Sarah Scoles

Career & Background

Sarah Scoles is a Colorado-based science journalist, contributing editor at Scientific American, and accomplished author whose work spans astrobiology, space exploration, nuclear science, and UFO culture. She previously served as editor at Astronomy magazine and worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia—the site where the first-ever SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project began. Her articles appear regularly in The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, The Washington Post, Science, and Undark, among other leading outlets.

UFO Culture & They Are Already Here

Scoles gained significant prominence in UFO discourse with her 2020 book They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers (Pegasus Books), an anthropological examination of American UFO culture in the 50 years following the Roswell incident. Rather than attempting to prove or disprove extraterrestrial visitation, Scoles reframes the discussion entirely: "What intrigued me most was not the UFOs. It was the people obsessed with UFOs." The book traces UFO belief as a social phenomenon—a belief system akin to traditional religion, a political framework, a lifestyle, and crucially, a source of community and meaning.

Scoles' methodology is characterized by first-person fieldwork within UFO researcher networks and communities, offering an "open-minded skeptic's" perspective that avoids both dismissal and uncritical acceptance. She examines how UFO narratives function psychologically and socially, engaging with the terrestrial mysteries of human perception, pattern recognition, and collective meaning-making. The work is explicitly framed to speak to both skeptics and believers, emphasizing that understanding UFO culture requires understanding its adherents.

Broader Science Writing & Awards

Beyond UFO topics, Scoles writes extensively on astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, drawing on her experience with SETI-adjacent research. She is also the author of Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Pantheon Books, 2017), which profiles the pioneering SETI researcher and examines humanity's scientific quest for cosmic companionship.

In recent years, Scoles has built a significant body of work examining nuclear weapons, nuclear policy, and the psychology and neuroscience underlying nuclear decision-making. This reporting earned her the 2024 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She has also received the American Geophysical Union's David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Writing (2021) and the American Astronomical Society Solar Physics Division's Popular Media Award (2019, 2020).

Stance & Relevance

Scoles represents a contemporary journalistic approach to UFO/UAP phenomena: rigorous, contextualized, and focused on epistemic questions about how knowledge claims are formed, contested, and believed. She does not venture into hardware speculation or classified recovery narratives; instead, she examines the documented, observable dimensions of UFO culture as a window into meaning-making, community formation, and the human need to frame the unknown. Her work is valuable to the UFO archive precisely because it documents how modern scientific and skeptical discourse intersects with UFO belief, and how UFO culture functions independently of whether any UFO phenomenon is real.