The Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) is a privately funded organization that aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow founded in 2020 to support research into the survival of human consciousness after physical death and the nature of an afterlife. It describes itself as a wholly owned subsidiary of the RT Bigelow Educational Foundation. Its formal mandate concerns the afterlife rather than UFOs, but it continues decades of privately funded anomaly research by Bigelow, from the National Institute for Discovery Science in the 1990s to the Pentagon-funded AAWSAP contract.

The institute became widely known through an essay competition announced in January 2021, which asked entrants to make the case for survival of consciousness as if proving it beyond a reasonable doubt in a courtroom. It received 204 essays. Parapsychologist and interviewer Jeffrey Mishlove won the $500,000 first prize with "Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death," near-death researcher Pim van Lommel placed second and Leo Ruickbie third. BICS also named 11 runners-up and 15 honorable mentions and later issued the winning essays in a five-volume print edition, ebooks and audiobooks.

In 2023 the institute funded a second project, the BICS Challenge, which spent $390,000 over nine months on six teams of 67 mediums in three countries. The teams were asked to put a single question to what BICS calls the Spirit World: whether it has failed to improve human spirituality since 1857. Bigelow has said that a jury reading the contest essays would "convict" on the question of survival, and in an August 2026 podcast he said he has proof that people survive the death of the body.

In 2026 the institute's public channels became closely tied to Bigelow's UAP advocacy. Its X account promoted and clipped the Bigelow Podcast, launched in August, in which journalist George Knapp interviews Bigelow, often joined by former NIDS and BAASS manager Colm Kelleher. Episodes covered Bigelow's account of a February 2026 Oval Office meeting in which he says he urged President Donald Trump to make a limited public confirmation of non-human intelligence, the history of AAWSAP and Skinwalker Ranch, and a September 2026 Defense Intelligence Agency letter about locating AAWSAP records, which the institute's account said would be released through the PURSUE program. Bigelow has said that "at least some of what we're interacting with are ETs" and has described extraterrestrial intelligences as servants of a Supreme Consciousness.

BICS is the most explicitly consciousness-focused of Bigelow's research bodies, reflecting his view that consciousness links the afterlife to the UAP question. Its essay prize put unusually large sums into survival research, and by 2026 its platforms carried Bigelow's public arguments on disclosure and non-human intelligence.