The Sol Foundation is pleased to announce that the team of anthropologist Peter Skafish, neuroscientist Brian Lord, and systems engineer David Hooper are the recipients of the 2026 Linda G. O’Bryant Prize for Noetic Sciences for research on UAP and consciousness. Awarded by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Sol cofounder and executive director Peter Skafish and Sol fellows Brian Lord, of the University of Arizona, and David Hooper, founder and CEO of ELDAEON, will use the prize money of $100,000 to begin field experiments on correlations, frequently observed by practitioners of “CE5” protocols, between states of human consciousness and unidentified aerial or anomalous phenomena events.
Skafish, Lord, and Hooper are enthusiastic about this opportunity to bring together the noetic sciences, which Lord counts among his research specialties, with rigorous inquiry into UAP, which Skafish conducts anthropologically and Hooper facilitates through ELDAEON’s deployment of its mobile UAP detection instrument array DIONYSUS. The team is also excited to conduct some of the very first scientific research into the potential efficacy, causal mechanics, and cognitive and social dimensions of CE5 events, which have been among the most controversial and intriguing of witness accounts of UAP.
“We’re grateful to IONS and O’Bryant for continuing to back heterodox inquiry and expanding their support to the area of UAP science, which still lacks adequate funding sources,” says Skafish. “The Sol Foundation is particularly happy that two of our most promising fellows and collaborators, Brian and David, are among the recipients of this award, as one of the reasons Garry Nolan and I established Sol is to empower academics and technologists in their pursuit of answers to one of the most important questions of our times: How and why do UAP interact with human beings?”
The IONS prize and research will help enable Lord to expand his past and existing research on meditation and altered states of consciousness. Hooper, meanwhile, will further refine ELDAEON’s instrument array through the field experiments, with the aim of eventually putting sensing capabilities in the hands of consumers, enabling anyone to collect objective, multi-sensor data on UAP and related phenomena. Hooper also will build on the results of his own investigations into CE5 techniques, which were recently documented in Inside America’s UFO Hunting Industry.
The IONS Linda G. O’Bryant Prize research team also draws on the expertise of Damon Abraham, principal research scientist at Entangled, and two members, along with Skafish, of the Sol Foundation and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s UAP Science Advisory Council: astrobiologist and Blue Marble Space cofounder Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Stanford University School of Medicine professor and Sol cofounder/board director Garry Nolan.
To learn more about this research or to get involved, please get in touch with us. Sol and ELDAEON are seeking an individual with a combination of academic and corporate backgrounds to manage our field experiments as we acquire further funding and expand their frequency and scope. Letters of intent, with curricula vitae attached, should be directed to [email protected].To support our research with a major gift, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Smaller support can be directed to [email protected].