hearings, whistleblower testimonies, and the release of official reports generate a shifting information landscape in which secrecy, disclosure, speculation, and institutional authority interact in complex ways (Anton & Vugrin, 2022; Yingling & Yingling, 2024), reinvigorating scientific and government consideration of these phenomena (Guthrie, 2025; Oxnevad, 2021). Online communities have since emerged as central arenas for interpreting these developments, negotiating trust, and evaluating the credibility of institutions and evidence (Bastos & Duarte, 2025).
This is further shaped by the Trump administration's release of allegedly declassified UAP documents in 2026, coming one year after the federal defunding of disinformation research and the closure of government agencies designed to deter adversarial influence campaigns. On social media, influencers and media personalities increasingly blend UAP speculation with the extreme ideologies of powerful figures linked to Palantir and the expanding surveillance state (Lipińska et al., 2025; Stise et al., 2024; Durán 2026). Political representatives, meanwhile, have drawn on civilian and military sightings of unclaimed drone campaigns and aerial phenomena to advance both securitization efforts around unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and calls for greater transparency in defense spending and procurement.
These developments have attracted sustained critical attention. Scientists and cultural critics alike identify colonialist dynamics in the privatization of space governance and exploration, including in contemporary ideological treatments of UFO/UAP (Kite, 2021; Lechuga, 2023; Salazar & Gorman, 2023). Internet and surveillance studies scholars identify powerful consolidations between technology companies and military-intelligence agencies-consolidations that in some ways echo the enduring concerns of ufologists and experiencers (Iliadis & Acker, 2022; Taskale, 2026). In such an environment, speculation, strategic ambiguity, and the pragmatics of secrecy become instruments of propaganda, persuasion, and belief formation mobilized by grifters, conspiracists, influence actors, religious zealots, and government power players alike (Hallsby, 2026; Krame et al 2024).
In this context, UFO and UAP-long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy thinking-become the subject of confirmed institutional conspiracy in the form of classified programs, coordinated secrecy, and deliberate disinformation. As such, UAP sustains a wide-ranging academic inquiry spanning government classification procedures, whistleblower protections, media narratives, influence campaigns, technocratic systems of belief, the role of gnosis in technoscientific research, and infrastructures and frameworks to sustain scientific investigators pushing the boundaries of their methodological and epistemological toolkits (Agrama, 2021; Andresen, 2023; Kripal, 2024; Knuth et al., 2025; Lomas et al., 2025; Schwarz & Seidl, 2023).
UAPs also display tangible connections with the military-industrial complex and the emerging military-digital complex-defined by the militarization of cyber operations conducted through social engineering, disinformation, cyberattacks, artificial intelligence, and fully autonomous systems (Durán, 2026). In this context, disclosure itself can be weaponized to galvanize anti-establishment sentiment. Government transparency regarding UAP is therefore a politically mediated practice shaped by national security concerns, classification regimes, and institutional power (Creeber, 2025). Similarly, while disclosure evolved as a grassroots political movement, it remains vulnerable to transparency theater and repurposing in the service of partisan conflict.
Disclosure has also become a point of contention in the wake of the heavily redacted Epstein files and the ongoing expectation of meaningful UAP declassification. In this context, online communities such as forums, subreddits, and social networks operate as sites where evidence is debated, claims are verified or contested, and cultural meanings around anomalous phenomena are constructed. Such communities have also assembled historical evidence suggesting that disinformation campaigns have been deliberately deployed by state actors to obscure classified aerospace technologies and manipulate public narratives. Understanding how such campaigns intersect with contemporary misinformation ecosystems remains an important and underexplored challenge for the field (Stahlman, 2024).
This Special Issue of American Behavioral Scientist seeks to expand an emerging research agenda at the intersection of communication studies, media sociology, cultural studies, science communication, and information studies, with particular attention to how UAP/UFO discourse circulates across sociotechnical systems. We invite submissions that analyze how disclosure practices, secrecy regimes, and disinformation campaigns intersect with digital media infrastructures and public knowledge production. Scholars from communication studies, cultural studies, information science, sociology, political communication, science and technology studies (STS), media studies, international relations, and computational social science are encouraged to contribute.
Submissions may examine how disclosure events reconfigure public discourse, reshape institutional trust, and influence the circulation of narratives online. We particularly welcome work that approaches digital platforms as infrastructures of epistemic negotiation, or that engages the political economy of information surrounding UAP. Methodological approaches may include cultural studies, computational social science, discourse analysis, digital ethnography, archival research, and beyond. We especially encourage submissions that engage critically with these themes from transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives, and invite manuscripts addressing any aspects of these complex social, technological, cultural, and religious phenomena from any global location, including but not limited to:
UAP discourse and the Silicon Valley technocracy
Disclosure, transparency movements, and whistleblower protections
Government secrecy, classification regimes, and secret military programs
Community archives, FOIA requests, and government surveillance of civilian researchers
Decolonial approaches to UAP and UFO studies
Golden Dome, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and missile defense infrastructures
Palantir, private security contractors, and the expansion of surveillance systems
Space governance, securitization, and privatized space intelligence
The Deep State, the Network State, and technocratic governance
Religious and spiritual frameworks for UAP, including Christian nationalism
Conspiracy thinking, skepticism, and cultures of debunking
Media and cultural studies approaches to UAP and UFO phenomena
Disinformation campaigns, psychological operations, and influence operations
Corruption, criminal conspiracy, and covert operations
Methodologies for investigating anomalous and edge phenomena
Timeline
Deadline for paper submission: November 30, 2026
Feedback on paper submissions: March 31, 2027
Expected Special Issue publication: Summer 2027
Initial submissions are format-free and should be sent directly to the Special Issue Editors Marco Bastos (marco.bastos@ucd.ie) and Marisa Duarte (marisa.duarte@asu.edu). Contributions will be double-blind peer-reviewed and should be under 8,000 words (including tables, figures, and references). Final submission of accepted manuscripts will be through Manuscript Central.
References
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