SCU (Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies)

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) is a nonprofit research organization of scientists, engineers, and former military and law enforcement professionals who produce technical case analyses of UAP incidents. Founded in 2017 (emerging from the group that analyzed the Aguadilla video), it occupies the field's quantitative-methods niche.

The Aguadilla working group's 2015 report demonstrated an appetite for long-form instrumented analysis; its authors formalized as SCU with an explicitly agnostic charter: study anomalies, publish methods, claim nothing beyond the data.

SCU publishes peer-reviewed-style papers through its own review process: the Aguadilla report, a widely cited 270-page study of the 2004 Nimitz encounters estimating accelerations from witness and sensor data, analyses of the 1950s film cases, UAP patterns near nuclear facilities, and statistical work on official report datasets. It runs the annual AAPC (Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference), files FOIA requests, and has briefed congressional staff and cooperated with academic authors on journal publications, including papers in Progress in Aerospace Sciences-adjacent venues.

Founders and board members including Rich Hoffman, Robert Powell (of the Stephenville radar study), and Larry Cates; a few hundred member-researchers.

Active through the PURSUE era, with its case library among the first stops for journalists seeking technical treatments.

Skeptics credit SCU's transparency while disputing key analyses: the Aguadilla parallax debate and criticisms that the Nimitz acceleration estimates stack witness assumptions into extraordinary numbers. SCU engages critics in writing, which both sides note is rarer than it should be. Within the field, its refusal to conclude frustrates advocates, which SCU treats as evidence of calibration.