On October 30, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) announced the winners of the fourth annual Linda G. O’Bryant Noetic Sciences Research Prize. Each year, this US$100,000 prize supports research exploring the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. While past editions explored whether consciousness could exist beyond the brain (2023) and the possibility of conscious AI (2025), this year focused on the relationship between consciousness and UAP, short for unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Noetic Sciences Research Prize: Exploring Consciousness and UAP
The winning team brings together anthropologist Peter Skafish, co-founder of the Sol Foundation—an organization dedicated to UAP research—neuroscientist Brian Lord of the University of Arizona, and systems engineer David Hooper. According to the team, this one-year study is a first step toward investigating whether—and how—human consciousness may be connected to UAP, using methods that other research teams can repeat and build on.
In practice, Skafish and colleagues will work with a group of practitioners meditating outdoors with the intention of making contact with other intelligences—a practice known as CE5, or “close encounters of the fifth kind.” During these sessions, instruments will record practitioners’ brain activity, heart rhythms, and breathing, while cameras monitor the sky.
Researchers will also compare meditation sessions with and without the intention of making contact, looking for differences in reported experiences and unexplained aerial events. These comparisons should help reveal how the practitioners’ brain activity and physiology relate to what they experience and what the instruments record.
A Study to be Tested and Shared
Scientific rigor was a major factor in selecting the winning proposal, and the team’s research experience also mattered. “We wanted teams which have worked on the subject before and have published either in this subject or a related topic,” explained IONS scientist Arnaud Delorme when describing the selection criteria. In the winning study, scientific methods include randomly assigned meditation conditions, private reports collected before group discussions, and reviewers assessing aerial events without knowing which meditation took place.
For transparency, researchers also intend to register their analysis plan in advance and share their data and procedures so others can scrutinize and repeat the work. “We’ll publish the data, whatever it shows, including a result of no difference,” Hooper said during the award event.
A Shared Search for Answers
For Skafish, progress in understanding UAP will depend on more than government announcements. In his closing remarks at the award ceremony, he argued that the truth will eventually emerge from the contributions of scientists, intellectuals, journalists, artists, and people who have experienced the phenomena themselves.
The project gives that last group a direct role: practitioners bring experiences and knowledge that can help researchers decide what to investigate. As Skafish put it, “We don’t conceive them as our research subjects. We conceive them as research collaborators.” The meditators’ involvement reflects a broader idea: people do not need to be scientists to contribute to the search for answers.
Whether or not the study finds a connection between consciousness and UAP, it could help clarify how such claims can be investigated. More broadly, the prize invites us to explore two fascinating questions: does consciousness extend beyond matter, and are we alone in the universe? Positive findings would raise new perspectives; a result of no difference would be valuable too. Either way, the project offers a starting point for bringing personal experiences and scientific methods into closer dialogue, with room for both curiosity and critical examination.
