Since the very first years Unidentifed Aerial Phenomena have been the object of university theses.
An international collection and catalogue of all known university dissertations worldwide has been built and kept by Paolo Toselli since 2001. The latest edition was including 413 theses (from 1948 to 2022), for a total of 73,000 pages.
Almost all surveyed theses are referring to social sciences, with the exception of five in applied sciences (engineering and medicine), one in natural sciences (astrophysics) and five in architecture.
38% of the collected dissertations were from the United States of America, 62% from outside the USA. Most of those theses are in English, French or Spanish. There are also three works in Czech, two in Croatian and Dutch languages, only one each in Slovenian, Ukrainian, Indonesian and an African language. Theses from Eastern Europe and from Asia are almost absent, probably because of the language barrier.
Statistically, the most “prolific” year was 1998 with 29 theses discussed (11 in the USA). 2005 follows with 22 theses (only 4 in the USA), then 2001 (21 theses, 11 in the USA).
As of the academic qualification levels, there are 85 theses for the achievement of a bachelor’s degree, 166 theses for the Master’s degres, 131 dissertations for the “Ph.D.”.
In 2019, Toselli's work provided the basis for an essay that investigated the state of the art of academic research on unidentified aerial phenomena and related topics, evaluating the main trends (cultural, epistemological, political and integrative) and analyzing them in order to highlight an epistemological proposal useful for orienting new historical studies on the topic. The contribution, written by João Francisco Schramm, was published in the journal edited by students the History Course at the University of Brasilia (Em tempo de Histórias, n. 34, 2019, pp. 39-63), with the title “Uma análise do estado da arte das pesquisas sobre fenômenos aéreos não identitàdos: limites, tendencias e contributições epistemológicas”.
In the summer of 2022, the database was used in Norway as a starting point for a master's thesis in history and history teaching, to analyze both national and international academic works. The thesis, entitled “UFO-er i Norge UFO-kulturen i Norge mellom 1970 og 1982 med fokus på Norsk UFO Center“ (UFOs in Norway. UFO culture in Norway between 1970 and 1982 with a focus on the Norsk UFO Center), was presented by Jens-Arne Aanby at the University of Stavanger.
Paolo Toselli himself presented his work (“Catalogue mondial des thèses et des dissertations universitaires en ovniologie”) and the complete list of theses, as updated to 2019, in the book “De l’expérience à la science” (From Expere (Editions Garpan, 2021), which collects the proceedings of the international conference on ufological research organized in Canada by GARPAN (Groupe d’assistance et de recherche sur les phénomènes aérospatiaux non identifiés) in October 2018.
The whole catalogue is available here from this link in its sixth edition.
