A group of researchers say it's time for academia to get serious about studying UFOs.
The movement, championed by the Society for UAP Studies, is wrapping up an international conference aimed at establishing a new discipline dedicated to studying unidentified anomalous phenomena (or UAPs, the more formal term for UFOs).
Michael Cifone, the society's co-founder and president, said he's interested in what he calls "the empirical weird."
His catch-all phrase encompasses things that blur the lines between the real and the possible, phenomena that defy easy explanation: the spiritual, the parano