Robert Sheaffer

Robert Sheaffer is an American writer and longtime chair of the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (successor to CSICOP), a position he inherited from Philip Klass and has held for decades, making him one of the field's most durable organized-skeptic voices. His UFO Sightings: The Evidence (1998) and a long-running column in Skeptical Inquirer magazine have applied case-by-case reanalysis to prominent sightings, frequently identifying conventional astronomical explanations, including planetary and stellar misidentification, a specialty informed by his separate career and long-standing interest in amateur astronomy. Sheaffer maintains the Bad UFOs blog, active since the early 2010s, offering near-real-time skeptical analysis of newly circulated viral UFO videos and claims, including detailed reanalysis of Navy-released footage such as Gimbal and GoFast, which he has argued show conventional parallax and camera-tracking artifacts rather than extraordinary flight performance. He has also written on claimed evidence of ancient astronaut theories and other paranormal subjects from a skeptical vantage. Sheaffer's decades of continuous, methodical case reanalysis, less flamboyant than Klass's combative style, have made him one of the most consistently cited sources for skeptical counter-explanations across the full span of famous UFO cases, from the 1950s through the modern UAP era.