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Michael Shermer

3 min read

Michael Shermer

Founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine and The Skeptics Society. Longtime advocate for scientific skepticism and prolific author (Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, Truth, etc.). Has tracked UFO/UAP claims since the 1990s.

UAP Framework

In a January 2026 Washington Post opinion piece (src-wapo-shermer-ufo-skeptic-2026-01), Shermer organized UAP reports into three categories:

  1. Ordinary terrestrial — weather balloons, drones, aircraft, atmospheric effects (accounts for ~90–95% of cases)
  2. Extraordinary terrestrial — advanced foreign adversary technology
  3. Genuinely anomalous/extraterrestrial — the residual requiring further investigation

He argued the extraterrestrial hypothesis remains unsupported by available evidence and invoked the physical barrier of interstellar distances. This piece was later cited as an ironic contrast to his subsequent appointment to the UAP Science Advisory Council.

UAP Science Advisory Council

Shermer is a member of the government-tasked uap-science-advisory-council chaired by avi-loeb, established at the request of the White House, aaro, odni, the FBI, and other IC agencies in June 2026. His role is described as “the study of anomalies.” His appointment was confirmed by The Skeptics Society via Skeptic.com on June 15, 2026 (src-shermer-uap-science-council-2026-06).

His presence on the council — as the most prominent institutional skeptic among the twelve members — may represent an attempt to ensure scientific rigor and provide counterbalance to advocates of the non-human-intelligence hypothesis.

July 2026 — expanded on-record remarks

A July 2 2026 Scientific American profile (src-sciam-uap-science-council-2026-07) carries Shermer’s most expansive on-record quotes about fellow council members: “Pretty much everyone on the committee is more open to the possibility that UAPs could represent something other than ordinary terrestrial phenomena. Not just space aliens, by the way, but space-time bubbles and multi-dimensional beings and far future human time travelers.” He flatly rejects those ideas as “so unlikely or impossible by the laws of physics that I wouldn’t even bother [going] down that road.” He also speculates (unconfirmed) that Rep. anna-paulina-luna may sit on the secret uap-governance-board.

July 2026 — on Harvard’s role in council selection

Per the Harvard Crimson (src-loeb-harvard-uap-council-ties-2026-07), Shermer downplayed any deliberate Harvard-vs-non-Harvard balancing in member selection, attributing it instead to avi-loeb’s personal trust in people’s work via the galileo-project network — while crediting Loeb’s Harvard professorship for the council’s outside credibility: “If he was an astronomer at a small liberal arts college or a community college… that would not have the same effect.”

Sources

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