What Has Been Funded?

The Institute of Noetic Sciences, or IONS, has awarded its 2026 Linda G. O’Bryant research prize to a six-person team investigating consciousness-associated unidentified anomalous phenomena. The project is called Instrumenting the Contact Experience.

The team was presented at an IONS event on 30 October 2026. The institute’s press release is dated 4 November. It says the study is expected to start in December 2026, run for a year and share results in 2028. These are announced plans, not completed findings.

Anthropologist Peter Skafish leads the study, with neuroscientist Brian Lord and engineer David Dominguez Hooper. Damon Abraham, Jacob Haqq-Misra and Garry Nolan are collaborators. Their professional affiliations identify the researchers; they do not make the proposed explanation an institutional finding.

What Does CE5 Mean Here?

CE5 refers to practices whose participants seek an encounter through meditation and focused intention. The claim under examination is that deliberate contact-seeking might be associated with experiences or events distinguishable from those recorded without that intention.

The Sol Foundation’s announcement describes plans to use Hooper’s mobile DIONYSUS instrument array in field experiments. Sol presents possible connections between consciousness and UAP as questions to investigate. Its enthusiasm is not independent verification of those connections.

A participant can sincerely report a powerful experience without establishing what caused it. Equally, an unusual recording can remain unidentified without demonstrating that a person summoned it. Those are separate propositions, and the experiment needs to keep them separate.

Three Conditions, Not Just A Night Of Skywatching

The published design summary describes one established group of four to eight practitioners at a Southwest field site. Each campaign assigns five contact-seeking nights and two active-control nights at random. Four unattended nights provide a separate reference outside that randomised comparison.

  • Contact-seeking: meditation with a deliberate invitation for contact.
  • Active control: body-focused grounding meditation without that invitation.
  • Unattended reference: instruments operating without participants.

Each assigned night contains four 25-minute practice periods with seven-minute breaks. Participants provide private accounts before discussing their experiences as a group.

The active control is especially useful. Comparing meditation only with an empty site would mix together several differences, including the presence of people and their attention to the sky. A comparison with another meditation practice asks a narrower question about contact-seeking intention.

What Will The Instruments Measure?

The summary lists brain activity, heart activity and breathing measurements, alongside all-sky and thermal images, aircraft and weather records. Random-number generators are also included as secondary measurements. The data streams will share a timeline.

The two headline outcomes are reported contact intensity and unresolved aerial events per usable recording hour. Aerial-event reviewers will not know the assigned practice. Participants, however, will learn their assignment before meditating. The study is therefore not fully blinded.

Instrumented observation also underpins the Galileo Project’s approach to UAP. Recording conditions and checking ordinary explanations can make an observation more testable. A sensor array’s presence alone cannot establish the identity of whatever it records.

What Would A Positive Result Establish?

A higher contact rating would establish a difference in reported experience under the study’s conditions. It would not, by itself, show that an external intelligence responded.

A higher unresolved-event rate would raise a different question. Researchers would still need to examine recording quality, classification rules, weather, aircraft activity and chance. An unidentified event is not automatically an extraterrestrial event.

Our coverage of the Williamtown drone records makes the same distinction between documenting an incident and identifying its source. Independent replication would be particularly important here because one small group at one site cannot establish how widely a result applies.

The Protocol And The Results Still To Come

IONS describes the award as funding prospective research, rather than recognising a completed paper. Its press release promises de-identified data and methods, with null results released on the same schedule as positive findings.

Preregistration means recording the research questions and analysis choices before testing them. The public design slides explain the intended comparison, but they are not a substitute for inspecting the complete dated registration, event criteria and analysis plan. Those documents will be needed to assess the eventual results.

Some investigators also participate in the UAP Science Advisory Council. That overlap does not make this privately funded investigation a government confirmation of contact.

The concrete development is a funded attempt to compare a controversial claim with control conditions. Whether the experiment records a difference, and what that difference could mean, remains to be determined.