A new academic paper published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications titled “Exploring expert figures in alien-related UFO conspiracy theories” by Maria Lipińska, Nina Kotula, and Dariusz Jemielniak claims to investigate the role of expert figures in UFO discourse. The study, published in February 2025, attempts to analyze how scientific authority is invoked in what the authors characterize as “UFO conspiracy narratives.” According to the researchers, their findings indicate a “reliance on expert endorsement to legitimize claims about extraterrestrial activity and government secrecy.”

As a someone who has covered UFO phenomena for over a decade, I find this study problematic on multiple levels. What appears at first glance to be a scholarly analysis quickly reveals itself as an exercise in academic gatekeeping, where legitimate questions about unexplained aerial phenomena are casually dismissed as mere conspiracy theories.

The paper states that there is “a common use of expert figures, often without empirical backing, to bolster conspiracy theories.” This sweeping claim demands scrutiny, as it fails to acknowledge the growing body of empirical evidence and the credible experts who have come forward in recent years.

The first major flaw in this study is its methodology. The researchers relied primarily on social media analysis, specifically examining posts on the X platform (formerly Twitter) with hashtags related to UFOs. This narrow approach presents several problems.

First, social media posts constitute only a fraction of the broader UFO discourse. By focusing exclusively on this medium, the researchers ignored significant contributions from government reports, military testimonies, scientific papers, and mainstream media coverage. This selective sampling inevitably skews the results toward more sensationalistic content that typically circulates on social media.

The study specifically analyzed only 100 posts containing hashtags such as #UFO, #UFOsightings, #Aliens, and #UAP. This extremely limited sample size cannot possibly represent the vast and complex landscape of UFO research and discussion. For comparison, the hashtag #UFO alone generated over 117,000 tweets during their study period according to their own admission, yet they examined only 25 posts from each hashtag category.

Furthermore, their content selection criteria focused on posts mentioning “experts” and “scientists,” creating a circular logic: they specifically sought out posts that invoke expert authority and then concluded that UFO discussions rely heavily on expert authority. This methodology does not allow for a representative view of how UAP discourse actually operates across various platforms and contexts.