Skeptical Eye

History

Volume 1 Number 1 of Skeptical Eye appeared dated May 1987 as the newsletter of the National Capital Area Skeptics, a Washington DC regional society of the CSICOP-aligned sceptical movement. The lead piece in the first issue announced the group's founding and framed the new organisation's purpose plainly: "Skeptics Form Organization to Examine Paranormal / Fringe Science". The first listed meeting topic was "UFO Abductions or Fantasy?", which placed the Hopkins-era abduction methodology directly on the inaugural meeting agenda. The publication ran for twenty volumes through to 2009. The archive holds 40 issues spanning the run.

NCAS's Washington DC base placed the society in close proximity to the institutional centre of the broader sceptical movement. Philip J. Klass operated from his home at 404 "N" Street Southwest in the same city across the entire publication life of his Skeptic UFO Newsletter, and the National Capital Area Skeptics's reading list and invited speakers ran with that proximity. The publication's Washington-DC editorial perspective gave it consistent access to the federal-records and FOIA-investigation methodology that Klass had established for the broader UFO-sceptic press.

The twenty-two-year run covers the canonical UFO-research case set of the period the publication operated through: the MJ-12 forgery dispute the Klass publication was leading on at the time of NCAS's founding, the Gulf Breeze photographs, the Linda Cortile case, the Phoenix Lights, the Roswell witness reinterviews, the Santilli alien-autopsy footage, and the November 2004 USS Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter that would define the post-2017 disclosure era. The publication's regional meetings and invited-speaker programme tracked the same case set the national publications were engaging.