Bad UFOs

About the Author

Robert Sheaffer was born in 1949 in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston — the same university where J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer whose own trajectory ran the opposite direction, from Air Force consultant to public UFO advocate, chaired the astronomy department. Available biographical sources do not record Sheaffer's specific field of study at Northwestern, and he is not, by his own public self-description or any independently verifiable record, a working research scientist with an advanced degree in a relevant field: he describes his career on his own website, The Debunker's Domain, as work "as a data communications engineer" in Silicon Valley, a technical rather than academic-scientific background broadly typical of the skeptical ufology tradition he belongs to. He is a longtime member of Mensa.

Sheaffer's skeptical career runs in parallel to, and substantially overlaps with, that of aerospace journalist Philip J. Klass, alongside whom he was a founding member — together with engineer James Oberg — of the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, since renamed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). In June 1982 he was a founding director, and later chairman, of Bay Area Skeptics, the San Francisco Bay Area's own regional skeptics' organization and one of the first local groups modeled directly on CSICOP; it remains active today. His single longest-running body of work is "Psychic Vibrations," the column he wrote for Skeptical Inquirer from 1977 to 2017 — a four-decade run covering UFOs alongside psychic claims, cryptozoology, and other paranormal subjects — which he later collected into the 2011 volume Psychic Vibrations: Skeptical Giggles from the Skeptical Inquirer. He also wrote for Fate magazine and the British Interplanetary Society's Spaceflight, and maintains both The Debunker's Domain (debunker.com) and the Bad UFOs blog as his primary post-2017 outlets.

His book-length bibliography traces a consistent line back to a single early work: The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence (Prometheus Books, 1981), expanded and updated as UFO Sightings: The Evidence (Prometheus Books, 1998), both of which apply the same claim-by-claim skeptical method Bad UFOs would later extend to a newer generation of cases. Outside ufology, he wrote Resentment Against Achievement: Understanding the Assault upon Ability (1988) and The Making of the Messiah: Christianity and Resentment (1991), both published by Prometheus Books, extending his skeptical method to religion and to critiques of egalitarian politics — a breadth of subject matter that has made him, by his own description, an "equal-opportunity debunker" rather than a UFO specialist exclusively.

That specialization nonetheless runs deep on this site's own pages: this catalogue's Robert Sheaffer key-figures entry already documents his shadow-geometry analysis of the McMinnville Trent photographs, his identification of Venus as the likely source of Jimmy Carter's 1969 sighting, and his tracking of the Gulf Breeze photo case's unraveling — the same case-by-case method this book collects and extends into the 2010s.

Historical Context & Origins

Sheaffer self-published Bad UFOs through CreateSpace on December 31, 2015, at a moment when American UFO culture had just absorbed two very different jolts. On one side, journalist Leslie Kean's 2010 bestseller, this site's own UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, had spent several years pushing a more "respectable," credentialed-witness framing of the subject into the mainstream press — a framing Sheaffer directly pushes back against in this book's treatment of the Belgian UFO wave Kean had separately endorsed. On the other, the case that Sheaffer himself would call "ufology's biggest black eye" was collapsing in real time as the book went to press: the so-called "Roswell Slides," a set of purported 1947 alien-body photographs promoted through a major May 2015 live-streamed event, had unraveled within weeks when researchers identified the pictured figure as a mummified child, and Sheaffer's own Skeptical Inquirer postmortem on the affair ran that September, months before this book's own December release.

Structurally, the book is less a single new argument than a working archive of Sheaffer's most active recent years as a columnist and blogger: Benjamin Radford's own review of it in Skeptical Inquirer catalogues its contents as running from the 2010 "mystery missile" sighting off the California coast, through the Belgian UFO flap, a chapter's worth of debunked viral videos, and Steven Greer's Disclosure Project, back to the field's older classics — the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, Travis Walton, the Roswell Incident and its just-collapsed "Slides," and the Rendlesham Forest case — giving newer readers the same grounding in the field's foundational claims that his 1981 and 1998 books had provided to an earlier generation.

The book also arrived into a specific institutional gap rather than a crowded field: unlike Curtis Peebles's 1994 Smithsonian-published Watch the Skies! or the Philip J. Klass books that preceded it by Prometheus Books and other established houses, Bad UFOs came out through Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing platform with no institutional imprint behind it at all — a genuinely lower-friction, lower-prestige route to print that nonetheless let Sheaffer collect and update columns written over several decades into a single accessible volume exactly as the UFO-disclosure conversation Kean had helped popularize was gaining renewed cultural traction.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

Because Bad UFOs is a compilation of discrete columns rather than a monograph built around one thesis, its "argument" is really a consistent method applied dozens of times over: identify the most specific, checkable, mundane candidate explanation for a given claim — a satellite reentry, a known aircraft, an insect near the lens, a flare, a hoax confession — before entertaining an exotic one, and treat a claim's continued popularity as no substitute for that explanation actually having been tested and ruled out.

A recurring theme across the columns collected here is that many famous UFO cases are not permanently unsolved but simply under-followed: Sheaffer repeatedly revisits older claims with newly available evidence — declassified satellite catalogues, improved digital image analysis, a witness's later recantation — arguing, in Radford's phrase from his review of the book, that "mysterious UFO reports may be conclusively solved years (or even decades) after they occur" if a skeptic simply keeps checking back. His 2012 Yukon "Busted!" column and his repeated returns to the Gulf Breeze and Aztec cases both exemplify this: solving a case, in Sheaffer's method, is an ongoing process rather than a single verdict rendered once.

A second consistent theme is photographic and videographic skepticism specifically: across the cases this book and Sheaffer's wider body of work address, from El Bosque's "probably a fly" to Chicago O'Hare's hole-punch cloud dynamics, Sheaffer treats visual evidence as unusually easy to misread precisely because apparent size, apparent speed, and even apparent "impossible" maneuvering are all functions of an assumed distance that single-camera footage almost never actually establishes.

A third theme, sharpened by his decades inside organized skepticism specifically, is that the UFO research community fails at self-policing: Sheaffer's book leans on MUFON's own internal statistic that 80 to 90 percent of the UFO reports it investigates ultimately explain conventionally, and repeatedly criticizes proponent researchers and organizations for readmitting discredited witnesses and claims rather than treating a debunked case as settled.

The book's final and, per Radford's review, most important chapter — "UFO Skeptics Are from Mars, UFO Proponents Are from Venus" — steps back from individual cases to argue the two camps are frequently talking past each other because they weight the same categories of evidence differently from the outset: witness sincerity and consistency carry more evidentiary weight for proponents, while skeptics require independent, checkable physical corroboration before treating sincerity as informative at all. Sheaffer treats this asymmetry, not bad faith on either side, as the real reason so many individual disputes never resolve.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

Per the book's own publisher description and Benjamin Radford's Skeptical Inquirer review, Bad UFOs ranges from the field's founding classics — the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, the Roswell Incident and the "Roswell Slides" hoax that collapsed the same year the book was published, the Rendlesham Forest landing claim, and Travis Walton's abduction account (Case File #009) — through contemporary claims including the 2010 California "mystery missile," the Belgian UFO wave, and Steven Greer's Disclosure Project.

Seven of this site's own case files cite this exact 2015 edition directly, and each traces back to a specific piece of Sheaffer's published analysis. The Campeche Military FLIR Incident (Case File #197, 2004) file draws on his original Sept./Oct. 2004 Skeptical Inquirer article, which brought together electro-optics expert John Lester Miller's technical read on the infrared footage with James C. Smith's satellite and 3-D modeling work supporting an oil-platform-flare explanation. The Chicago O'Hare UFO Sighting (Case File #050, 2006) file cites his observation, later relayed by fellow skeptic Brian Dunning, that aircraft punching through cloud layers typically leave turbulent rather than crisp, disc-shaped holes — a real point this site's own file weighs against the fact that documented hole-punch clouds do sometimes show clean edges.

The El Bosque Air Base UFO Video (Case File #163, 2010) file documents Sheaffer's April 2012 Bad UFOs blog post arguing the object was "probably a fly," which directly challenged analyst Alberto Vergara's "far superior to any flying object of known manufacture" speed claim as resting on an unstated assumption about the object's distance from the camera, and criticized CEFAA for withholding the complete raw video that would have let outside analysts test that assumption independently. The Fox Lake / Yukon Giant Craft Sighting (Case File #213, 1996) file centers on his September/October 2012 "Psychic Vibrations" column "'Top Ten' UFO Case: Yukon, Canada, 1996—Busted!," which laid out satellite-tracking analyst Ted Molczan's identification of the sighting as the reentry of a Cosmos 2335 rocket booster in a "stimulus/response" framework — while this site's own file also preserves Sheaffer's own caveat, quoted directly from that column, that the reentry explanation "left out the part where the observers reported the object hovering, the electrical interference, etc," which he judged "not 'a pretty good job' of observing" even by the standard of his own preferred solution.

The Gulf Breeze UFO Sightings (Case File #098, 1987–90) file draws on the deepest and longest-running of Sheaffer's engagements with a single case: his 1991 "Gulf Breeze Flap Fades" Skeptical Inquirer column tracking the case's early unraveling, a 2007 review of Craig Myers's War of the Words, and, per this site's own key-figures entry on him, an entire chapter of this book devoted specifically to Ed Walters's Polaroid photographs. The South China Sea UAP Wave (Case File #138) and Stephenville Lights Sighting (Case File #051, 2008) files both cite this same edition as comparative reading for, respectively, anonymous-witness viral video claims and a large-scale mass-witness sighting case — the two categories of UFO report Sheaffer's method treats most differently.

Beyond the seven pages that cite this specific book, this site's own case-file library documents Sheaffer's still-wider engagement with claims this book's methodology also covers: his shadow-geometry critique of the McMinnville Trent photographs (Case File #037) and his skeptical read of the Mariana film both predate this book, drawn instead from his earlier UFO Verdict and UFO Sightings: The Evidence; his detailed 2012 Skeptical Inquirer rebuttal of the Ramseys' The Aztec Incident revival is documented on the Aztec, New Mexico Crash Claim (Case File #238) file; and his consistent "gull explanation" for the Tremonton, Utah UFO Film (Case File #189) runs from his 1981 book through its 1998 update. Taken together, this body of citations across this site's own catalogue is itself a working measure of exactly how much of modern skeptical ufology's day-to-day case analysis traces back to Sheaffer's byline.

Critical Reception & Controversies

Bad UFOs was reviewed inside Skeptical Inquirer itself by Benjamin Radford in the magazine's July/August 2017 issue, under the headline "A Good Analysis of Bad UFO Information." Radford called Sheaffer "one of the—if not the—world's top experts on the subject of unidentified flying objects and claims of extraterrestrials," praised his "encyclopedic knowledge of a surprisingly diverse topic," and singled out the closing "Skeptics Are from Mars, Proponents Are from Venus" chapter as "one of the most important chapters—and unfortunately one of the shortest." Radford's review was not uncritical, however: he noted the book's lack of specific in-text references and citations as a real limitation, one that "somewhat thwarts the book's usability for readers who want to find out more information or check original sources" — a methodological complaint from within the organized skeptical movement itself, not only from ufology's side of the argument.

Reception from within ufology itself has been genuinely mixed rather than uniformly hostile. Blogger Curt Collins, reviewing the book on Blue Blurry Lines in early 2016, wrote that it "holds up a mirror to the UFO circus" and could as easily have been titled "UFOlogy's Greatest Misses," approvingly citing the book's use of MUFON's own statistic that 80 to 90 percent of the UFO reports it investigates ultimately crumble under scrutiny. Collins nonetheless pushed back on what he read as the book's implied conclusion that UFO research itself is a dead end, arguing instead that ufology should pursue formal collaboration with mainstream scientific projects on its genuinely unresolved residue of cases rather than treating skepticism and continued research as mutually exclusive.

A more openly critical reader review posted to the book's Amazon listing made a sharper comparison, judging that "Sheaffer is no Philip Klass in his writing abilities nor in continuing the latter's in-depth investigations leading to plausible solutions of puzzling cases," and that the book "gives a broad overview of the field of skeptical ufology with synopses of findings made by others and off-the-cuff observations by the author" rather than fresh, ground-up investigation of the kind Klass's own UFOs Explained had modeled — a criticism that echoes, from the opposite direction, Radford's own complaint about the book's thin sourcing.

Sheaffer's standing with individual ufologists, as distinct from the book itself, appears more collegial than adversarial on the available record: prominent UFO researcher Kevin D. Randle, who has interviewed Sheaffer for both Skeptical Inquirer and his own "A Different Perspective" broadcast, described him in an August 2024 blog post as "a reasonable skeptic" who "was always willing to listen and discuss" — a characterization that drew immediate pushback in the post's own comment thread, where at least one reader argued Sheaffer's skepticism was "prejudiced from the outset" and that treating him and fellow skeptic Mick West "with kid gloves is a mistake," illustrating in miniature the exact skeptic/proponent divide the book's own closing chapter describes.

This site's own case files register a related, more granular version of the same tension: the Fox Lake / Yukon file notes that Sheaffer's preferred Cosmos 2335 reentry explanation, despite being independently confirmed by German reentry specialist Harro Zimmer, still does not account for several specific witness reports — a flashlight-response claim and electrical interference — that this site's own research treats as a genuine, unresolved gap in the skeptical case rather than papering over it, precisely the kind of incomplete-explanation criticism proponents most often direct at Sheaffer's work generally.

Influence & Legacy

The most directly measurable evidence of this book's ongoing influence is on this site itself: this exact 2015 edition is cited across seven separate case-file pages — Campeche Military FLIR Incident, Chicago O'Hare UFO Sighting, El Bosque Air Base UFO Video, Fox Lake / Yukon Giant Craft Sighting, Gulf Breeze UFO Sightings, South China Sea UAP Wave, and Stephenville Lights Sighting — making it, alongside Curtis Peebles's Watch the Skies!, one of this site's own most-cited skeptical secondary sources for exactly the viral-video and mass-witness photographic cases its wider case-file library documents.

Institutionally, Sheaffer's legacy runs through the organizations he helped found rather than through this one book specifically: the UFO Subcommittee of CSICOP/CSI, founded with Philip J. Klass and James Oberg, and Bay Area Skeptics, which he helped establish in 1982 and which remains an active regional skeptics' organization more than four decades later. His 1977–2017 run writing "Psychic Vibrations" for Skeptical Inquirer is among the longest continuously authored columns in the skeptical movement's publishing history, and its subject-matter successor, the Bad UFOs blog, continues to generate the same claim-by-claim analysis this book compiles a slice of.

The book's own publication window intersected directly with one of skeptical ufology's most-cited modern victories: the May 2015 "Roswell Slides" event and its rapid public collapse that same year, which Sheaffer covered in real time for Skeptical Inquirer under the headline "The 'Roswell Slides' Fiasco: UFOlogy's Biggest Black Eye" — published just months before this book's own December 2015 release, and widely cited afterward within organized skepticism as a case study in how quickly an extraordinary claim can be tested and fail.

Within this site's own research specifically, Sheaffer functions less as a single-book source than as a recurring analytical voice cited across the full span of his career — from the 1981 UFO Verdict and 1998 UFO Sightings: The Evidence through this 2015 book to his ongoing Bad UFOs blog — a citation pattern that itself illustrates the book's own central claim about solving cases as an ongoing process: this site's Robert Sheaffer key-figures entry alone connects him to six separate case files spanning five decades of UFO history, from 1950's Mariana and McMinnville films to the 2010s' Campeche and El Bosque videos.

The Book

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