Call for Papers: 

American Behavioral Scientist Special Issue "Unsettling the UAP/UFO Technocracy: Disclosure, Conspiracies, and Deep State Imaginaries"

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<mailto:marco.bastos@ucd.ie>) and Marisa Duarte (marisa.duarte@asu.edu <mailto: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. No payment from the authors will be required to publish or participate in this call.

References

Agrama, H. A. (2021) “Secularity, Synchronicity, and Uncanny Science: Considerations and Challenges,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 56, 2, 395-415.

Andresen, J. (2023) Extraterrestrial Ethics. Ethics International Press Ltd.

Anton, A., & Vugrin, F. (2022). “UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact.” (Dis) information campaigns on the UFO phenomenon,” Journal of Anomalistics, 22(1), 18–35.

Baio, A. (2023). UFO ‘whistleblower’ says government has ‘intact’ non-human craft. The Independent.

Bastos, M. & Duarte, M. (2025) “Between Disclosure and Conspiracy: The Transparency Effect on r/UFO and r/UAP Subreddits,” Information, Communication and Society, 1-23. DOI:10.1080/1369118x.2026.2645882

Creeber, G. (2025) “From UFOs to UAPs: is disclosure really imminent?” Intelligence and National Security 40, 3: 583-589. DOI:10.1080/02684527.2025.2488552

Durán, G. (2026). The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Simon & Schuster.

Eghigian, G. (2024) After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press.

Guthrie, D. (2025) “Flying saucers and the ivory dome: Congressional oversight concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena,” Harvard Law School National Security Journal 16, 1: 194-265.

Hallsby, A. (2026) Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric. The Ohio State University Press.

Iliadis, A. & Acker, A. (2024) “The Palantir Files: Public Interest Archives for Platform Accountability,” Information, Communication, and Society 27, 13: 2343, 2365. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2352624

Kite, S. (2021) “‘What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth’: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with Apocalypse,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 45, 1: 137-156.

Knuth, K. et al. (2025) “The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP),” Progress in Aerospace Sciences 156 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paerosci.2025.101097

Krame, G., Vivoda, V., & Bar-On, T. (2025). Casting Ambiguity: Securitization of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena in the United States. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 50(2), 263-282. DOI: 10.1177/03043754241256845

Kripal, J. (2024) How To Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. University of Chicago Press.

Lechuga, M. (2023) Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson.

Lomas, T. et al. (2025) “The UAP Assessment Matrix: A Framework for Evaluating Evidence and Understanding Regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” Acta Astronautica 234: 491-503.

Lipińska, M., Kotula, N. & Jemielniak, D. (2025). Exploring expert figures in alien-related UFO conspiracy theories. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12 (1), 535-538. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-04799-8

Oxnevad, I. (2021) The Truth is Mostly Right Here: The Security Dilemma and the Earthly Logic of an Extraterrestrial Threat. Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 21 (2), 180-205. URL: https://jmss.org/article/view/74704/55613

Salazar, J.F. & Gorman, A. (2023) The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space. Routledge.

Schwarz, A. & Seidl, E. (2023) “Stories of Astrobiology, SETI, and UAPs: Science and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life in German News Media From 2009 to 2022.” Science Communication 45, 6: 788–823, https://doi.org/10.1177/10755470231206797

Stahlman, G. (2024) “Closing the Information Gap in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) Studies,” in Sserwanga, I., et al., eds. Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win: iConference 2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v. 14596. Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57850-2_23

Stise, R., Bingaman, J., Siddika, A., Dawson, W., Paintsil, A., & Brewer, P. (2024). "Cultivating paranormal beliefs: how television viewing, social media use, and podcast listening predict belief in UFOs." Atlantic Journal of Communication 32 (4), 629-639. DOI: 10.1080/15456870.2023.2187803

Taskale, A.R. (2026) “Manufacturing the Leviathan: Palantir’s ‘Technological Republic’ and the Nationalist Faction of the Tech Oligarchy,” Science as Culture: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2025.2607360

Yingling, M. & Yingling, C. (2024) “Academic freedom and the unknown: credibility, criticism, and inquiry among the professoriate,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communication 11, 987.