Jacob Haqq-Misra is an American astrobiologist and senior research investigator at Blue Marble Space, the Seattle-based nonprofit research institute he co-founded with other early-career scientists. His research covers planetary habitability, the climates of other worlds, technosignatures, and the ethics and governance of space settlement. Since 2020 he has argued that unidentified anomalous phenomena deserve scientific study, and in 2026 he became one of the most active researchers analyzing the U.S. government's declassified UAP videos.

Raised in Minneapolis, Haqq-Misra earned a bachelor's degree in astrophysics and computer science at the University of Minnesota in 2005, then a master's in meteorology in 2007 and a doctorate in meteorology and astrobiology in 2010 at Penn State. That training in atmospheric dynamics runs through his work on climate models of Mars and the TRAPPIST-1 planets and on how long Earth's plant biosphere can last. He is the author of Sovereign Mars: Transforming Our Values through Space Settlement (University Press of Kansas, 2022) and of an open-access textbook, Ethics in Science and Society.

Much of his research belongs to SETI. With NASA Goddard planetary scientist Ravi Kopparapu and other collaborators he has modeled what Earth's future technosphere might look like from afar and assessed artificial greenhouse gases, solar panels and wind power as possible technosignatures on exoplanets. A 2022 paper proposed galactic settlement of low-mass stars as one resolution of the Fermi paradox. He has served on the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Committee and on the advisory council of METI International.

In 2020 and 2021 he and Kopparapu wrote pieces in Scientific American and the Washington Post calling for scientific research on UFOs. Haqq-Misra has said the first task is deciding how such phenomena could be studied, without favoring any hypothesis in advance. On the Sol Foundation's Sol Forum in early 2026 he argued that UAP study belongs on SETI's agenda. In August 2026 he and Kopparapu posted a preprint examining all 112 sensor videos released through PURSUE, concluding that none carried the range, platform and sensor information needed to turn on-screen motion into physical velocity, so the clips could not establish anomalous speeds. The pair discussed the study with John Michael Godier on Event Horizon.

As a member of the UAP Science Advisory Council chaired by Avi Loeb, Haqq-Misra led its first paper in October 2026. He found that six objects in the infrared video DOW-UAP-PR135, reported by an Air Force crew at 480 mph, each brighten and dim 7.1 to 7.9 times per second, matching bird wingbeats recorded by Galileo Project cameras, and attributed the speed estimate to parallax. Applying the method across PURSUE's six releases, he identified 25 likely birds in 10 videos, about 8 percent of the sensor footage, according to Loeb. Because a wingbeat rate does not depend on an object's unknown distance, the method gave the council its first identified cases and made Haqq-Misra a central scientific voice in the 2026 debate over the government's UAP footage.