American aviation journalist, born 1919 and died 2005, an electrical engineering graduate of Iowa State who joined Aviation Week and Space Technology in 1952 and spent thirty-four years as its senior avionics editor. From the mid-1960s he was the field’s most persistent sceptic, a founding member of the UFO subcommittee of CSICOP, and the author of a series of books proposing conventional explanations for the best-known cases.
He appears in The Invisible College as the source of the explanation that the Delphos Ring 1971 was ground saturated by urine from a sheep watering trough, an explanation Jacques Vallee displaced by having material from the ring examined in a French laboratory, where the whitish fibres resolved into an actinomycete. Sourcing note for anyone following this up: the sheep-urine attribution circulates widely in the secondary literature, and has not been traced here to a primary Klass text; at least one account states his objection differently, that the mark was a horseshoe shape of ordinary farm origin rather than a closed ring. His last major target was Philip J. Corso: Skeptics UFO Newsletter 49, January 1998, catalogued the Eighth Air Force headquarters error, the Walter Haut press release date, the Hawk missile guidance and the claim of two years heading the Foreign Technology desk.
Connections
Delphos Ring 1971 · Jacques Vallee · The Invisible College · Philip J. Corso · Kevin Randle · James Oberg