INFORMATION
AS EVIDENCE
Just as in all the other knowledge fields, information is the
basic element. Six years ago, speaking at the 1989 BUFORA Congress,
I discussed the problem of information quality taking the Italian UFO
sightings (and especially the close encounters) as a landmark.
The conclusion stated that the available sources about most
sightings had (and regrettly still have) a very low quality: fortunately,
the situation is getting better, even though quite slowly. This
is one of the main reasons making difficult a scientific-style
approach to the UFO question and keeping professional scientists away
from dealing with the subject.
Despite the low quality, we
have to take the quantitative aspect of the UFO phenomenon into
consideration as well. It definitely has a remarkable importance
for historical, cultural, social and, last but not least,
bibliographic reasons. It is enough to think to studies like those devoted
to the press coverage about the UFO subject or to the evolution of
imagery of "flying saucers" and related "occupants"to realize immediately how important the availability and quick
management of the information are, of any nature it could be.
As a remark of great
importance one may state that available information about the UFO
subject can be actually considered a real evidence of the phenomenon, likely
the only one that cannot be questioned. "Information"means everything produced about sightings and, as a consequence, their
study, including the huge artistic and news production from the
mass-media. If a historical presence, just having size and time constancy
like that one the UFOs had throughout the last fifty years, do
exist, it is by itself the undeniable proof of the presence of a
big phenomenon, at least at social level. In such a way, nobody
may deny the existence of a "UFO question", anyway
appearing much more complex than a phenomenon produced by purely
cultural or psychologic causes. 
Something we
still are not able to define has aroused, directly or indirectly,
a huge quantity of worlwide sightings of unusual aerial phenomena and, as
a consequence, further news and cultural influence. We face a
situation where current information give birth to new
information, following a sort of an autofeeding process. Somebody
could wonder information (here meant as cultural background) were
directly responsible for new sightings or only the end product of
an indipendent phenomenon: the answers is one of the main
questions of UFO research and unfortunately it seems still quite
far from being found.
The historical presence of
UFOs in our society is immediately evident through the
information being collected from the most different sources: press,
literature, movies, television, art, the same UFO buffs. Often it
is an indirect information (for example: that coming from science
fiction movies or comics), yet it had a great role in the deep diffusion
of the UFO concept among people.
Beyond any discussion and controversy about the true value to
give to special evidences like alleged photographs and ground
traces, the real proof in the hands of UFO researchers is made
just by the information present in our society and, especially,
in the information collected by the same researchers. Apart from
its own quality, it is the real basic starting point for any
analysis of the whole question.
One of the major tasks of
UFO groups and researchers is the collection and preservation of
such huge quantity of material, which has reached a critical mass
so that its management and use have become very difficult since a
lot of time. Tens if not hundreds of kilos of paper are buried
and forgotten in any archive of groups or single researchers everywhere
in the world: only in a few rare cases such archives have been methodically
classified by hand in order to allow an easier search. Yet even in
such a case the possibilities to manage the collected material
are quite limited, subjected to several mistakes and requesting a
lot of time that could be used in other more profitable ways.
More, a paper-based archive features a danger not to be
underestimated: it is vulnerable to the aging and other factors
and the risk to have it lost is higher than one usually think.
The newsclipping example is meaningful: the tens of thousands of
newsclippings collected by each national organisation as a basic
starting point for a country-based analysis of the UFO phenomenon
are currently filed in traditional folders and cabinets, yet they
have no practical possibility to be run. Think just to the time
needed to extract all the 1950 cases involving daylight discs
where the word "flying saucer" is reported. On the
contrary, computer technology could allow us to scan nesclippings
with an excellent quality and associate to each of them a given
quantity of reference data: then, nearly in real time, it would
be possible to find all the newsclippings related to cases
matching our searching criteria.
The present situation may be illustrated as follows: we have a
remarkable quantity of information which cannot be exploited at
their best and made available to research as a meaningful evidence.
The main problem is not the presence of documentation, yet its management
and common availability. As a result, ufologists have become
mainly collectors of news related to an odd phenomenon. Being a
collector is an extremely interesting hobby, yet I suppose real
UFO researchers would like to do something different from heaping
up case reports, articles, books, magazines, etc .....
It is clear to everybody it
is no longer possible to work properly and efficiently in the
collection, classification and delivery of UFO information. We
face the same situation when dealing with material taken from the scientific
literature and possibly interesting for our research: also in
such a case, the quantity of information is so huge that advanced
browsing and search tools are really necessary.
Starting around the mid
'80s, the personal computer has become more and more popular in
the consumer market. Just that time, there have been the early
ufologists attempts to use such a new device to carry out an
in-house management of available information. Previous works
aimed at the establishment of international UFO sighting databases
on mainframe computers (available part-time only) failed soon: one
on. Previous works
aimed at the establishment of international UFO sighting databases
on mainframe computers (available part-time only) failed soon: one
of the reasons of that had been the intrinsic difficulties
associated with the circulation of information inside the UFO
movement. The situation has now changed so much that one may
estimate over one quarter of researchers having a personal
computer and likely being able to contribute to the electronic
archiving and management of UFO-related documents.
Some groups and inviduals promoted interesting projects about
catalogues of national or international sightings (for example:
SWECAT which includes about 12,000 Scandinavian cases collected
by the Swedish group AFU, MEXCAT and FOTOCAT from the group
editing the mexican magazine "Perspectivas Ufologicas",
the nice international
database of over 10,000 UFO sightings developed by Larry
Hatch Software in America, etc ....) or devoted to special cases
(such as the important "Project Becassine" run by the
French researcher Denys Breysse, who has patiently collected
thousands of close encounters of the third kind events all around
the world). Even being quite rare, such projects are clear
examples of how it is possible to manage reference data of UFO
sightings and quickly put them at disposal of other researchers.
Despite the fact these are computer-based catalogues featuring a
quite limited amount of data, their contribution to the
management and quick retrieving of information evidence is not
negligible.
Unfortunately, well planned and organized projects for archiving
and storing of generic or special UFO information are still very
few. The reasons of such a situation may be mainly found in both
a limited availability of suitable hardware/software tools and a
lack of ideas about what one could actually do. More, because of
the amateurish feature of the UFO movement, all the projects are
spontaneous, as well as hardly coordinated and coordinable. Once
again, the limit of having easily and quickly available
information is another negative factor decreasing the value of
such works: none of them actually offer a complete review and
analysis of the related UFO sightings and reports really known.
For example, you have a research study about EM effects
associated to UFO phenomena and you realize at once the cases
taken into consideration are old, poor referenced or even mostly
coming from a single country.
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eeding process. Somebody
could wonder information (here meant as cultu