Michael E. Salla, a PhD political scientist formerly at American University, founded the Exopolitics Institute (2003) and published Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence (2004), followed by works on the US Navy's alleged secret space program. His method aggregates whistleblower testimony, Corey Goode, William Tompkins, others, into institutional histories; the method's critics note the sources are unverifiable claimants and the chain of custody is the claimants themselves. Salla's AU tenure ended amid the controversy, a documented institutional fact.
Exopolitics is the administrative wing of the UFO community: conferences, policy papers, and 'galactic diplomacy' frameworks that treat contact as a governance problem awaiting declassification. It absorbed the 2017-2023 congressional UAP hearings as vindication of method, though the hearings documented anomalies, not aliens.
The concept's real insight is procedural: if any of the testimony were true, existing institutions could not process it, no protocol, no mandate, no vocabulary. Exopolitics is a rehearsal of governance for an event its own practitioners admit has no confirmed precedent, statecraft as science fiction's mirror discipline.
If contact is a policy problem, where is the embassy?