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Sociology, history & stigma

The IR-theory work on sovereignty and the UFO, faculty attitudes, academic freedom, the post-war taboo's media history, and the religious-studies treatment of UFO/contact narratives.

8 papers · sorted newest first

  1. Academic Freedom and the Unknown: Perceptions, Awareness, and Policy Regarding UAP Research

    Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · 2024

    Yingling et al.

    Survey of US faculty on the academic-freedom question around UAP research — what's chilled, what isn't, and what the structural causes are.

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  2. Faculty Perceptions of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

    Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · 2023

    Yingling et al.

    The companion survey of US faculty attitudes toward UAP itself (interest, plausibility, willingness to publish). Forms the empirical base for the 2024 academic-freedom paper.

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  3. Flying Saucers and UFOs in US Advertising During the Cold War, 1947–1989

    Advertising and Society Quarterly · 2022

    McAllister & Eghigian

    Media-history paper using Cold War US advertising imagery as a proxy for cultural assimilation of UFO motifs. Useful for the broader stigma question.

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  4. American Cosmic and Intimate Alien: A Dual Review Essay on UFOs, Religion, and Technology

    Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2021

    Zeller

    Review essay treating Pasulka and Halperin as the two principal religious-studies treatments of UFO/contact narratives. The standard citation for the field's religious-studies wing.

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  5. Strategic Ignorance and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Critiquing the Discursive Segregation of UFOs from Scientific Inquiry

    Astropolitics · 2018

    Dodd

    Argues that the deliberate separation of UFO/UAP discourse from formal SETI work is a case of 'strategic ignorance' — actively maintained, not passively inherited.

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  6. Making UFOs Make Sense: Ufology, Science, and the History of Their Mutual Mistrust

    Public Understanding of Science · 2017

    Eghigian

    History of the institutional split between ufology and science from the late 1940s onward — and the persistence of mutual suspicion through to the 2017 NYT moment.

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  7. A Transatlantic Buzz: Flying Saucers, Extraterrestrials and America in Postwar Germany

    Journal of Transatlantic Studies · 2014

    Eghigian

    Cultural history of how the American flying-saucer wave reached postwar Germany — and what it became when it arrived. Useful counterweight to US-only histories.

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  8. Sovereignty and the UFO

    Political Theory · 2008

    Wendt & Duvall

    The foundational political-theory paper on why states cannot acknowledge UFOs without destabilising their own legitimacy. Cited everywhere downstream.

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