Astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock convened fellow academics in 1982 to create an independent forum where rigor could be applied to subjects sidelined by orthodox funding streams. The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) registered as a 501(c)(3) and adopted a charter that promotes open inquiry, methodological transparency, and debate on phenomena ranging from unidentified aerial events to consciousness studies.12
Early Leadership and Organizational Growth
The inaugural Executive Committee included Princeton engineer Robert Jahn, Cornell astronomer Yervant Terzian, University of Virginia astronomer Laurence Fredrick, and psychologist Roger Shepard. Annual meetings rotated through leading research universities, establishing credibility and attracting members from physics, medicine, anthropology, and engineering communities.3
Flagship Publications
The quarterly peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE) has published since 1987 and maintains an open-access digital archive. Articles undergo conventional referee vetting yet span remote-viewing protocols, ball-lightning spectroscopy, and field trials of anomalous cognition. The free EdgeScience magazine, launched in 2009, distills emerging findings for a broader readership while preserving citation standards.45
Conferences and Collaborative Projects
SSE hosts an annual international conference and biennial European symposium that showcase laboratory results, statistical reviews, and instrumentation demonstrations. Sessions on advanced propulsion, psi replication, and UAP sensor arrays have seeded multi-institution collaborations such as the Portable Anomaly Observatory initiative and the ongoing Hessdalen Atmospheric Lights monitoring campaign.6
Notable Research Endeavors
Member-led studies have produced the first automated analysis of large-scale remote-healing datasets, blind protocols for presentiment experiments, and archival meta-reviews that informed the US Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on breakthrough propulsion. SSE task forces have advised government and private foundations on sensor deployment for unidentified aerospace phenomena and curated declassified radar logs for independent analysis.4
Influence and Continuing Agenda
By sustaining peer dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, SSE has normalized scholarly engagement with topics once dismissed as anecdotal. Its mentorship grants and Young Investigators Program channel resources to doctoral candidates designing reproducible studies on high-strangeness data. Current strategic goals include expanding open-source research repositories and standardizing metadata for cross-project interoperability.