Stanford University is a private research university on the San Francisco Peninsula in California. Railroad magnate Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, founded it in 1885 in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., and it opened in 1891 on the family's former Palo Alto farm. Its place in UFO and UAP research comes through individual faculty members and events held on its campus rather than through any university program.

Physicist Peter Sturrock, a Stanford professor of applied physics from 1961, was the first of its faculty to become widely known for UFO research. In 1975 he surveyed members of the American Astronomical Society and received more than 1,300 replies; a strong majority favored continued scientific study, and about 5 percent reported puzzling sightings of their own. He helped found the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982, organized a 1998 panel that found the physical evidence for an extraterrestrial explanation inconclusive but judged some cases worth further study, and described its work in The UFO Enigma (2000). He passed away in 2024. The Stanford name is also attached to Cold War remote-viewing research, but that work was done at the Stanford Research Institute, which university trustees founded in 1946 and which separated from the university in 1970 before becoming SRI International.

The university's main modern connection is Garry Nolan, the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor in the Department of Pathology at the School of Medicine. In 2018 Nolan and Atul Butte of the University of California, San Francisco led a whole-genome study of the Atacama skeleton, a six-inch specimen from Chile once promoted as possibly extraterrestrial, with Stanford pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman among the authors. The study, published in Genome Research, confirmed the remains were human and linked their bone features to mutations associated with skeletal dysplasia. Anthropologists led by Siân Halcrow disputed the dysplasia reading, described the remains as a preterm fetus and criticized the ethics of the research.

Nolan has also described studying brain scans of military and government personnel with unusual health complaints at the request of intelligence officials, telling The Debrief that he found unique features in the caudate putamen of some individuals and that the work contributed to early detection of the cases later called Havana syndrome. In 2022 he co-authored a paper with Jacques Vallée in Progress in Aerospace Sciences on laboratory techniques, including isotopic analysis, for characterizing unusual materials. In 2023 he and anthropologist Peter Skafish founded the Sol Foundation, whose first symposium met at Stanford that November.

Nolan remained one of the most visible scientists in UAP debates through 2026. A member of the federal UAP Science Advisory Council, he appealed publicly in August to President Trump to bring David Grusch and other whistleblowers back into government service, stressing that he spoke only for himself. Through Sturrock's surveys, Nolan's laboratory work and the Sol symposium, Stanford's name has become closely tied to efforts to bring UAP questions into peer-reviewed journals and academic settings.