A project for the collection of Italian close encounter cases was started in 1977, in order to have a
comprehensive well-organized catalogue of all the events of such a kind. In 1985 the project went on
computers and since then it has been managed on a database. The Italian Center for UFO Studies
published a first 260-page version of the commented catalogue in 1989 and a new revised illustrated
version is scheduled for late 1995.
This huge work offers a collection of nearly 600 close encounters taken place in Italy between 1912
and 1995. Each case is stored in a database program with its basic data, plus up to nine images
related to newsclippings, skecthes, photographs, etc ....., as well as the full abstract of the event. The
researcher having access to the database may display all of these documents together, besides being
able to perform any kind of query on the available data. For example, to find all cases happened
during the 1978 wave, in December, in Sicily and involving ôoccupantsö is only a matter of one or
two seconds.
TRACAT is the Italian Catalogue of ground trace cases: started in 1982, it has been published in
several different editions, the last one by the Italian Center for UFO Studies, including pictures of
traces and detailed comments for each event. The catalogue has now more than 240 entries and it is
fully managed on a computer database like the ITACAT one, with photos and sketches when
available.
Basic data coming from both ITACAT and TRACAT have been used to process and plot some
preliminary statistical graphs. More extensive statistics on a selected range of solid cases will be
carried out in the future through sophisticated computer programs.
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