The Sol Foundation

The Sol Foundation is publishing today the latest in our science and policy briefings. Sol analyst Marik von Rennenkampff returns with a writeup on our chairman of the board and cofounder Dr. Garry Nolan’s groundbreaking material science research on a UAP event from the 1970s that occurred in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In the first peer-reviewed analysis of physical materials associated with a multi-witness UAP event, Nolan and a group of scientists, including information scientist and pioneering UAP researcher Jacques Vallée, utilized state-of-the-art materials analysis technologies to examine the remnants of a mass of molten metal observed descending to the ground during the event. Analysis of the sample found that while its isotopic ratios contain no anomalies, the various metals within the once-molten mass are mixed incompletely, indicating an industrial process of unknown, and potentially perplexing, origin. To read more, follow the link in the comments.

The Sol Foundation is proud to announce that Kirk McConnell has joined us as our Senior Legislative Affairs Officer. Well-known as one of the most effective and committed disclosure advocates from federal government, Kirk worked for 37 years in the United States Congress, serving on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His direct involvement in the UAP issue began after the 2017 publication of breakthrough stories on the phenomena by The New York Times, after which he participated in UAP investigations and helped to draft UAP-related legislation during his remaining years of service in Congress. Since leaving government, Kirk has sustained his commitment to disclosure and serves as an adviser to nongovernmental UAP organizations. In his capacity at Sol, he will guide our support and advocacy for the UAP Disclosure Act and relevant future legislation. Welcome, Kirk!

The Sol Foundation wishes to recognize Senator Michael Rounds for his past cosponsorship of the UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA), which, he signaled in a recent interview, he would like to see move forward in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act. The legislation is widely recognized by experts and nongovernmental UAP organizations as establishing the best pathway toward thorough, accurate, and controlled disclosure of federal government knowledge of unidentified anomalous phenomena. Sol wishes to express its renewed commitment to supporting the UAPDA and leading a public conversation about its merits.

Sol is proud to announce another addition to its leadership team and the UAP community: Matt Mason, who will be serving as our new Chief Marketing Officer. Matt is a marketing executive, entrepreneur, and author with 20 years of C-level experience at the frontier of consumer tech, AI, and blockchain. He was the first CMO at Kraken, head of marketing at BitTorrent, which grew to 175 million users during his tenure, and Studio Head at a Sony Pictures innovation lab. Named #11 on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business list, Mason started his career as a pirate radio DJ in London, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of RWD, the UK’s largest music magazine, and wrote the non-fiction bestseller The Pirate’s Dilemma (Simon & Schuster/Penguin). His “infographic novel” Hard Times (Penguin) won Best in Show at SXSW and was exhibited at MoMA. Matt is already bringing Sol’s research, policy, and public education work to new audiences, and we anticipate that he'll help increase the kind of public understanding of UAP and disclosure for which Sol is known.

The Sol Foundation is excited to announce the first of several major additions to its executive leadership. Dr. Christian Peters, political scientist and managing director at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Science (BIGSSS), at Germany's University of Bremen, has joined Sol as our Associate Director of Research. Christian is an accomplished scholar and has published widely across the social sciences, with his research spanning higher education, populist politics, religion and politics, and unidentified anomalous phenomena. His work focuses on the politics of knowledge, particularly how institutions interpret and govern scientific uncertainty and emerging forms of intelligence. He is best known in the UAP field for his Scientific American article, co-authored with historian Greg Eghigian, "It's Time to Hear from Social Scientists about UFOs," which helped broaden UAP discourse to include perspectives from the social sciences. At the University of Bremen, he manages an interdisciplinary research environment with over 60 doctoral fellows and was recently appointed Academic Director for Education and Career at DIFIS SOFO, a center addressing the impact of key technologies on social policy. At Sol, he will draw on his experience in research management and organizational development (shaped by European funding frameworks including the German Research Council, European Research Council, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie programs) to help ensure quality and high-impact output. We look forward to working with Christian.

The Sol Foundation is pleased to feature Leslie Kean, Jim Semivan, and Kirk McConnell in a conversation with our cofounder and executive director, Peter Skafish, on the current moment of UAP disclosure, and what may be required for it to move forward. Drawing on their decades of experience in investigative journalism, intelligence, and Congress, the discussion concerns why progress has been uneven despite clear momentum, examining factors like the risks faced by whistleblowers, the limits of congressional oversight, and the persistent gap between what government may know and what it will publicly acknowledge. The question is not simply whether disclosure will occur, but what it would actually consist of, and whether existing institutions are capable of managing its consequences. Link to video in comments.

Veteran DC journalist Leigh Ann Caldwell covers in Puck News the Sol Foundation’s recent publication, authored by former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director Kirk McConnell, advocating that Congress establish a UAP whistleblower restitution fund: puck.news/a-ufo-frenzy-s… “There’s still deep skepticism," Caldwell writes, "that the government really will reveal everything—or that it won’t punish insiders for speaking out. So the Sol Foundation, a group that advocates for disclosures related to extraterrestrial life, is currently pushing for enhanced protections for U.A.P. whistleblowers, including a ‘restitution fund’ to support people who come forward. Kirk McConnell, a retired Senate staffer who worked on U.A.P. investigations for the Armed Services Committee, told me that while Congress is reliant on whistleblowers, they often face retaliation. The foundation also shared a new report warning that whistleblowers ‘can face financial ruin’ and that establishing a legal defense fund was ‘vital to ensuring that Congress exercises its constitutionally mandated authority and oversight over executive branch UAP activities.’”

The Sol Foundation is proud to announce the publication today of our latest briefing paper, by Kirk McConnell, which argues that Congress should establish a UAP whistleblower restitution fund, a mechanism that would provide rapid financial compensation to individuals from the military and intelligence community facing retaliation for disclosing information about unreported classified UAP programs to congressional committees. (Link to paper in comments.) McConnell, well-known to viewers of Dan Farah’s Age of Disclosure, holds unique expertise on UAP oversight and spent 37 years as a professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The paper identifies a structural problem that has prevented Congress from gaining information that it needs about government UAP programs: when financial pressure forces a whistleblower to seek new employment during an appeals process, their ability to sustain their whistleblowing activity and complaint is undermined. Senior members of the Senate have confirmed this on the record, with Secretary of State and former Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Senator Michael Rounds all having stated publicly that individuals with knowledge of undisclosed UAP programs are afraid to come forward. This is the first serious policy framework specifically designed to address this problem. It proposes three options for administering the fund and makes the case for why Congress cannot exercise its constitutional oversight function without one. Look out in the near future for more of our science and policy briefing papers as well as our longer policy papers and upcoming academic working papers.

A new paper by retired NASA developer Ivan Busko identifies transient events in 1950s Hamburg Astronomical plates and demonstrates that they are consistent with reflections from flat, rotating objects in Earth orbit. Buska’s findings support the validity of research by Dr. Beatriz Villarroel’s VASCO project, which uncovered unexplained transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey plates. Dr. Villarroel has been associated with Sol since our founding and serves on our advisory board. Her work on fast optical transients in archival sky surveys is exactly the kind of research Sol exists to support: methodical, pathbreaking, and aimed at questions that most institutions have not yet found the courage to take seriously. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20407

Sol is proud to feature astrobiologist Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra on the latest episode of the Sol Forum. In a conversation with Peter Skafish, Jacob reflects on the relationship between the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the growing body of UAP observations. Rather than treating these domains as separate, he suggests that they may be part of the same underlying problem: how to recognize and interpret forms of intelligence that do not conform to human expectations. Drawing on his work in technosignatures and the philosophy of detection, Jacob asks what it would mean to expand SETI to meet this challenge. Link to video in comments.

The Sol Foundation is excited to share the latest video from its symposium this past fall! In a highly anticipated fireside chat, James Fowler, technologist and president of Compass Tech, and Sol Briefing host Marik von Rennenkampff discuss the technical aspects of tracking UAP with advanced sensors. Fowler and von Rennenkampff also analyze a string of brazen incursions by mysterious objects, frequently dubbed “drones” by the media, over highly sensitive facilities and assets in recent years. Fowler describes his experience tracking unknown objects via his firm’s advanced sensor suite as a government contractor and subsequently with the Skywatcher initiative. Von Rennenkampff then provides a survey of the recent incursions which, in some cases, have been documented on radar and military infrared sensors, resulting in perplexing footage and incidents that defy easy explanation. Link to video of the conversation is in the comments.

In this new edition of the Sol Briefing, host Marik von Rennenkampff discusses the extraordinary comments by presidents Trump and Obama that led to President Trump's pledge to release “government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life" as well as UAP and UFOs. Von Rennenkampff also analyzes eyebrow-raising comments from Hillary Clinton and Sen. Mike Rounds, one of the most perplexing military-filmed UAP videos released to date, and intriguing online bets placed on the timing of a U.S. government announcement of the existence of alien life. He closes with intriguing, historically unprecedented comments from the former acting director of the Pentagon’s UAP analysis office. Access this installment of the Briefing through the link in the comments.