5th March 2009 

Dear readers, subscribers and friends,

After months of negotiations and promises I have now accepted that we can no longer publish UFO DATA as a printed magazine.

The credit crunch has been blamed for everything over the last six months, but along with the financial climate and banks having wobbly knees at the thought of helping businesses carry on in these times, it also seems the interest in this classic subject is at a lifetime low.

Much information is available on the internet and all recent efforts to publish a magazine have failed at large personal costs to those involved, myself personally included.

It has cost me around £10,000 over the last 18 months to produce the magazine and present some of the best conferences this country has seen.

Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed every minute of it.

However, the time has come to make a decision. 

Without bankrupting myself to keep the 300 or so loyal subscribers in print, I have no option but to go no further with the printed magazine.

The magazine costs around £3,000 per issue to publish and we had a thousand subscribers two years ago. That dropped last year, hence the personal cost, but this year it is down to the 300 mentioned above. You can see for yourself that the maths just don’t work.

Philip Mantle has informed me today that he has to walk away, feeling he has done everything possible to keep the project alive. I thank him for his efforts and he played a big part in trying to move forward, but delays from an interested party has just slowed things down for months, leaving us with no choice but to draw a line under UFO DATA Magazine.

My heartfelt thanks go to one individual who has been there for me and the magazine and without him we simply would not have been able to operate. He is Steve Johnson.

Research, webmaster and public relations, he has done everything in a professional and friendly way.

Thank you Steve for everything.

Those who have sent payments by cheque to renew subs since December will find we have not cashed these (we needed to know we were safe to publish) and I have refunded all recent PAYPAL activity.

By way of recompense, and again at my own personal cost, I will endeavour to send all listed subscribers a final electronic version of the magazine along with a DVD from the 2008 conference featuring the best of our lecture presentations.

This will take a little while and I will have to fund it personally. This will be some 600 DVDs and CDs, so please I ask you to bear with me.

Once again I thank you all on behalf of myself and the many individuals who have made the last four years possible.

Thanks a million.

Russel Callaghan.