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The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/Gobble_Gobble on 2025-02-19 01:17:39+00:00.

Join us February 22nd for another multi-subreddit collaboration on UAP and Experiencers with our host, Leslie Kean and guests Karin Austin, Executive Director of the John Mack Institute, and Dr. Peter Skafish, Anthropologist and co-founder and current Executive Director of the Sol Foundation.

Following on the heels of our two livestream AMA events (James Fox, Kirk McConnell and Lenval Logan (here) and Leslie Kean, Hal Puthoff, Garry Nolan, Jim Segala (here), multiple moderators from r/aliens, r/Experiencers, r/HighStrangeness, r/UFOB and r/UFOs are coming together to host a third AMA event exploring anthropological and sociological aspects of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and the Experiencer Phenomenon.

About the AMA

This AMA will focus on the nature of experiencer phenomena and the wider context for both individuals and society. Leslie Kean will be hosting this event and discussions around Karin Austin’s work with the late John Mack, becoming the Executive Director of the John Mack Institute after his death, and the upcoming inclusion of his work in Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible; and Dr. Skafish’s work as co-founder and current Executive Director of the Sol Foundation and upcoming projects related to Experiencers and UFO/UAP Witnesses. This is a great opportunity to ask about the historical and global context of experiencer reports and their possible connection with spirits, fae, and gods, and whether these experiences represent a continuum of contact throughout human history. Let’s tackle the challenges of legitimizing experiencer studies, how academia can engage with the topic without stigma, and the ethical considerations in working with individuals who have had life-altering encounters.

The live AMA will occur on Saturday, February 22nd, 2025, at 1pm PST / 4pm EST with journalist and author Leslie Kean, as well as scientists and researchers Dr. Peter Skafish and Karin Austin. This collaborative event will be live-streamed, reaching audiences across platforms including YouTube, and Twitter/X. You can also stay up to date with us on Instagram and also on BlueSky

Important Resources for this AMA

From the Sol Conference 2024

  • Dr. Peter Skafish with Leslie Kean - "The Relational Communicative Problem of UAP Pathbreaking journalist Leslie Kean explores with Sol cofounder, anthropologist Dr. Peter Skafish, a range of problems that he addresses through his work for Sol and ongoing academic research, from the implications for democracy of UAP secrecy to the insight anthropology provides into researching UAP events to their unconsidered communicative dimensions. Fireside from the second Sol Foundation Symposium, November 22, 2024, in San Francisco.
  • Dr. Jeffrey Kripal & Karin Austin - "Introducing the Archives of the Impossible Rice University professor and Archives of the Impossible founder Dr. Jeffrey Kripal and John Mack Institute director Karin Austin discuss “experiencers” of UAP and related phenomena and the challenging enigma their stories present to human thought.
  • Eric Davis, Kirk McConnell, and Peter Skafish - The Politics of Executive Branch UAP Secrecy Physicist Dr. Eric Davis and retired Senate Armed Services Committee staff member Kirk McConnell in a fireside chat on US government UAP secrecy with Sol cofounder Dr. Peter Skafish.
  • Ryan Graves and Leslie Kean - “Update From the Front Lines: Aviation Safety and UAP” Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA) founder Ryan Graves and journalist Leslie Kean engage in a conversation about the recent UAP encounters of civilian and military aviators, congressional legislation that was recently proposed by ASA, and past advocacy and research UAP efforts focused on aviation safety.

How to Participate

This is a bit different than a typical AMA. Questions will be collected in advance on the following subreddits: r/aliens, r/Experiencers, r/HighStrangeness, r/UFOB and r/UFOs. Please read posted questions and upvote the ones you want to see asked! Due to the multi-subreddit nature of this AMA we are only able to take questions on reddit in advance - no questions will be taken live, or on YouTube or X.

Why This Matters

This collaboration represents a unique collective effort by Reddit’s UAP-focused communities to raise awareness and demand clarity on one of the most compelling issues of our time. Together, we are amplifying our voices and fostering a broader conversation about the more enigmatic side of the UAP phenomenon. Mark your calendars and join us on January 18th for this rare opportunity.

Bios:

Leslie Kean

Investigative journalist and author of the 2010 New York Times bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, published in eleven languages. Her over two decades of investigation and mainstream coverage of UFOs were profiled in The New Yorker in 2021. Leslie and reporter Ralph Blumenthal have contributed articles to The New York Times on UFOs/UAPs for seven years, beginning with a 2017, game-changing front page story about a secret Pentagon UFO program. This story included reporting on the 2004 Nimitz incident and the release of the now famous Gimbal and FLIR Navy videos. Leslie and Ralph [broke the story of former senior intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch in The Debrief in June, 2023, which led to an open Congressional hearing on crash retrievals and UAP. Leslie also works with Break Thru Films, an award-winning film and television production company based in New York City. Together they have produced two seasons of the documentary series UFOs: Investigating the Unknown. Season 2, made for National Geographic, premiered on January 9, 2025. Previously, Season 1 was commissioned and produced by CNN, and aired on NatGeo/VICE platforms in early 2023.

Leslie is also the author of the award-winning 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, which is the basis for a six-part documentary series on Netflix, also produced and directed by Break Thru Films in 2021. In addition, she has co-authored a play dealing with the existential ramifications of UFO disclosure, described by a leading Broadway producer as “’12 Angry Men’ meets ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’”. Her website is

Dr. Peter Skafish

Dr. Peter Skafish is a sociocultural anthropologist who works between his discipline and philosophy on how ideas, cosmologies, and translation shape the diversity of human thought and experience. He is currently engaged in research that employs anthropological perspectives on pluralism, cosmology, modernity and religion to anticipate how the sort of nonhuman beings that we imagine to design UAP might think, and in what ways this thinking is likely to be both commensurate and incommensurate with our own. Dr. Skafish is also developing in his advisory research for Sol broad recommendations for a genuinely democratic, “whole of society” approach to solving the legal, political, and environmental problems raised by UAP.

Dr. Peter Skafish has a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and has held faculty and research positions in the United States, France, Canada, and Germany, including at universities such as UC Berkeley, the Collège de France, McGill University, and the Bauhaus-University, Weimar. He also has been the recipient of funding from such organizations as the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Humanities, and the Fondation Fyssen. He is the author of the book Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts, which…

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