In recent years, reports of unidentified flying objects, commonly referred to as UAPs, have captured the attention of the public and experts alike. As the phenomenon continues to attract widespread attention, a growing number of witnesses have come forward to report experiencing physical and psychological effects after encountering UAPs. These effects range from headaches and nausea to anxiety and sleep disturbance.

The U.S. military has confirmed sightings and encounters are happening. In 2022, the Department of Defense All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office was established. The goal of the AARO is to mitigate any potential threats to the safety of operations and national security, including anomalous and unidentified objects in space, air, underwater and across different modes of transport. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the unclassified version of its 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It noted that 510 UAP reports had been filed as of Aug. 30, 2022.

Ted Roe, cofounder and Executive Director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), said his own experiences with UAP and the aftermath of these encounters led him to create the UAP Medical Coalition (UAPMC). “I've got a family history of these exposures (to UAP) that goes back to when I was five years old. And actually, there's one or two before that that my family talks about. So I've been dealing with the subject all my life. My therapist was out to lunch in terms of UFOs in general, but she was good with trauma,” Roe said.

UAPMC was formed to assist medical and mental health professionals seeking to collaborate on the topic of UAP after Roe noticed the difficulties people having these experiences were facing when reaching out for medical and psychological help. “I started noticing people in the groups, and they were all having trouble too. I tried to join some experiencer groups. Oh, no. There's a lot of sickness in there, but that's where people go because they're desperate. You know, it's all in their psychology and whether they have the discipline to hold to the reality of what they went through. So I'm worried about them, and I realized that the mental health and medical community was not at all prepared to deal with this.”

Recently, Garry Nolan, a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, recently conducted a study exploring the potential health effects of UAP encounters on the human brain. This study is notable because it represents one of the first attempts to systematically examine the possible biological effects of UAP interactions on humans.

Nolan said in an August 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson, "My day job at Stanford for the last 30 years has been the development of technologies to look at cancer and blood. It was circa 2011 or so when some people from the CIA and an aerospace company came to ask me for help on the analysis of some individuals who had encountered some anomalous objects. They came to my office unannounced and then started laying out pictures and data on the table in front of me. And I honestly thought it was a joke."

Nolan continued, "They were deadly serious about it because they had basically said at that point, people have died …and then they showed me some brain images of individuals who had been damaged, and internal scarring you can see through MRIs they were military personnel, people, intelligence agents on the ground. A pilot — a few pilots, actually, who had gotten close enough… to some sort of object — one of them on the ground as well, walked right up to it and touched it. He described the object as basically about four or five feet across with strange writing on it.”

The study focused on a small number of individuals who reported experiencing encounters with UAPs and compared their brain scans to those of a control group who had not had such experiences. The results showed a number of differences between the two groups, including differences in brain activity, brain structure and the presence of certain biochemical markers.

One of the key findings of the study was that individuals who reported UAP encounters showed evidence of increased activity in certain regions of the brain, specifically in areas involved in the regulation of stress and the processing of traumatic memories. The researchers also found changes in the levels of certain neurotransmitters and other biochemicals, which could indicate changes in brain function.

UAP Med is made up of a team of volunteers from different fields of expertise. The group includes therapists, professors, veterans, experiences and researchers. Ron Westrum, a professor at Eastern Michigan University and sociologist specializing in the sociology of science and technology, said of the group, “It's amazing to me that some people think this is a wonderful experience and more people need to have it. But the experiencers that I've talked to, and I can only speak for myself, don't look at it that way. They see it as rather something that's terrifying. It's uncontrollable. It seriously interferes with their lives, makes them feel insecure about themselves and their children, and about the world as a whole, actually.

“So what is it that these all these people have experienced? Okay? You can go right across the occupational spectrum. I'm a sociologist. You know? Scientist, doctor, psychiatrist, whatever the deal is. They get abducted. Okay? And we have completely failed to find a social science explanation explaining away these things. It seems to be something real, solid. It's sometimes a group phenomenon.”

Many of these reports come from individuals who were in close proximity to a UAP at the time of the sighting. Some describe a feeling of intense pressure or vibrations that caused physical discomfort. In some cases, the effects have been so severe that the individual was unable to continue with their daily activities.

“You know, it's all in their psychology and whether they have the discipline to hold to the reality of what they went through,” Roe said. “For the longest time, I thought that I was pretty damn special because I had these things happening. Then I step back and started looking at it objectively. My objective awareness, my trained awareness. That's not what I saw. And so I watched and I waited because I'd carried this a long time. I knew what I'd been through. I knew that had to be at least that hard for others, if not worse, part of the compassion, the training, the discernment that comes with understanding the reality of all this and that it affects human beings.”

Some experts believe that these effects may be related to electromagnetic radiation or other unknown factors associated with UAPs. However, more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between UAP encounters and health effects. Roe explained, “We're trying to inform the community of professionals on UAP studies so that they can look at it, argue and debate, and come up with their own good ideas on how their profession should engage on this topic.”

Earl Grey Anderson, State Director of Mutual UFO Network for California and executive member of the MUFON's Experiencer Resource Team, said, "I retired after being a nurse for almost 40 years. I've seen that there is a connection between certain health issues and having a close encounter with a craft or beings."

Westrum added, "We're not dealing with something crazy about somebody's personality. We're dealing about something that has all the marks on it of a real event, which takes place in a defined time and space, and it's extremely disturbing to people. And then typically, for experiencers, not something they want, but throughout their life course. The reason I got involved in it originally was, well, why don't scientists tell us about this if this is really going on? So a lot of my adult life has been spent studying hidden events."

As the phenomenon of UAPs continues to generate public interest and concern, it is critical that the medical community and relevant authorities work together to understand the potential health impacts of UAP encounters. Roe ended with, “these therapists and physicians, everybody, they need to have an understanding of what's actually going on. That it really could be what the guy said it was, you know, that, yeah, you can think confabulation if you want. You're the professional, but there's a reality here. It's not that it can't be. Not just all the possibilities method. And then so if you can get them to talk about it, get them to deal with that, what if? Then the conversation starts, the stigma starts rolling back.”

For more information about UAP Med, visit their website at uapmed.org.