Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer is an American science writer and historian of science, trained in the history of science at Claremont Graduate University, who founded the Skeptics Society in 1992 and its associated Skeptic magazine, becoming one of the most publicly visible general-purpose skeptics of the past three decades, with UFO and alien-contact claims forming one recurring subject among his broader critiques of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and paranormal belief. His bestselling Why People Believe Weird Things (1997) devoted significant attention to the cognitive and social mechanisms, including pattern recognition, confirmation bias, and the psychology of eyewitness memory, that Shermer argues account for sincere UFO and alien-abduction testimony without requiring genuinely anomalous phenomena. He wrote a long-running monthly column for Scientific American that frequently addressed UAP-related news, including skeptical treatment of the 2017 AATIP revelations and subsequent whistleblower claims, arguing that extraordinary government-cover-up claims required a correspondingly higher evidentiary bar than had yet been met. Shermer has debated prominent UFO proponents publicly on multiple occasions and maintains that his skepticism is provisional rather than dogmatic, open in principle to extraordinary evidence, a framing that has drawn both respect for intellectual consistency and criticism from believers who see it as a rhetorical shield against ever conceding a case.