The very first BBSs completely devoted to ufology were born around the mid '80s in the United States, yet in 1986 an experimental BBS was started in Italy by myself. These simple on-line service have limited resources, but they contributed to make available to everybody a large quantity of UFO information: unfortunately, the quality of such information has never been really good because of the quite low number of serious researchers owning a computer with a BBS connection. In 1995 the largest UFO BBS are two and both based in the United States: MUFONET and PARANET. They are based on a real network of tens of satellite systems located in different states of the USA and in other countries, including several in Europe. Both offer a huge quantity of information about various topics, such as recent sightings, articles, news of topicality, discussions, UFO publications, etc ......, all of them accessible by free (but the phone bill !). They may be considered a real mine of documents of any kind and a great communication tool, still used only in part: anyway, it is likely it will become more and more important for the UFO movement in a not too distant future.

Also commercial on-line services like Compuserve and America On-Line have special forums open to all subscribers where they can discuss about topics related to UFOs and UFO research. Text files and images are often available by downloading: among them you can find the electronic version of UFO newsletters like "The Swamp Gas Journal" and "The Desert Rat". The moderators of such forums are UFO buffs or researchers, who must manage a high traffic of questions and answers, as frequent or occasional visitors of these forums may be counted in terms of thousands. A new even bigger on-line service is just starting: it is called "The Microsoft Network" and it is expected to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of users in a quite short time. There is already an "Alien Encounters Forum" where, besides a mailing list, it is possible to receive nice multimedia presentations of special UFO topics, plus text and image files.

It is clear that communication and information distribution will come more and more from huge on- line services accessible by computer to millions of people all over the world. They can be an outstanding tool of divulgation for subjects like ufology. Besides offering serious documents able to educate people to the real aspects of the UFO question, they can be really helpful in collecting first- hand reports or information of new sightings.

Anyway, the real communication system phenomenon is the even too much emphasized INTERNET, a huge planetary network of computer networks able to offer an incredible quantity of information covering pratically any kind of human activity. By a computer, a modem and a subscription to a service provider one can connect immediately such an oustanding resource of knowledge, accessing mailing lists and forums of discussions among users located in different continents or databases including data, text documents and images of possible use for UFO research. Most of the information are now available in a very simple and intuitive way, through the so-called World Wide Web (WWW) sites: it is enough to know how to use a computer mouse and follow the directions you see on your monitor, then you'll be able to look up or download on your own computer the information you better like.

UFO buffs are always very active and have soon joined the huge possibilities offered by INTERNET, now estimated having about 35 millions of connected users. Some services offering UFO-related information are currently available and among them:

• the WWW sites

• the Newsgroups

• the FTP sites for file downloading

• E-Mail and Mailing Lists

The WWW sites (also known as World Wide Web) are services run on computers always connected to the network offering graphic pages including information under the form of text and images or even music and videoclips. They are graphically designed through a visual interface usually very attractive. Such pages are hypertext documents, because selecting words or images marked in a special way one can jump to other pages presenting information related to those mark-ups.

For example, if in the WWW pages portraied in the slide you click on "CISU Publications", a new page will appear on the computer monitor: it offers a description of the magazines and books published by the Italian Center for UFO Studies, including the covers of some of them. Other hypertext links allows to leave this page and jump to others and so on. The concept of "hypertext" is very simple but very powerful: it delivers the possibility to navigate quickly through a huge quantity of information in a logic and well-organized way, exploiting a tree-structure that you can follow sequentially or by jumps. Access to these WWW sites is generally free and visitors may download text files (documents, articles, listings, etc ...) or images (designs, photos, etc ...), storing them on their computers: after ending the connection, they are able to read them with enough calm, without any problem with the phone bill. Several WWW sites concerning UFOs are already available on several servers, but usually the quality of information you can find over there is not very good. Anyway, the situation is changing thanks to the more and more frequent involvement of serious researchers now approaching INTERNET. New groups and associations have born just around the network, among people having the same interest for UFOs and computers: an example is the INTERNET UFO GROUP (IUFOG), a small American group managing a WWW site.

The newsgroups are special areas entirely devoted to the exchange of messages related to a given subject. Since some time, INTERNET offers some of them completely devoted to ufology, UFO sightings, abductions and other fringe topics: you may even find a newsgroup for CSICOP-like skeptics ! Despite being quite generic in their approach, such discussions often offer some interesting material and, anyway, are an excellent way to spread news and information. A special interest comes from newsgroups devoted to scientific disciplines such as meteorology and psychology, where you may find as well as from the newsgroups devoted to subjects having some sort of possible connection with ufology (for example, forgroups devoted to subjects having some sort of possible connection with ufology (for example, fortean subjects and urban legends).

Quite similar to the newsgroups, the mailing lists are public exchanges of e-mail messages managed by a computer named "server" and filtered by a moderator. Even here, among a lot of messages and documents of poor quality, there is sometimes some interesting stuff. For example, during the last months there have been several messages devoted to the footage of the so-called Roswell autopsy and it has been really very funny to know the many rumours circulating about the matter. This may be well considered one of the negative aspects of the ease of circulation of uncontrolled information supplied by INTERNET.

Finally, the FTP sites are computers anybody can connect through the network where there are files of different kinds (documents, programs, images, etc ....) that can be freely downloaded. As regards UFOs, as far as we know there aren't large archives of really interesting material yet, but the situation will definitely change in the future. Collaboration among UFO groups and researchers is still necessary in order to amass their available material (previously stored in digital form) in sites like FTPs where it can be freely retrieved by everybody.

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