Michael Salla



Michael Emin Salla is a pseudoscholar and ufologist who created the branch of wingnuttery known as exopolitics. According to this fantasy, extraterrestrial intelligence has been involved in human affairs since at least the 1950s, and various treaties exist governing human/alien relations.

Who?
Salla was born in Melbourne, Australia on 25 September 1958. He obtained a bachelor's degree from Melbourne University in 1983 and a Ph.D. (Government Affairs) from Queensland University ten years later. After teaching appointments at various Oz institutions, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Peace and Conflict Resolution Program, School of International Service, American University, Washington, D.C. in 1996.

He authored a couple of dozen articles on conflict resolution topics in academic journals in the 1990s, then invented "exopolitics", moved to Kalapana, Hawaii, and went into the popular book business, mostly self-published.

He is listed as a course instructor at the Exopolitics Institute along with journalist Paola Harris and former lawyer Manuel Lamiroy. The institute offers a so-called "Galactic Diplomacy Certificate", among other scams "qualifications". The cost of that course is $1500 plus extras for seminar tuition — a trivial investment, really, when one considers what an asset such a certificate would be if applying for a job in, say, corporate management.

Salla has also promoted the QAnon unified conspiracy theory.

Seekrit
"Galactic diplomacy" — which I use as a synonym for "exodiplomacy" — is not mere speculation from the pen of futurists or science fiction writers. It is currently a highly classified national security program where a select group of authorized government, military and corporate officials are secretly meeting to discuss extraterrestrial life and technology. In some case, these officials are communicating directly with representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations.

These policies are implemented in highly classified compartmentalized programs with strict need-to-know security provisions in place. ... [T]he vast majority of government, military and corporate officials are simply out of the loop on the extraterrestrial issue.

So if this is such a cosmic secret, how come some random loony in Hawaii knows about it?