Robert Sheaffer

Robert Sheaffer (born 1949) is an American writer and software engineer who has been a continuously active UFO skeptic since the early 1970s: a founding member of the UFO subcommittee of CSICOP (now CSI), Philip Klass's collaborator and successor in spirit, and the field's institutional memory on the debunking side.

A Northwestern graduate who once studied under J. Allen Hynek's department, Sheaffer combined a technical career with a lifetime of case investigation and a long-running "Psychic Vibrations" column in Skeptical Inquirer.

His signature analyses include the identification of Jimmy Carter's 1969 sighting as Venus, the shadow-and-suspension critiques of the McMinnville photos (with Klass), early critical work on the Hill star map, and book-length treatments: The UFO Verdict (1981), UFO Sightings (1998), and Bad UFOs (2016), the last sharing a name with his active blog, where he has tracked the modern era from the Navy videos through the PURSUE releases with the same tools.

Sheaffer's standing claim is that ufology's best cases dissolve serially under investigation and that no residue has ever survived into evidence. His contribution is continuity: a single career spanning Condon to AARO, with the receipts filed.

Proponents cast him as a dismissal engine whose explanations occasionally strain as hard as the claims (the McMinnville debate's long life cuts both ways), and his combative writings on adjacent topics have drawn their own fire. He remains, with West, the reference the field argues against by name.

Sheaffer continues writing at Bad UFOs and in Skeptical Inquirer, an active elder of the skeptical tradition.