Philip J. Klass

Philip Julian Klass was an American electrical engineer and journalist. For more than thirty years from 1952 he was a senior editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology, writing especially about avionics. He was a founding fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now CSI) and published the Skeptics UFO Newsletter from 1989 to 2003.

Klass wrote several books arguing that UFO reports have ordinary explanations, including UFOs Explained (1974) and UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983). He held that most witnesses are honest people who misidentify things, and from 1966 offered a $10,000 wager to anyone who could prove extraterrestrial visits by agreed tests.

He investigated the 1976 Tehran incident, arguing that the jet crews first saw a bright astronomical body, probably Jupiter, and that equipment failures were due to malfunction and pilot error. He was also an early critic of the Majestic 12 documents, pointing out that the Truman signature on one memo appeared to be a pasted-in copy of a genuine signature.