Philip J. Klass

Philip Klass was a longtime senior editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology, a trade publication that gave him unusual technical fluency in aerospace systems, which he applied over three decades to become the most tenacious and, to believers, the most feared skeptical investigator of UFO claims. Klass argued in UFOs Explained (1974) that essentially every well-documented sighting had a conventional explanation, frequently proposing that ball lightning or plasma phenomena associated with high-voltage power lines accounted for many close-range reports, a specific theory that drew significant pushback even from some skeptics as insufficiently supported. He founded and chaired the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), and became notorious within the field for offering a standing cash reward, eventually raised to $10,000, to anyone who could produce a UFO case that, after full investigation, remained genuinely unexplained by any prosaic hypothesis — a wager never paid out during his lifetime, which he considered vindication and critics considered evidence of the bet's deliberately unwinnable framing. His later UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1988) extended his skepticism to the emerging abduction phenomenon, arguing hypnotic regression was producing false memories. Klass maintained combative public rivalries, most notably with Stanton Friedman, that became a defining feature of UFO conference culture for decades. He died in 2005 at age 85.