Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) CSICOP is a leading independent organization of scientists and scholars formed in 1976 and active ever since in critically examining paranormal and fringe-science claims (including those concerning UFOs and alien contact) from a scientific point of view. It is based at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, and has been headed since its inception by founding chairman Paul Kurtz, professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. CSICOPís more general mission is to promote science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, and reason. It publishes the Skeptical Inquirer (subtitled ìThe Magazine for Science and Reasonî), a bimonthly journal that presents evaluative and investigative articles and information and perspective on a wide range of topics. Authors include scientists, scholars, and investigators worldwide; the need not be associated with CSICOP. It also holds national and international conferences, assists news media with finding scientific sources and scientifically credible information, sponsors workshops on skepticism, puts out a quarterly printed newsletter, disseminates electronic newsletters, and so on. CSICOP has been strongly critical of those who fail to use scientific rigor in investigating claims and of media that present credulous, unskeptical accounts of UFO claims and other unproved assertions about alien contact. Many scientists, writers, and investigators interested in extraterrestrial intelligence and active in examining claims of UFOs and alien contact have been associated with the CSICOP over the years, including astronomers Carl Sagan, George Abell, David Morrison, Alan Hale, and Edwin Krupp, UFO investigators Philip J. Klass, Robert Sheaffer, and James Oberg (Klass is chairman of CSICOPís UFO subcommittee), writers Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner, and many physicists, plus a number of psychologists and social scientists (among them Robert A. Baker, Susan Blackmore, and Robert Bartholomew) interested in the psychological and sociological aspects of these controversies. Robert Sheaffer frequently critically comments on the most recent bizarre claims about aliens and UFOs in his ìPsychic Vibrationsî Skeptical Inquirer column.