This year’s conference brings together scholars and practitioners from across the social sciences, humanities, physical sciences, and consciousness studies for three days of focused, interdisciplinary engagement. The program features compelling plenary presentations, discipline-specific workshops, and keynote addresses from two of the most respected thinkers working at the intersection of knowledge systems, institutions, and anomalous phenomena.
https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/post/society-for-uap-studies-announces-2025-annual-conference
Distinguished Keynote Speakers
Professor Steve Fuller, a pioneering voice in the sociology of science, has spent his career exploring how knowledge systems evolve, how paradigm shifts occur, and how emerging fields gain legitimacy. His work on epistemic communities and scientific revolutions provides an essential foundation for understanding UAP studies as a new, boundary-crossing academic domain. Professor Fuller’s keynote will examine how traditional academic structures can adapt to, support, and meaningfully advance rigorous UAP research.
Professor Ron Westrum, an internationally recognized expert on organizational culture and information flow, brings decades of expertise in understanding how institutions handle unexpected or anomalous data. His well-known typologies of organizational response—ranging from pathological to generative—are crucial for examining how governments, scientific bodies, and research institutions engage with UAP-related information. Professor Westrum’s keynote will address the challenges and opportunities faced by researchers working with unconventional or contested evidence.
Together, Fuller and Westrum will offer challenging, forward-looking perspectives tailored to the interdisciplinary needs of contemporary UAP studies, highlighting methodological issues, institutional barriers, and pathways for scholarly progress.
Featured Plenary Presentations
This year’s agenda includes a strong lineup of plenary speakers whose work spans scientific, philosophical, cultural, and methodological approaches to UAP phenomena:
- Dr. Michael Glawson & Dr. Courtney Bower — A new framework for credible, legible, and tractable UAP research
- Prof. Michael Zimmerman — Rethinking the meaning and legacy of “alien abductions”
- Michaël Vaillant — Governing uncertainty in interdisciplinary UAP investigations
- Dr. Matteo Polato — Ontologies of UFOs from John Keel and Jacques Vallée to Hellier
- Assoc. Prof. Tiina Mahlamäki — A history of the Finnish UFO movement
- Dr. Adam Dodd — UFOs as more-than-human media
- Dr. Massimo Teodorani — Plasma, consciousness, and advanced propulsion in a unified UAP framework
I want to just comment that Dr Teodorani has literally been studying phenomenon at Hesdallen, Norway which is regularly overlooked by the UFO community as the area has had repeatable events physical orb phenomenon and high strangeness in the area for the last 45 years. You can see their website and information about studies (videos etc) and the continuing project studying the phenomenon there. https://www.hessdalen.org/
In regard to this, he recently did a nice write up on plasma physics in relation to UFO/UAP:
https://massimoteodorani.wordpress.com/2025/09/25/uap-propulsion/
Thank you so much for this info! Do you have any other information about Dr Zimmerman you could share? I have been asked about him but could not find any other info. Thank you again!