Skeptic UFO Newsletter (SUN)

History

Philip J. Klass spent thirty-four years as senior avionics editor at Aviation Week and Space Technology in Washington DC. The investigative methods he applied to classified defence programmes through that career carried directly into the UFO writing he began in the late 1960s. UFOs Identified (1968) proposed a plasma-physics explanation for many sightings. UFOs Explained (1974), UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983), and UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1988) extended the case-by-case technical critique across two decades. By December 1989 he was ready for a bimonthly format that would let him engage cases as they broke rather than waiting for a book project to close.

The first issue of the Skeptics UFO Newsletter appeared dated December 1989. The masthead carried Klass's home address at 404 "N" Street Southwest, Washington DC 20024, and his telephone number (202-554-5108). The publication was produced and edited by Klass alone, distributed by post, and supported by individual subscribers. SUN ran bimonthly for fourteen years through to the final issue, dated Summer 2003. Klass retired the publication that year and died in August 2005 at the age of eighty-five.

The bimonthly cadence let Klass work cases in close to real time. SUN #2, dated March 1990, addressed what Klass framed as "philosophical disarray" inside the abduction-research movement. The lead story documented the bitter split between Budd Hopkins, then the field's most prominent abduction researcher, and the psychiatrist Rima Laibow, who had appeared with him on the 14 October 1988 broadcast UFO Coverup? Live. Laibow's initial public support for Hopkins's and David Jacobs's methodology had given way to clinical-psychology criticism of the hypnosis-based interview format. Klass treated the split as evidence of methodological problems the abduction researchers had not resolved within their own field. The line of argument extended through the rest of the SUN run and intersected the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's parallel critique from the clinical-psychology side.

The mid-run issues from the mid-1990s engaged the cases the broader research community was working on as they unfolded: the Gulf Breeze photographs, the Linda Cortile case in New York, the 1995 Ramey memorandum reanalysis, the cattle-mutilation investigations, the Roswell witness reinterview campaign, the Santilli alien-autopsy footage, the Phoenix Lights of March 1997. Klass's method was consistent across all of them. Identify a specific evidential claim, work through the available primary sources, file independent FOIA requests where the case involved military records, interview witnesses Klass could reach directly, and reach a sceptical conclusion the publication then defended against responses in subsequent issues. The dialogue with the pro-UFO press was sustained, frequently personal, and documented in the SUN archive issue by issue.

The Klass Method

The publication's investigative form was distinctive even within the sceptical movement. Klass did not write from the desk. He filed FOIA requests for the military records relevant to a given case and published their responses verbatim. He commissioned independent technical assessments from radar specialists, atmospheric physicists, and document examiners. He interviewed witnesses by telephone and printed the responses in their own words. The publication carried minimal commentary that was not anchored to a specific primary source: an FOIA return, a witness statement, a measurable physical claim. Klass's tone was direct, sometimes combative, never unfocused.

His standing $10,000 challenge, payable on production of clear authenticated evidence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, ran across the publication's life. The conditions were tightly drawn and the offer was never collected. Klass treated the standing offer as a measure of the field's evidential ceiling. His critics treated the conditions as designed to be unfulfillable regardless of evidence quality. The dispute belongs in the file; SUN documents both positions.