Michael E. Salla is best known for popularizing “exopolitics” as a way of framing UAP and NHI questions through the lens of political science, international relations, and governance. In his own definition, exopolitics is the political study of the key actors, institutions, and processes associated with the UAP phenomenon and the extraterrestrial hypothesis. (Exopolitics Journal)
Salla also helped build an ecosystem around the concept via the Exopolitics Institute and the Exopolitics Journal, positioning exopolitics as a public-policy relevant discipline rather than only a cultural curiosity. (Exopolitics)
Who is Michael Salla?
Michael Salla, born in 1958 in Melbourne, Australia, holds a PhD in Government from the University of Queensland. He previously taught at institutions like American University in Washington, DC, and the Australian National University, focusing on global politics and conflict resolution. Around the early 2000s, he shifted to exopolitics, founding the Exopolitics Institute in 2005 and the Exopolitics Journal in 2006. Today, he is an independent researcher, author, and podcaster based in the U.S., known for his work on UAPs and NHIs. For more, visit his site at https://exopolitics.org/.
What is Exopolitics?
Exopolitics, as defined by Salla, examines the political actors, institutions, and processes involved in extraterrestrial affairs, including government cover-ups and NHI-human interactions. It builds on UAP research but emphasizes policy implications, such as how NHI presence might affect global governance. Critics argue it’s not a recognized academic discipline and veers into speculation.
Major Contributions
Salla has authored over a dozen books, primarily in his Secret Space Programs series, exploring alleged hidden technologies and NHI alliances. His podcast, Exopolitics Today, features interviews on topics like space arks and galactic envoys. He organizes conferences and webinars, predicting major disclosures in 2026.
Michael Salla’s journey from mainstream academia to the forefront of exopolitics represents a fascinating, albeit contentious, evolution in the study of extraterrestrial phenomena. This exploration delves into his background, the conceptual framework of exopolitics, his prolific publications, core theories, recent activities, and the surrounding debates, drawing from official sources, academic profiles, and critical analyses.
Early Life and Academic Career
Born on September 25, 1958, in Melbourne, Australia, Michael E. Salla pursued a conventional path in political science. He earned his PhD in Government from the University of Queensland, focusing on international relations and conflict resolution. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Salla held academic positions at prestigious institutions, including the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. His early work emphasized global politics, U.S. foreign policy, and peace studies, resulting in four edited or authored books on these topics. This period established him as a credible scholar before his pivot to unconventional subjects.
Salla’s transition began around 2003, influenced by UAP disclosures and whistleblower testimonies from former government officials. He resigned from academia to focus on what he termed “exopolitics,” arguing that traditional political science overlooked the implications of extraterrestrial life. Critics note this shift marked a departure from empirical rigor, leading to his work being sidelined in mainstream circles.
Defining Exopolitics
Salla coined and popularized “exopolitics” as an interdisciplinary field examining the political ramifications of extraterrestrial presence on Earth. In his view, it encompasses the study of key actors (e.g., governments, NNI civilizations), institutions (e.g., secret programs), and processes (e.g., cover-ups and disclosures) related to NHI life. He positions it as a “discipline of choice” for public policy on NHI issues, building on UAP sightings, abductions, and official testimonies.
Exopolitics extends beyond ufology by framing NHI interactions as geopolitical events, potentially influencing global alliances and technology. Salla founded the Exopolitics Institute in 2005 to promote research and education, followed by the Exopolitics Journal in 2006 for peer-reviewed (though niche) publications. He has organized international conferences on NHI topics, advocating for transparency in government policies. However, detractors classify it as pseudoscience, lacking testable hypotheses and relying on anecdotal evidence.
Key Publications and Media
Salla’s output includes books, articles, podcasts, and videos, primarily self-published or through niche outlets.
Books
His works form the backbone of exopolitics literature, often in the “Secret Space Programs” series. Below is a table summarizing major titles based on available sources:
| Title | Publication Year | Brief Description |
| Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence | 2004 | Introduces exopolitics, arguing for ET presence based on whistleblowers and documents. |
| Exposing U.S. Government Policies on Extraterrestrial Life: The Challenge of Exopolitics | 2009 | Analyzes alleged U.S. cover-ups and policy implications. |
| Galactic Diplomacy: Getting to Yes with ET | 2013 | Explores diplomatic frameworks for ET contact. |
| Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination | 2013 | Links JFK’s death to UFO disclosure efforts. |
| Insiders Reveal Secret Space Programs & Extraterrestrial Alliances | 2015 | First in SSP series; claims hidden space fleets and ET pacts. |
| The U.S. Navy’s Secret Space Program & Nordic Extraterrestrial Alliance | 2017 | Discusses alleged Navy-ET collaborations. |
| Antarctica’s Hidden History: Corporate Foundations of Secret Space Programs | 2018 | Explores Nazi-era bases and ancient ET tech in Antarctica. |
| US Air Force Secret Space Program: Shifting Extraterrestrial Alliances & Space Force | 2019 | Ties USAF programs to Space Force creation. |
| Rise of the Red Dragon: Origins & Threat of China’s Secret Space Program | 2020 | Examines China’s alleged SSP. |
| Space Force: Our Star Trek Future | 2021 | Envisions Space Force’s role in ET disclosure. |
| Galactic Federations, Councils & Secret Space Programs | 2022 | Details interstellar organizations. |
Podcast
Exopolitics Today podcast, with over 100 episodes, features interviews on NHI encounters, space arks, and disclosure.
What “exopolitics” means in Salla’s framework
What follows is a structured tour of Salla’s exopolitics: its intellectual core, its main claims, where it connects to mainstream space politics, where it departs sharply from conventional evidentiary standards, and how a serious reader can separate signal from noise.
Exopolitics as a “governance layer” on top of UAP/NHI
In Salla’s writing, exopolitics is less about whether UAP are real (he takes that as a meaningful question) and more about:
- how states and institutions respond to NHI-related realities (openly or privately),
- how secrecy and compartmentalization shape policy outcomes,
- how technology control, strategic advantage, and public legitimacy interact if NHI is present.
A key example is his peer-reviewed article in Astropolitics, where he argues that “unacknowledged” programs create analytical blind spots for space policy, and that exopolitics provides conceptual tools for studying alleged classified activity and its connection to UAP and extraterrestrial life claims. (ResearchGate)
Exopolitics as “methodological flexibility” toward hidden programs
Salla’s Astropolitics argument is basically: space politics scholarship studies what is acknowledged; exopolitics attempts to grapple with what is not acknowledged, including claims of highly compartmentalized programs and their alleged relationships to exotic technology. (ResearchGate)
This is where exopolitics becomes controversial, because “methodological flexibility” can be either:
- a legitimate effort to study hard-to-access phenomena (think intelligence studies, organized crime studies, or early nuclear secrecy history), or
- a license to treat weakly sourced stories as fact.
The Salla “stack”: the recurrent claims you see across his work
Across Salla’s books, essays, and media, exopolitics tends to rely on a recurring stack of assertions:
- NHI are interacting with humanity.
- Some governments and contractors allegedly possess knowledge and possibly materials/technology.
- Information is compartmented, and elected oversight is weak.
- There are competing factions or policy lines within states about engagement, disclosure, and technology use.
- Public “disclosure” is a managed process, influenced by geopolitical and institutional incentives.
Salla’s 2004 book is framed as an early synthesis of those political implications, and bibliographic listings identify it as published in 2004 (Dandelion Books) with standard ISBN metadata. (Google Books)
Separately, Salla’s own institute biography claims he founded the Exopolitics Institute (2005) and the Exopolitics Journal (2006), reflecting a deliberate attempt to institutionalize this lens. (Exopolitics)
Where exopolitics overlaps with legitimate, mainstream questions
Even critics of exopolitics often concede that some of its questions are real, even if they reject many of its answers.
A) “Policy follows perception” (and secrecy is itself a policy)
If governments treat UAP as sensitive, that decision alone has political effects: budgeting, authority, oversight, public trust, and international signaling.
B) Civil space governance will eventually collide with “anomalies”
As lunar and cislunar activity expands, the chance of unexpected observations rises. Governance systems (data standards, reporting norms, cross-national coordination) determine whether anomalies become shareable science or trapped in stovepipes.
C) Private actors matter
Even in orthodox space politics, contractors, intellectual property, export controls, and procurement secrecy shape what the public sees. Exopolitics can be read, at its best, as a push to treat “institutional behavior around anomalies” as the primary object of study.
Where exopolitics becomes most vulnerable
A) The evidence problem: testimony without hard constraints
Salla’s work frequently leans on testimony, insider narratives, and document claims that are difficult to authenticate independently. In his own writings, he explicitly argues for taking witness reports seriously and building a policy lens around them, and he notes the resistance this approach receives. (ResearchGate)
The core vulnerability is not “testimony is worthless.” In many domains, testimony is crucial. The vulnerability is absence of controlled verification loops:
- provenance and chain-of-custody for documents,
- independent replication for technical claims,
- adversarial testing (what would falsify this?),
- clear separation between inference and established fact.
B) Absence of evidence becomes evidence of hiddenness
A recurring pattern in fringe political narratives is that the lack of documentation is taken as proof of extraordinary secrecy. A mainstream academic example of this critique appears in an Oxford University Press chapter discussing “exopolitics” as a cultural term and describing how missing documentation is often interpreted as proof of a continuing “truth embargo” by proponents. (OUP Academic)
I’m not endorsing that chapter’s rhetorical tone, but the underlying analytical point is important: a framework that can “explain” any absence of evidence becomes hard to test.
C) Conflation risk: UAP reality vs sweeping geopolitical storylines
One can reasonably argue UAP represent a serious anomaly class, while rejecting large, specific story architectures (named programs, detailed interstellar diplomacy timelines, sweeping claims about covert deals) that are not anchored to independently verifiable datasets.
Exopolitics, in the Salla style, often moves quickly from “UAP/NHI may be real” to “here is the geopolitical structure behind it,” and that leap is where most critical readers disengage.
How scholars contextualize the “exopolitics movement” culturally
If you want a useful outside lens, one approach is to treat exopolitics as part of the broader “contactee” and modern anomalous-belief ecosystem.
A review in Science Fiction Studies of Aaron John Gulyas’ history of contact narratives notes that contemporary exopolitics blends reformist “space visitor” themes with narratives of covert obstruction by government and industry. (DePauw University)
That kind of framing is valuable because it shifts the question from “is every claim true?” to:
- why this genre of claims persists,
- what needs it serves (ethical critique, desire for cosmic membership, distrust of institutions),
- and how movements evolve when official information is partial and incentives are opaque.
This cultural lens does not disprove NHI. It helps you understand how meaning and politics get built around the possibility of NHI.
A practical way to read Salla
If you want to explore Salla without getting lost, use a three-bucket filter:
Bucket 1: Governance insights that remain useful even if specific stories fail
- secrecy as a policy variable
- incentives for classification and compartmentalization
- oversight failure modes
- how narratives shape mass politics and foreign policy behavior
These are “portable” insights.
Bucket 2: Claims that might be investigable with better tooling
- specific alleged facilities, timelines, procurement patterns
- repeatable technical assertions (materials, propulsion claims)
- consistent multi-witness clusters that can be triangulated
Treat these as research hypotheses, not conclusions.
Bucket 3: Claims that are currently non-falsifiable
- intricate interstellar diplomacy histories
- highly specific “insider” cosmologies with no independent anchors
- claims that rely on “you can’t verify this because it’s too secret”
These are the claims that most reliably degrade the signal-to-noise ratio.
Why exopolitics matters to NHI discovery politics (even if you disagree with Salla)
If NHI discovery happens via civil space missions, telescope technosignatures, or unexpected terrestrial evidence, the aftermath will be political:
- who controls the data,
- who gets access to sites or materials,
- what gets classified,
- how the public narrative is shaped.
Salla’s exopolitics is, in essence, an attempt to pre-build a theory of those politics. The question is whether his empirical foundation is strong enough for the conclusions he draws.
References
Gulyas, A. J. (2014). Extraterrestrials and the American zeitgeist: Alien contact tales since the 1950s [Book review]. Science Fiction Studies. (DePauw University)
Keats, J. (2010). Exopolitics. In Virtual words: Language on the edge of science and technology (pp. 156–159). Oxford University Press. (OUP Academic)
Salla, M. E. (2004). Exopolitics: Political implications of the extraterrestrial presence. Dandelion Books. (Google Books)
Salla, M. E. (2005). The history of exopolitics: Evolving political approaches to UAPs and the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Exopolitics Journal, 1(1). (Exopolitics Journal)
Salla, M. E. (2014). Astropolitics and the “exopolitics” of unacknowledged activities in outer space. Astropolitics, 12(1), 95–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/14777622.2014.890492 (ResearchGate)
Salla, M. E. (n.d.). About. MichaelSalla.com. (Michael Salla)
Salla, M. E. (n.d.). Founder. Exopolitics.org. (Exopolitics)
Suggested internal crosslinks for UAPedia
- Implications of the Artemis Accords on NHI Discovery
- The Artemis Accords
- Non-Human Intelligence: Lifting the Veil
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