Professor Michael Bohlander to Speak at the International 2025 SOL Foundation Symposium

Caption: Lenticular clouds over Durham on 17 February 2025. - Image credit: Michael Bohlander

Professor Michael Bohlander, Durham Law School’s Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy, has been invited to address the 3rd international symposium of the SOL Foundation, taking place from 25 – 27 October 2025 in Baveno on Lago Maggiore in Italy.

The Sol Foundation is establishing itself as a premier centre for UAP research. Under the direction of academic and government experts already professionally engaged in the study of UAP, the Foundation is assembling teams of noted specialists in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and engineering, information science, and other technology-focused disciplines. Collectively, these teams will undertake rigorous, methodical, and cutting-edge inquiry into UAP and their implications as well as help set the agenda for UAP Studies.

At the symposium, a roster of leading thinkers on UAP from academia, government, civil society, and the private sector will deliver groundbreaking talks that set the direction for the upcoming year’s UAP conversation, with topics ranging from physics, astrobiology, and other aspects of the new science of UAP to international governance and law to cosmology, consciousness, and nonhuman agency and intelligence.

Professor Bohlander’s talk is entitled “From Description to Meaning – Epistemological problems of scientific UAP research and ethics of contact”.

Drawing on his previous work – both empirical and in legal doctrine – as well as his judicial practice, he will present on two linked aspects of a fundamental framework for the discussion, namely the epistemological problems of the scientific research into UAP and the kind of evidence it can produce on the one hand, and of the ulterior question into the meaning of the UAP presence on Earth, as well as the vexed issue of ethics of contact, on the other. He will ultimately argue that there is a need to revisit experiencer research in an academically rigorous manner.

Professor Bohlander has organised previous events on the topic of SETI and UAP at Durham. He led the drafting of the 2025 Declaration on SETI and UAP Research, which was adopted at the Symposium “Grounding the SETI and UAP Debate” of 24 April 2025. It has been endorsed online by over 440 signatories worldwide and been translated into 20 languages.