UFOs: The Public Deceived

About the Author

This site's companion entry on Klass's 1974 UFOs Explained already covers his electrical-engineering background, his three-decade Aviation Week & Space Technology career, and his 1976 role co-founding CSICOP's UFO Subcommittee in full, so this entry takes a narrower, later-career angle: what had changed about Klass's own public methods by 1983. A decade of case-by-case investigation had made him ufology's most quoted professional skeptic, and by the early 1980s his skepticism had visibly sharpened from published rebuttal into private pressure campaigns against the researchers and witnesses he'd concluded were unreliable. UFO historian Kevin Randle has documented one especially concrete example directly relevant to this era: in August 1980, ahead of nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman's move to Canada, Klass sent an unsolicited letter to Canadian scientists warning them that Friedman would "begin accusing them of UFO coverups" — a preemptive characterization Randle cites as representative of a broader pattern of Klass lobbying witnesses' and researchers' employers, colleagues, and government contacts rather than confining his skepticism to print.

The clearest, most self-documented illustration of Klass's reputation at the exact moment UFOs: The Public Deceived reached bookstores came from Klass himself. In October 1983, the same year this book appeared, James W. Moseley published Klass's own "Last Will and Testament of Philip J. Klass" in his long-running newsletter Saucer Smear — a mock bequest addressed "to ufologists who publicly criticize me… or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private," leaving them what it called THE UFO CURSE: "No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today.… As you lie on your own deathbed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today." Whether read as gallows humor or as a genuine expression of the friction Klass had accumulated with the field he'd spent fifteen years investigating, the "curse" instantly became one of ufology's most quoted in-jokes and a permanent, dated marker of just how personal the dispute between Klass and the researchers behind this book's central cases — Travis Walton's and Val Johnson's chief among them — had become by 1983.

Historical Context & Origins

Klass published UFOs: The Public Deceived nine years after UFOs Explained, and its own structure announces it as a direct sequel rather than a new project: reviewer Elmer Kral, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, described the book as covering "the major UFO reports and events since his earlier books, including the so-called ‘best cases’ advanced by many UFO proponents." The intervening decade had reshaped the field's center of gravity — Project Blue Book's roughly 80,000 pages of files had been transferred to the National Archives in 1976 and made available on microfilm without restriction, and the CIA released nearly 1,000 UFO-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 1978, with other agencies releasing more. Rather than settling the government-secrecy question, that declassification wave gave proponents new primary documents to interpret; Klass's opening five chapters respond directly to Ground Saucer Watch director William Spaulding's media claims (amplified by a January 1979 New York Times feature and an NBC-TV "Tomorrow" show appearance) that the released CIA files proved a "massive" cover-up, arguing instead that the roughly 192 pages the CIA and NSA still withheld most plausibly protected Cold War-era intelligence sources rather than evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

The book also arrived into a UFO-literature landscape reshaped by a specific 1980 publication: Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore's The Roswell Incident, which resurrected the 1947 Roswell crashed-saucer story as a live subject for the first time in over three decades. Klass's Chapter 30 responds directly to that revival, four years before the 1984-surfaced Majestic-12 documents would give Roswell an entirely new, and far more contested, evidentiary layer that this book itself predates.

A structural target running through several chapters is the financial architecture of tabloid UFO coverage: the National Enquirer's annual "Blue Ribbon Panel" — which by this period included proponents J. Allen Hynek, James A. Harder, Leo Sprinkle, and Frank Salisbury as judges — awarded $5,000 to the original observers of each year's selected "best case," including the 1971 Delphos, Kansas report, the 1973 Coyne helicopter sighting, the 1975 Travis Walton abduction, and the 1976 Tehran jet-fighter incident. Klass uses the panel's own membership and cash award as evidence that the field's most publicized "best cases" carried a built-in financial incentive for witnesses and a credibility problem for the proponents selecting them.

Klass also directly critiques Stanford astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock's widely reported 1977 survey of American Astronomical Society members on UFO reports, arguing press coverage in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor overstated a modest, ambiguous result — and notes, with evident skepticism, that Sturrock had gone on to found the Society for Scientific Exploration, a body Klass predicts would repeat what he considered his ufological predecessors' mistakes.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's organizing continuity with UFOs Explained is deliberate: rather than proposing a new framework, Klass extends his existing "UFOlogical Principle #1" — that honest, even technically trained witnesses routinely misperceive brief aerial events — to a fresh set of cases that had become famous specifically because they resisted easy explanation the first time around. What distinguishes this book structurally is how much more space it devotes to witness motive and media incentive rather than pure technical reconstruction, reflecting nine additional years spent, in Klass's own view, watching sensational claims outrun careful reporting.

The first five chapters mount a direct, document-based rebuttal of the government-cover-up thesis, quoting CIA records through mid-1976 to argue the agency's only substantive UFO involvement was the five-member Robertson Panel it convened for four days in January 1953, after which the CIA "lost interest in the subject a few weeks later." Klass concedes 57 CIA pages and 135 NSA pages remained classified as of publication, but argues their most plausible content was the protection of Cold War-era human intelligence sources rather than proof of extraterrestrial contact — while also predicting that genuine evidence of visitation, once confirmed, would generate so much internal government paperwork that "it will be impossible to keep the startling fact from the public."

A second argument, extending the witness-motive lens from UFOs Explained's Socorro chapter, runs through the book's treatment of tabloid and network incentives: Klass cites Center for UFO Studies statistics that over 90 percent of UFO reports (many from law-enforcement officers) resolve to misidentifications, and pairs that figure with a granular accounting of who profited from specific unresolved reports staying unresolved — the National Enquirer's $5,000 Blue Ribbon Panel awards, a $1,000 Enquirer payment to Val Johnson, and the book contracts and speaking fees Klass argues flowed to Travis Walton and his associates.

A third argument concerns hypnosis and forensic evidence: Klass challenges the abduction-research reliance on hypnotic regression directly through psychologist Leo Sprinkle's own published acknowledgment that hypnosis-safeguard standards developed for criminal courts existed, paired with Sprinkle's argument that they didn't apply to UFO cases because there was "no crime, no criminal, no victim" — a distinction Klass treats as a convenient methodological escape hatch rather than a genuine scientific justification.

The book's closing argument, delivered in its final chapter under the Pasteur epigraph "the greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so," reduces three decades of UFO reporting to a specific ratio: roughly 98 percent honest misidentification of prosaic, sometimes unfamiliar objects, and roughly 2 percent self-delusion or deliberate hoax by people Klass describes as wanting to "spin tall tales and become instant celebrities" — a considerably harder, more individually accusatory framing than the more diffuse "witnesses misperceive" thesis that organized UFOs Explained nine years earlier.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

The Travis Walton Abduction (Case File #009, 1975) receives the book's single most extensive treatment, spanning Chapters 18 through 23. Klass argued the November 1975 disappearance near Snowflake, Arizona was a financial fabrication tied to logging-crew foreman Mike Rogers's lapsed U.S. Forest Service contract, pointed to the small puncture mark found in the crease of Walton's elbow as consistent with a staged sedative injection, and made significant use of a polygraph examination administered by Arizona examiner John J. McCarthy on November 15, 1975, whose "gross deception" result APRO co-director James Lorenzen withheld from the public until Klass circulated a 17-page white paper the following June. This site's own case file on the incident preserves Klass's argument and the physical-evidence dispute as genuinely unresolved rather than settled by either side.

The Val Johnson Incident (Case File #161, 1979) gets the book's Chapter 24, where Klass argued — on p. 227 of this exact edition, per this site's own case file citation — that the Marshall County, Minnesota deputy sheriff had deliberately damaged his own patrol car and simulated his facial injuries to fabricate a UFO attack. Sheriff Dennis Brekke and colleagues who worked alongside Johnson pushed back on the theory at the time, and Minnesota's own historical retrospectives on the case have continued to treat it as one of the more credible UFO encounters in American law-enforcement history — a genuine, still-unresolved dispute this site's own file documents in full.

The Kaikōura Lights (Case File #060, December 1978) occupy Chapters 25 through 27, which reviewer Elmer Kral notes Klass himself calls the "best-documented UFO incident of all time" before explaining the footage, shot off the Kaikōura coast, as most likely the lights of the region's commercial squid-jigging fleet. Physicist Bruce Maccabee, who had already published a peer-reviewed photometric analysis of the same footage in Applied Optics in 1979, directly rebutted the squid-boat theory, finding no independent confirmation that boats were operating in the sighted area at the sighted time; this site's own case file additionally notes that neither Klass's explanation nor a similar 2000 re-analysis by former DSIR scientist William Ireland resolves the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research's own contemporaneous finding that ground radar returns were "not coincident" with what pilots and observers were independently reporting.

The Tehran UFO Incident (Case File #018, September 1976) gets Chapter 14, where Klass attributed the Iranian Air Force jet-fighter encounter over Tehran airspace to electrical-electronic equipment malfunction, inadequate pilot training for night intercept missions, celestial objects, and a possible meteor from the Aquarid or Southern Piscid showers active that week.

The Coyne Helicopter Incident (Case File #049, 1973) receives Chapters 16 and 17, in which Klass reaffirms rather than originates his explanation: he had first proposed an Orionid meteor fireball combined with startled pilot control input in 1978, touching off a public dispute carried out partly through OMNI magazine's letters pages with CUFOS investigator Jennie Zeidman, whose own field report concluded the case remained unexplained.

The 1947 Roswell Incident (Case File #001) is addressed in Chapter 30, where Klass explains the crashed-saucer report as debris from a balloon-borne radar-calibration device combined with rumor and hoax — an early skeptical position, predating both the 1994 Air Force Mogul-balloon report and the 1984-surfaced Majestic-12 documents that would later dominate Roswell's evidentiary debate.

Critical Reception & Controversies

Contemporary reception from the organized-skepticism community was strongly favorable. Reviewing the book for the Skeptical Inquirer (Winter 1983-84), former pro-UFO field investigator Elmer Kral concluded "I think Philip Klass does indeed ‘talk sense,’" and recommended it be placed "on the shelf of every library… alongside the UFO books of the late eminent scientists Donald H. Menzel and Edward U. Condon." Kral's praise was not unqualified: he noted the book contained "three or four chapters that could be organized more clearly and five or six paragraphs that contain some humor that a few readers may misinterpret," a specific, named structural critique from within the same skeptical community that otherwise endorsed the book's conclusions.

Pushback from within ufology itself was sharper and more specific than the reception UFOs Explained had drawn nine years earlier, consistent with Klass's own more combative reputation by this point. Researcher Karl Pflock, who was himself skeptical of the Travis Walton story, nonetheless criticized Klass's methodology in these exact chapters: Pflock argued Klass "implicitly accepts the accuracy of the Walton witnesses' publicized descriptions" when it supported his collusion theory, while separately dismissing the same witnesses' reliability elsewhere in his argument — a specific, documented charge of selective skepticism from a critic who shared Klass's ultimate hoax conclusion but not his method of reaching it.

The broader pattern of letter-writing campaigns UFO historian Kevin Randle has since documented — Klass privately contacting employers, colleagues, and government contacts of researchers and witnesses he'd concluded were unreliable — forms the backdrop against which this book's own case chapters were received. Val Johnson's own sheriff, Dennis Brekke, publicly vouched for Johnson's credibility and sobriety against Klass's self-inflicted-damage theory, and neither that theory nor Klass's Walton chapters produced the kind of unambiguous physical proof his earlier Socorro hoax theory had claimed and later research undermined — a pattern this site's own entry on UFOs Explained already documents Jerome Clark and Allan Hendry criticizing in Klass's investigative record more broadly.

The book's reception is inseparable from its author's own self-authored public image that same year: October 1983's "UFO Curse," published in Saucer Smear, was read by some in the field as confirmation that Klass had grown too combative to be taken as a neutral investigator, and by his defenders — Kral's Skeptical Inquirer review chief among them — as simply Klass refusing to let credulous UFO reporting go unanswered, whatever the personal cost to his relationships within the field he covered.

Influence & Legacy

Klass extended this book's method into two further titles before his 2005 death: UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1989), which revisited the Travis Walton case yet again alongside newer abduction claims, and The REAL Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup (1997), which returned to the Roswell chapter this book had opened in 1983 with three additional decades of Majestic-12 and Air Force Mogul-report material to contend with.

Within this site's own catalogue specifically, this exact 1983 Prometheus Books first edition (ISBN 0879753226 / 9780879753221) is cited across resources.html in connection with the Berkshire UFO Wave, the Val Johnson Incident, and the Vandenberg AFB Missile Incident case files, plus this site's Psycho-Social Hypothesis theory page — giving it a citation footprint alongside UFOs Explained as one of this site's two most institutionally load-bearing Klass titles.

More broadly, this book cemented Klass's position as the field's default reference-point skeptic for cases through the mid-1980s, cited on nearly every subsequent skeptical treatment of Travis Walton, Val Johnson, and the Kaikōura Lights that followed it. But its legacy runs in both directions: the same combative methods this entry's Critical Reception section documents — the letter campaigns, the selective-skepticism charge from Karl Pflock, the self-authored "UFO Curse" — also helped cement, within parts of ufology, a lasting counter-narrative that organized skepticism itself could shade into personal campaigning rather than neutral investigation, an accusation that has followed the skeptical wing of UFO research for the four decades since.

The Book

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