Robert Irving Sarbacher was an American scientist, engineering educator and Washington consultant whose name entered UFO history through two short documents. The first is a set of notes the Canadian radio engineer Wilbert Smith made of a 1950 conversation with him; the second is a 1983 letter Sarbacher wrote to a researcher about reported recoveries of crashed saucers. Both are cited as testimony from a well-placed insider, although Sarbacher himself said his involvement had been slight.

In July 1945 Georgia Tech's student newspaper reported that Sarbacher had taken up his duties as the new dean of the institute's graduate division. He wrote Hyper and Ultrahigh Frequency Engineering, a 1940s textbook on microwave electronics, and the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Electronics and Nuclear Engineering (Prentice-Hall, 1959). By his own account he served the Pentagon's Research and Development Board as one of the "dollar-a-year men." By 1983 he was president and chairman of the Washington Institute of Technology, Oceanographic and Physical Sciences, in Palm Beach, Florida.

Smith, then in Washington for a broadcasting conference, met Sarbacher in his office in September 1950 after the Canadian embassy arranged an introduction. According to a transcription of Smith's notes, which the researcher Arthur Bray later found among Smith's papers, Sarbacher said that flying saucers exist, that "we have not been able to duplicate their performance," and that the facts in Frank Scully's book, the source of the Aztec crash story, were substantially correct. Smith's November 21, 1950 memo to his department, which led to Canada's Project Magnet, relayed information obtained "through the Canadian Embassy staff": that the matter was "the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb," and that a small group headed by Vannevar Bush was studying it.

Sarbacher's November 29, 1983 reply to the California researcher William Steinman stated that he "had no association with any of the people involved in the recovery." He named John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush as "definitely involved," thought Robert Oppenheimer was too, and said he had been invited to discussions of the reported recoveries but could not attend. He recalled that materials reported to have come from saucer crashes were "extremely light and very tough," and that colleagues gave him the impression the occupants were built like insects. In a 1983 interview with Stanton Friedman he said he only vaguely remembered talking with Smith. Grant Cameron later wrote that Steinman's own letter had supplied the list of names Sarbacher was answering, and that his main contribution was confirming that board members had attended a briefing on crashed saucers at Wright Field.

The statements returned with the 2026 crash-retrieval debate. In June the writer Christopher Sharp cited Sarbacher as independent confirmation of von Neumann's involvement in an alleged legacy program, and in August George Knapp shared a transcription of the Smith conversation. In September Jesse Michels revisited Smith's story with Cameron and, in a separate episode reopening the Aztec case, cited Sarbacher's remark about Scully's book. Sarbacher's place in UFO history rests on those few pages: a well-connected Washington consultant who, by his own account, heard about crashed saucers from colleagues rather than seeing them himself.