Society for Scientific Exploration

The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) is an American non-profit scholarly society, founded in 1982 under the Stanford physicist Peter A. Sturrock, that provides a professional forum for presenting, criticising and debating topics it says mainstream science ignores or studies inadequately, among them UFO reports, parapsychology and cryptozoology. It publishes the quarterly peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration (since 1987) and the popular magazine EdgeScience, holds an annual meeting, and administratively supported the 1997 workshop of the Sturrock panel, the first scientific review of the physical evidence associated with UFO reports in nearly thirty years. Richard Dolan reports that the Society's first European meeting, in 1982, was the subject of a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report. Its journal and its UFO workshop have drawn named critics: Kendrick Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer, wrote that the journal "appears to hold a hidden agenda" and ignores most contrary evidence, and the skeptic Robert Sheaffer wrote that the Society is a group inclined toward belief in paranormal phenomena and that its panel heard only UFO advocates, while the experimental psychologist Roger D. Nelson says the Society aims to "give everyone a respectful hearing" and that "if we think a speaker is doing bad science, we consider it our duty to criticize it".

Founding

In 1981 a group of scientists and other scholars in the United States concluded that phenomena which for various reasons the scientific community was not studying needed a new initiative, and that real progress required a journal designed for the purpose and a society to stand behind it; they formed themselves as the Founding Committee of the Society for Scientific Exploration, "formed for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena": the astronomers George O. Abell and Bart J. Bok, the philosopher Robert F. Creegan, the statistician Persi Diaconis, the astrophysicist Thomas Gold, the engineer Robert Jahn of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, the psychologist Roger N. Shepard, the atmospheric scientist George L. Siscoe, the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, Sturrock, the physicists William B. Thompson and James Trefil, and the sociologist Marcello Truzzi. The first meeting of the Society's Council was held at the Joseph Henry Building of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on 5 January 1982, and its first annual meeting at the University of Maryland on 3 to 5 June 1982, with later meetings at the University of Virginia, Princeton University, San Francisco and Austin; it also issued a semi-annual newsletter, the Explorer. Sturrock, the founding president, came to the subject in the 1970s, when Jacques Vallée, whom he had hired to help with pulsar research, led him to read the Condon Committee's report, and he says he then surveyed scientists anonymously and found them more open-minded than their public silence implied. The survey was his January 1977 questionnaire to members of the American Astronomical Society: of 2,611 mailed and 1,356 returned, 62 respondents, nearly 5 percent, said they had witnessed or recorded an event they could not identify and thought might be related to UFOs, and 80 percent favored further scientific study. The Society's founders argued that a journal serving the study of anomalies should be open to all points of view on a given subject, and that those responsible for it should encourage every viewpoint. By the time of the 1998 workshop the Society had about 300 members. Dolan dates the Society's first meeting to 2 June 1982 at the University of Maryland, led by Sturrock and drawing over 100 professors from a range of disciplines, in a tone he calls decidedly scientific and non-conspiratorial, and he adds that the first European meeting, at Munich two months later, was the subject of a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report, which he takes as a sign that officials were interested in the Society.

Journal and publications

The Journal of Scientific Exploration has appeared quarterly since 1987 and carries research articles, review articles, commentaries, essays, historical perspectives, book reviews and letters. It was established as a scientific forum for ufology, parapsychology and cryptozoology and for topics the mainstream journals largely ignore, and it was indexed in Scopus until that database discontinued its coverage in 2018. The sociologist Anne Cross notes that the journal publishes on anomalous issues at the edge of science, and in 2005 Time reported that the Society's president was the University of Virginia astronomer Charles Tolbert and the journal's editor the Virginia Tech dean emeritus Henry Bauer. Stephen E. Braude later became its editor. Michael Lemonick wrote that "pretty much anything that might have shown up on The X-Files or in the National Enquirer shows up first here", but also "a surprising attitude of skepticism".

Critics of the journal include the philosopher of science Noretta Koertge, who called it an "attempt to institutionalize pseudoscience", and the psychologist Seth Kalichman, who regards it as a "major outlet for UFOology, paranormal activity, extrasensory powers, alien abductions etc". Sheaffer argued that the journal's papers on dowsing, reincarnation and similar subjects are written in impressive jargon by scientists with impressive degrees yet have failed to convince mainstream scientific journals and organisations. The Royal College of Psychiatrists' Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group lists the journal among its resources for reports on anomalies, particularly parapsychological and extraterrestrial ones.

Papers the journal has carried include the 1996 report by Roger Nelson, Brenda Dunne and Yvonne Dobyns of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory on precognitive remote perception, a replication of remote viewing, and the Sturrock panel's proceedings of 1998. The Society's magazine EdgeScience carried the biochemist Colm Kelleher's 2022 article on the Pentagon's secret UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, and the "Hitchhiker Effect" and models of contagion that Kelleher draws from it.

Meetings, awards and members

The Society holds an annual meeting in the United States each spring and periodic meetings in Europe; about a hundred researchers attended the 2005 meeting, where Lemonick heard talks on consciousness physics, astrology and parapsychology, and noted that many of the scientists present were on the faculties of major universities. The Society's 2025 meeting, on 20 and 21 September, carried a UAP session chaired by Mark Rodeghier of the Center for UFO Studies, with an invited talk by Garry Nolan, "Science in The Age of UAP," a paper on evidence for sentience in UAP by Michael Jawer, and a paper on an artificial-intelligence game for interpreting non-human intelligence by Mark Boccuzzi. The Society says that some member-only events are not recorded, so that discussion can be free. Since 1992 the Society has awarded the Dinsdale Award, named for Tim Dinsdale, who obtained striking evidence of unexplained animals in Loch Ness in 1960, to senior scholars who have made substantial contributions to understanding physical, biological and psychological anomalies; its recipients include Sturrock (2006), Jerome Clark (2008), Henry Bauer (2012), Hal Puthoff (2018) and the statistician Jessica Utts (2021). The Society's leaders emeritus as of 2008 were Sturrock and the University of Virginia astronomers Larry Frederick and Charles Tolbert, and the physicist Robert M. Wood, a long-time research director of MUFON, served as one of its counselors. The Roswell researcher Karl Pflock was a member of the Society, of MUFON and of the Center for UFO Studies.

The 1997–98 UFO workshop

In 1996 the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller asked Sturrock for an update on what was known about the causes of UFO sightings, and the two conceived a workshop at which prominent investigators would meet a panel of scientists; the Sturrock panel of nine physical scientists, administratively supported by the Society, met from 29 September to 4 October 1997 and published its findings in the Society's journal. Sturrock submitted the proposal to Rockefeller's LSR Fund in February 1997 with the Society's administrative support, and the Fund transferred the money to the Society, whose role he calls strictly administrative. It found nothing to convince it that Earth is being visited by alien astronauts and no credible evidence that known natural laws are being violated, and agreed that some reports are accompanied by physical evidence that cannot readily be explained. The Associated Press described it as "the first independent review of UFO phenomena since 1966". Sheaffer answered that the Society is not a mainstream scientific body, that the eight investigators who presented were all UFO advocates with no skeptic among them, that the sessions were moderated by David Pritchard and Harold Puthoff, and that the cases put forward were old ones that had failed to convince skeptics, among them the Trans-en-Provence soil traces, which he said rest on the testimony of a single witness, and the Cash–Landrum incident. Frazier's response for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry was that the Society's journal, while presented as neutral, promotes fringe topics as real mysteries and that most of its prominent and active members believe in the phenomena it publishes.

Open questions

References

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