Faculty perceptions of unidentified aerial phenomena

Brief

Yingling, Yingling, and Bell (2023) administered a 67-item Qualtrics survey to 39,984 tenured and tenure-track faculty across 14 disciplines at 144 Carnegie R1 universities, collecting 1,460 valid responses (3.9% response rate) between February and May 2022. Across disciplines, faculty reported that evaluating UAP information and conducting UAP research are important, and curiosity outweighed skepticism or indifference. Overwhelmingly, respondents were aware of journalistic and military reports but not of the relevant legislation (e.g., the NDAA amendment establishing a UAP office). Nearly one-fifth reported a personal UAP observation, yet conducted essentially no academic research on the topic, a gap the authors attribute to the stigma of reputational damage, which was so pronounced that multiple faculty assumed the survey recruitment email was a phishing attempt.

Metadata

Category

Stigma

Venue

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Type

Peer-reviewed

Year

2023

Authors

Marissa E. Yingling, Charlton W. Yingling, Bethany A. Bell

DOI

10.1057/s41599-023-01746-3

Access

Open access

Length

1.7 M

Programs

Galileo Project

Data sources

Qualtrics survey, Carnegie Classification R1 university list, National Center for Education Statistics baccalaureate degree data

Tags

UAP-stigma, academic-sociology, survey, SETI-adjacent, science-policy

Key points

• N=1,460 valid responses from tenured and tenure-track faculty across 14 disciplines at 144 Carnegie 'Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity' institutions; total population contacted was 39,984.p.3
• Response rate was 3.9%; authors attribute this partly to the 'overall taboo nature of the study focus,' noting that one faculty member called receiving the recruitment email 'insulting' and 14 others wrote to confirm it was not spam.p.4
• Nearly one-fifth of faculty respondents reported a personal UAP observation, using the U.S. government's own definition of the term.p.1
• Curiosity outweighed skepticism or indifference across the full sample, and faculty endorsed both academic evaluation of UAP information and more UAP research as important, regardless of discipline.p.1
• Faculty were broadly aware of journalistic and government reports on UAP but not of relevant legislation such as the bipartisan NDAA amendment establishing a UAP office.p.1
• Open-ended responses identified fear of reputational damage as a primary barrier; the topic 'still often meets immediate downplay due to fear of reputational damage' even as stigma is increasingly challenged by government officials and scholars.p.3
• Sample skewed male (61.85% vs. 52% national estimate), full professor (43.56% vs. 35.5% national), and white (79.52% vs. 69.76% national) relative to U.S. faculty population benchmarks.p.5
• The Galileo Project (Harvard, led by Avi Loeb) and peer-reviewed work by Garry Nolan, Kevin Knuth, and Diana Walsh Pasulka are cited as the scholarly anchors presented to respondents to gauge awareness of existing UAP research.p.4

Verbatim

• “The stigma around the topic is so great that I thought your initial invitation to participate in the survey was spam!”

  p.4

• “disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues”

  p.2

Most interesting

• The 3.9% response rate may itself be a stigma artifact: researchers speculate that many faculty who recognized the topic simply deleted the email without responding, making the sample self-selected toward the more open-minded end of the distribution.
• Fourteen faculty contacted the researchers to verify the survey was not a scam, and one sent a 'courtesy email' warning that their names might be used in a phishing scheme, illustrating how thoroughly UAP stigma contaminates even the logistics of studying it.
• The authors excluded their own two universities from the sampling frame of 144 R1 institutions to prevent conflict-of-interest bias, and randomized university assignment via Excel's RAND function before scraping faculty contact data.
• Georgetown University posed a unique data-collection problem: it does not publish faculty email addresses publicly, leaving 69 faculty across eight disciplines unreachable by standard methods.
• The survey was administered during Spring 2022, coinciding with the May 2022 Congressional UAP hearings, yet faculty awareness of the legislative dimension (the NDAA UAP office amendment) lagged far behind awareness of media coverage.
• Physics was the single largest disciplined group in the sample (n=144, 9.86%), and astronomy faculty were folded into physics departments at many institutions, making physical scientists the plurality voice in a survey explicitly about anomalous aerial objects.