It is a curious honour to host what I believe is the first event on UFOs – or UAPs – Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – at the Royal College of Art in London today.
In fact the first two events. The morning started with a presentation to the emerging RCA _SPACE group while in the afternoon I led a seminar with the MA Environmental Architecture students.
This was the poster text for the events:
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SPACE Research Seminars 2026
We operate at the intersection of art and aerospace, working towards the democratization of space exploration by asserting the role of the arts beyond terrestrial sites and traditions.
The _SPACE Research Group plans to hold 3 research seminars at the RCA across the academic term 2025-26. Below are details of the first.
18 March 2026 UAP Studies Day: The Phenomena is a Trickster
18 March 2026, 11am-1pm Room: STE003
RCA _SPACE Group meeting: UAP Studies Briefing: The Phenomena is a Trickster
Dr Jon Goodbun will give a briefing on the emerging field of UAP (formerly UFO!) Studies, and the politics, rabbit holes and significant recent developments in the global ‘disclosure’ movement. He will also give an introduction to his own research interests in the field, and a scoping of a possible wider RCA project on the entire UAP field, including studies of media, new materials research, and in relation to more speculative research elsewhere such as electro-gravitics and zero-point and plasma fusion energy research, non-local consciousness studies and the implications for science and technology studies, and indigenous knowledge studies.
Goodbun draws on his ongoing work with Gregory Bateson’s ecological cybernetics – particularly Bateson’s insistence that mind is not contained within the skull, but is immanent within ecological systems of all kinds, which constitute ‘eco-mental systems’: circuits of perception, communication, and feedback that our ‘selves’ emerge from, empathise with, plug into and extend through. From this perspective, UFO and UAP reports can be read as environmental registers as much as “objects”: events entangled with sensing systems, media infrastructures, attention economies, and the atmospheres (literal and cultural) in which observation takes place. Goodbun takes his recent work on Bateson’s ‘ecological aesthetics’ methods to engage UAP material, thinking across perception, pattern, non-human intelligence, and the politics of the “real.”
2pm Room: DAR801
MA Environmental Architecture seminar: The Ecological Aesthetics of UAP/UFOs.
Jon Goodbun will lead his usual weekly seminar for the MA Environmental Architecture students, this week presenting a seminar on The Environmental Architectures of UAP. (This seminar may be open to any interested members of the RCA Space group.)
We will ask: What becomes possible when the discourse around UFOs, and the broader category of UAP: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, is approached not primarily as a question of physical fact (“are they real?”), but as a question of semiotic meaning and value: ecological, political, cybernetic, aesthetic, and epistemological. We ask: What kinds of environments—material, institutional, psychic, atmospheric—produce the conditions under which “the phenomenon” appears, is experienced, is recorded, is narrated, and then typically, is ridiculed, stigmatised and denied?
The fact is, both the phenomena, and the legitimacy of overwhelming
quantities of testimony from ‘experiencers’ and witnesses from around the planet, are real. However, the meaning of the frequent high strangeness of the phenomena, is exceptionally obscure. The pre-eminent ufologist Jaques Vallée (who was played by Francois Truffaut in Speilberg’s Close Encounters), has repeatedly observed that “the phenomena is absurd,” and directly connects contemporary phenomena to folk stories such as fairies, nature spirits, duendes and jinn from around the planet: “The Phenomena is a Trickster.”
Independent researchers in the field have amassed and archived recordings, testimony and historical material from cultures around the planet, and they typically argue that the evidence shows that the phenomena, whatever it is, has been with us on Earth for many thousands of years at a minimum. But what is it? What is our relationship to it? What, if anything, does it want? Around these questions has grown a rich and diverse weave of competing and complimentary narratives, cosmologies and worldbuilding speculations. Into this web of genuine testimony there has also of course also been inserted all kinds of deliberate fabulations and misinformation of various kinds. But even these deliberate fictions constitute some kind of data, and even demand a certain kind of research.
There are patterns which connect the phenomena that are currently being reported from our atmospheres and ocean, and indeed from orbital space. One hypothesis proposed to explain some data, is that our upper atmospheres sustains ecologies that we are barely aware of, possibly including plasma-based life forms resembling jellyfish, orbs and other organic forms. Many researchers argue that the evidence suggests that we have been in some way (this can cover many hypotheses!) sharing the planet for millennia with other, complex and technological intelligences. One popular observation is that the oceans of our planet are still largely unmapped and may be hiding a great deal. Of course, there is the possibility – most commonly imagined in popular science fiction – that we are visited by entities from beyond our planet and solar system. However it is worth noting that the ‘ET in a spaceship’ is generally seen in the UAP field as far too simple an explanation for a= lot of the phenomena, and there are many who argue that perhaps it is not so much other planets we are interacting with, as other Earths. In the UAP field, the ‘pluriversal’ and ‘many-worlds’ thesis – which many of us have taken from South American anthropology and worked with as an epistemology – is instead proposed as an ontological reality. Perhaps we need to imagine an ecology of Earths, loosely connected inter dimensionally or inter-temporaly, some hypotheses seem to imply.
Finally, we need to confront how to think about the overwhelming and constantly growing evidence and testimony that the USA and other governments not only have conducted extensive classified research into the phenomena and know a great deal more than they are letting on, but in addition, they have recovered multiple non-human origin craft. Some craft are said to have been recovered from archeological sites. Some are said to be so large that buildings have been built over them. Alarmingly, multiple military witnesses claim that the US has used weapons to bring craft down. Others have been described as ‘gifts.’ The range of US military whistleblowers from the so-called ‘legacy’ programmes is by now quite remarkable and covering all ranks from Admirals down. The claims made, on record to the US Congress, are equally astonishing, including (disputed) suggestions of success in retro-engineering recovered technologies by the military contractors who have been given the recovered craft, including most commonly Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. It is for example, regularly suggested that some of these contractors have been sitting on clean free energy technology (and plasma based cold fusion tech startups are now starting to emerge) which could have eliminated fossil fuel use decades ago.
Of course it is possible that ALL of this military testimony is an elaborate CIA disinformation programme (some of it certainly is), but at this point, this would be worthy of study in itself, and would constitute, amongst other things, one of the most extraordinary works of artifice of all time. (It is also worth noting that given the wider crisis of legitimation engulfing the US government and military post- Epstein and post-Iran, there are strong rumours that President Trump will initiate some kind of UAP disclosure as distraction in the coming months.)
Thus we will address the field’s hazards head-on: misinformation and sensationalism, US-centrism, racialised mythologies, and the labour realities of militarised knowledge (NDAs, whistleblowing, and worker precarity). We will situate these questions alongside the emerging institutional and research landscape — including novel institutions such as the Sol Foundation, and their convening of policy and research conversations around UAP. Without endorsing any single explanatory frame, we will map competing narratives—statesecrecy and “disclosure” claims, private-sector compartmentalisation, and the blurred border between military R&D, corporate IP, and public knowledge—as a way to ask how authority and evidence are produced and withheld. We will close by asking what a non-military, demilitarised research programme into anomalous phenomena might look like—and what responsibilities architectural and environmental thought might carry when “the heavens” are treated as an inhabited, contested, co-evolving and semiotic medium and a commons, rather than empty space awaiting enclosure, privatization and militarization.
