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 of the reasons of that had been the intrinsic difficulties associated with the circulation of information inside the UFO movement. The situatiosociated 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.

CHAPTERS
• Information as Evidence
• Computers and UFO Research
• Ufology Goes On-Line
• The Italian Example
• ITACAT and TRACAT
• PHOTOCAT and the Question of Photographic Evidence
• Other Computer-Based Projects
• Multimedia Catalogues

• Introduction