Peter Skafish

Peter Skafish holds a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. His IKKM biography lists appointments as maître de conférences associé at the Collège de France, Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the anthropology department of McGill University, Fondation Fyssen postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, visiting faculty at Berkeley and research fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. It states that he was founding and directing a research center, the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry.¹ He co-founded the Sol Foundation with Garry Nolan in 2023.²

Scholarship

The same biography credits Skafish with the introduction to the English translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss's "De Montaigne à Montaigne" and with co-editing "Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology." Its list of research interests reads "anthropological ontology, cosmopolitics, religion and secularism, outsider thought, planetarity, translation." A project statement written during the fellowship describes a book manuscript, "The Interpretation of Equivocations," arguing for "beings incompossible with those of modernity" and taking the Chinese medical concepts of qi and the pulse as its first case.¹

His book "Rough Metaphysics" was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2023.³ Its subject is the American writer Jane Roberts and the "Seth" material she produced as a trance medium; the subtitle is "The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts."³

Sol Foundation

Skafish was introduced to Nolan, who said the two concluded that the field lacked "a sort of professionalization of the arena." Interviewed in September 2023 as Sol's director of research, Skafish said, "What happened in 2017 and after wasn't a big surprise to me," and, of the legislative and declassified record, that "we would probably be close to settling the question of whether these things the 'genuine' UAP are non-anthropogenic." He added that "no one should be expected to believe that UAP are non-anthropogenic vehicles."² He said the foundation would produce white papers on legislative oversight and on "helping the intelligence community, but also ensuring that it stays within ethical bounds and the law," and he described one aim as to "lower the temperature" of the disclosure debate.²

The foundation's website, read on October 3, 2026, lists him as "Co-Founder & Executive Director," beside Nolan as "Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Board."⁴ The 2024 Form 990 of the Sol Foundation lists Skafish as secretary at one hour a week with reportable compensation of $20,000 and other compensation of $40,000, names him as principal officer, and carries his signature dated November 16, 2025.⁵ Skafish said in a December 2024 email that the second symposium was convened because of "a divisive election season and the likely failure of the UAP Disclosure Act."⁶ The March 2024 Sol white paper "UAP in Crowded Skies" names him as executive director.⁷ He is the author of Volume 1, No. 6 of the foundation's papers (November 2024), "The Prospect of Executive Branch Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Secrecy: The Harm to Congress and Potential Remedies," whose abstract begins that "long-standing secrecy within the executive branch may have concealed decades of UAP knowledge, research programs, and potentially retrieved technologies from Congress itself."⁸

Letters and councils

Skafish signed the November 12, 2024 letter to Congress urging passage of the review-board provisions of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, identifying himself as "Co-Founder, Sol Foundation; Sociocultural Anthropologist; Researcher; Author." The signers included Garry Nolan, Avi Loeb, John B. Alexander, Christopher Mellon, Tim Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo, Diana Walsh Pasulka and Yuan Fung of the UAP Disclosure Fund.⁹

In June 2026 Loeb gave DefenseScoop a list of twelve members of a "UAP Science Advisory Council" that included Skafish, listed under anthropology, with Nolan, Gallaudet, Michael Shermer, Ben Lamm and others. An official of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the council was among advisory groups to an interagency UAP Governance Board.¹⁰