Global Policy Journal Publishes Essay by Professor Bohlander on Ethics of Contact with Non-Human Intelligence 

In recent years, the debate about alleged extraterrestrial visitors has been getting a lot of coverage in the media, especially in the USA about decades of alleged government cover-ups. While the research focussing on the technological aspects of the sightings of anomalous objects in Earth’s orbit, airspace and oceans is slowly entering the mainstream, the same cannot be said for the reports by persons claiming to have had direct encounters with non-human beings. This is especially true for the controversial topic of alien abductions, which has traditionally faced either outright ridicule or been relegated to the realm of individual psychiatric diagnosis or psycho-social mass phenomena. This myopia robs the debate of a potential gateway to understanding the aims and purpose of the others, because people having had an encounter with them would so far appear to be the only ones who might shed a light on those issues, including the question of whether we can infer anything about the ethics that may guide them.

This paper attempts to establish, based on the reported conduct of the non-human beings, how humans might want to position themselves ethically towards unwanted contact. For this, it uses the lens of criminal law and the author’s long years of judicial experience. It concludes that, while it is advisable to suspend judgment for now due to a lack of reliable pattern data, a starting point from a view that humans are facing acts of violence equal in degree to what these days are called international crimes, is justifiable.

Professor Bohlander's current main research focus is on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), in particular the consequences of a potential contact with extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence (NHI) for human law and society in the wider sense, including the emerging field of ethics of contact and the problems arising from the epistemic gaps between human and NHI ethical perspectives. He tries to help move the debate away from the purely academic sphere to a practical engagement by political decision-makers. In 2025, he led an international group of academics in a submission on SETI and UAP research to the House of Lords Select Committee on the UK's engagement with space. He was the initiator of the Declaration on SETI and UAP Research of 24 April 2025, which has been translated into 20 languages and endorsed by 460 people worldwide. He co-organised an international symposium on the academic revival of experiencer research in July 2026.