UFO DATA Magazine Closes

[mercuryrapids]

UFO DATA Magazine in the UK has become the latest print publication about the UFO subject to close down. Here is editor, Russel Callaghan's statement:


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. [end of statement]

On a personal note, I must say that it has been an honour and privilege to work for the magazine these last few years and it enabled me to do things and meet brilliant people that otherwise would have been unthinkable.

Hopefully, the website and forum at www.ufodata.co.uk will continue and there are rumblings of a digital magazine to fill the void left by the print magazine's passing.

Thanks.

Steve Johnson (mercuryrapids)
Former feature writer for UFO DATA Magazine

[who elsie]

I'm really sorry to hear that. I was a subscriber to the old 'UFO Magazine' and attendeded some of their conferences. It was a real tragedy when the editor Graham Birdsall died - he was a real heavy-weight in the subject (in more ways than one!). That magazine closed shortly afterwards, which I think was a mistake , as it had such a loyal following and was gaining a high public profile. There have been attempts to relaunch something similar since, by some of those involved, but it was a tall order to reach the heights of the original magazine.

I have met/liaised with Russell Calaghan on a few occassions and he has always struck me as a decent bloke, who's passionate about the UFO subject. I'm sorry that he seems to be bearing the brunt of the down-turn in interest in the magazine. In fact, I don't think there is a down-turn of interest in Ufology -I think the reverse is true, it's just that, as his letter states, info is just too readily available free on the internet.

I sympathise with Russell - and I would be grateful if you could express my thanks to him for all he has done over the years and wish him well for the future - but at the end of the day Ufology is about sharing information first and formost. If you are lucky enough to make money out of it, then that's a bonus. The truth is still out there and greater and greater numbers ARE discovering it.