The Sol Foundation

The Sol Foundation is a nonprofit research organization founded in 2023 by Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan and anthropologist Peter Skafish to build an academic and policy infrastructure for the study of UAP and their implications. It positions itself as the field's serious room: no lights-in-the-sky enthusiasm, heavy on credentialed speakers and written output.

Nolan and Skafish launched Sol after the 2023 hearings, judging that the subject had congressional attention and public interest but no institution where scholars, officials, and funders could work in normal academic form.

Sol convenes an annual invitation-heavy symposium (the first at Stanford in November 2023) with speakers spanning former officials (Karl Nell, Tim Gallaudet, Jacques Vallée's circle, congressional staff) and academics in physics, religion, law, and policy; publishes position papers through its Sol Writes series, including Gallaudet's USO paper and analyses of disclosure policy, crash-retrieval claims, and scientific method for anomalies; and quietly brokers relationships among researchers, funders, and government-adjacent figures. Its output through the PURSUE era has made it one of the most cited think-tank voices on implementation questions: how disclosure, if warranted, would actually be governed.

Nolan (executive board), Skafish (president), and a rotating cast of fellows and advisors from the field's academic wing.

Active and growing as of 2026, with its symposium the field's premier serious-venue event.

Skeptics argue Sol launders extraordinary claims through academic staging, noting speakers assert non-human intelligence as settled while the organization publishes no primary evidence. Some ufologists counter-complain of gatekeeping and elitism. Sol's answer is its papers: policy analysis conditioned on "if the claims are true," which it argues is exactly what sober institutions do with high-stakes uncertainty.