Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions invites submissions for a special guest-edited issue on the subject of disclosure. Since the beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon in 1947, popular discourse on the subject has always included an intense speculative interest in the secret knowledge of the state, including and perhaps especially the military and intelligence agencies, who are widely suspected of harboring hidden knowledge about UFOs, their occupants, and nothing less than humanity’s ultimate place in the cosmos.

Interest in the release of state UFO secrets (a rapturous future event called “disclosure”) has erupted over the past decade, fueled by revelations of secret military programs like the Defense Intelligence Agency's AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) and the release of what the military claims are videos of UFOs in publications like The New York Times. The popular passion and desire for disclosure, a final revelation of state secrets about UFOs and our place in the cosmos, has steadily become a religious phenomenon in its own right.

Today, belief in a religious disclosure of state UFO secrets is hardly alternative or marginal: in March of 2026, the Vice President of the United States J. D. Vance, a practicing Catholic, acknowledged that he believes that UFOs are in fact “demons” after promising on a podcast interview that he will “get to the bottom of the UFO files,” implying an imminent release of information about our demon-haunted skies.

Pending any updates from Vice President Vance, papers on any aspect of the religious nature of the UFO disclosure movement are welcomed. Specific topics of interest might include:

• Pre-1947 precedents for the disclosure phenomenon, in which official or state institutions are petitioned to release secret religious or occult information they are believed to harbor.
• The conceptual heritage of the disclosure movement in the speculative work of figures like Raymond A. Palmer and Richard Shaver, who drew on Theosophy and other esoteric religious ideas to develop their theories.
• Religious ideas within the contemporary disclosure movement, including but not limited to figures like Chris Bledsoe, Luis Elizondo, and Steven Greer.
• The role of disclosure belief in New Age and the wider alternative religious milieu.
• The emerging connection between the disclosure movement, the American far right, and American Christianity.
• Belief among disclosure advocates in a special religious status of the state, particularly members of the military and intelligence communities, who are believed to have special access to nonhuman intelligences and technology.
• Analyses of disclosure literature as a contemporary expression of older religious modalities of revelation or gnosis, in which divine knowledge is revealed to an initiated elite or a salvific revelation to all humanity.
• The role of disclosure belief among new and established UFO religions.
• Political theory of disclosure, including but not limited to the possible political uses of popular religious belief in disclosure in generating what Giorgio Agamben would call a “state of exception,” a special state of emergency where the state can take extraordinary or otherwise impossible action.

Please submit a title and abstract (200-300 words) by 1 August 2026 to grievetr@westminster.edu. Based on submitted abstracts, the Guest Editor will invite selected authors to submit full manuscripts to the Guest Editor by 1 March 2027, who will work with the authors to prepare their papers for submission to Nova Religio through Scholastica. All manuscripts will be fully peer-reviewed prior to final acceptance for publication. The final decision on each paper will be made by the Nova Religio co-editors.

Full academic articles will usually be between 7-10,000 words including endnotes. However, abstracts for shorter pieces under the themes of Field Note or Research Note, a Perspective essay, or even a book review essay that relates to the theme are also welcomed. The final version of these pieces should be no longer than 5000 words each.

See Nova Religio’s Style Sheet for formatting the paper and citations in endnotes at https://www.pennpress.org/journals/journal/nova-religio/. Scroll down on this webpage to click “For Authors,” and text with information for authors will appear and the link to the Style Sheet will be visible.

Please feel free to be in touch with any questions.

Dr. Timothy Grieve-Carlson

grievetr@westminster.edu