UFOLOGY AND THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY OF THE '90s

The Italian case

(including a short overview about the photographic evidence)

by Maurizio Verga

The early American UFO buffs of the late '40s thought to have collected an outstanding amount of documentation when having a bunch of newsclippings in their own hands. They could have hardly imagined the huge quantity of material about their beloved topic available from all over the world after nearly fifty years.

"Available" is not a correct word, as no present single researcher or private association has enough money and facilities to get and store a complete or really compehensive selection of international books, magazines, newsclippings, reports and whatever else published about the UFO argument. Even worse, the documentation managed by each single buff is so bulky that it is really difficult and costly to arrange an exchange of material with somebody else. Information transfer by using traditional media such as printed paper has become a problem since a lot of time: the situation will become more and more difficult in the near future, producing a huge bottleneck in the development of new well-documented research works.

A commonplace example: let's think to an American researcher having a catalogue of close encounter cases and willing to supply it to an European colleague under the form of a collection of text documents and images. First of all, a lot of time and money are necessary to copy all that stuff in a not too good quality, then more time and money is requested to prepare a parcel and mail it. The material will arrive at destination after some time, yet when it will be in the hands of the researcher there are other problems. The way to manage all that amount of information will be quite limited and always very time-consuming: actually, all operations aimed at extracting only some information on the ground of search requests or alternative use of the available documents will be limited by the paper nature of information. Such a situation is one of the causes of the low number of real well-documented research works carried out within the UFO movement.

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 efficfrom 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 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.

COMPUTER AND UFO RESEARCH

Possible applications of computer technologies to ufology are several, yet those we may actually consider realistic for the present situation of UFO movement are mainly related to digital information production and management of existing printed documents. Fulfillment of such a goal could soon deliver the availability of a huge amount of information being of great use for anybody going to carry out research works, including sophisticated statistical surveys that could be developed in very short times. In such a way a very first basic result would be achieved: the systematic collection and prompt availability of the information evidence.

More advanced applications are nowadays technically possible, but beyond current resources of most UFO groups and buffs. An example is the use of 3D animation in order to simulate the dynamic of a sighting and carry out a series of controls on the witness' tale or the transformation of alleged UFO pictures into 3D models. Even though I and few other Italian researchers have been experimenting something in such fields, we must be patient: the future will offer us several surprises.

A personal computer with suitable components and a well-organized work plan is the perfect tool to store information in standard format. The concept of "standard" is extremely important: it may made available what has been produced by a single researcher to the whole UFO community, efficiently solving the communication problem. So it is necessary to follow a few simple rules when producing a text or catalogue or electronically archiving a given quantity of information. The priority goal is the easy availability of such computer-based documents, now and in the future, as present standards will be such throughout the next years as well. Such rules are really generic, because they want to be only a common minimum reference level to everybody interested in using the computer for UFO-related works. Last but not least, using these standards allows researchers to get rid easily of problems concerning the data transfer between two different computers (PC and Mac, for example).

These formats refer to standards in data storage rather than in data structure. Their use will definitely deliver great benefits to UFO research in the near future. Anyway, there are some other problems related to the data typology to be discussed and which suggestions of solution should be spread among ufologists. An example: unfortunately, there is no set of internationally common "recommendations" for the definition of a minimum set of data to be used for the electronic filing of sighting cases. A possible suggestion could be that one reported in the next slide. Making it known to people involved in UFO research it could be possible to start a common discussion and achieve a set of "recommendations"to be used as guidelines for all people using the computer for their works. The most direct result would be an important correspondence among the data included in the sighting catalogues (today they are often completely incompatible) and the possibility to establish quickly huge international catalogues on which to carry out first level statistical analyses.

UFOLOGY GOES ONLINE

Among the most interesting tools devoted to the spreading of information among ufologists and UFO buffs there are the BBSs and INTERNET. A Bulletin Board System usually is an amateurish system allowing the exchange of electronic mail messages and downloading or uploading of text files or software through the normal phone cables. The system is really fast and cheap, so that an Australian ufologist may let his British colleagues known about a local sighting the very same day by a simple local phone call, even sending a complete report of the sighting itself. The service is generally free and it already allows you to be update nearly in real time about the international scene, thanks to a network of ufologists based in different countries.

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 ings, 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-reltated information are currently available and among them:

the WWW sites the Newsgroups the FTP sites for file downloading E-Mail and Mailing ListsThe 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, 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.

THE ITALIAN EXAMPLE

Unfortunately, UFO research and study activity carried out in Italy is very badly known abroad, mainly due to the language barrier preventing a quick diffusion of the documents. The same problem produced a very imprecise knowledge of the national sightings, where international researchers could actually find a lot of very interesting cases. The very few "classic" events often published in books and magazines are usually full of mistakes if not completely wrong. This is another typical problem of the transmission of information, a problem very common in the past activity of ufologists which now can be solved for its most part, thanks to new computer-based technologies.

It is likely a surprise for many UFO researchers to get acquainted with the quantity and quality of finished and in-progress Italian projects. It is even a bigger surprise to know most projects are currently carried out by computers and Italian ufologists have been pioneers, together with their American colleagues, in the massive use of the personal computer to run their activities.

Between 1984 and 1985 the very first database programs have been developed on the small Commodore 64 home computer to store and manage generic Italian sightings and special collections of cases. Thanks to the popularithe small Commodore 64 home computer to store and manage generic Italian sightings and special collections of cases. Thanks to the popularity of such a machine, several UFO buffs contributed locally to the collection of all known Italian UFO sightings, soon making available a sample in excess of 9,000 events ranging between 1900 and 1990. Still around the mid '80s there have been the early experiments with software devoted to the automatic presentation of text and graphics about UFOs, ufology, classic sightings and results of UFO research, successfully presented in conjunction with several conferences and shows. In 1986 the very first European BBS completely devoted to UFOs was established and run by myself for more than two years and then disbanded due to personal issues. A new BBS, named "U-Link", was established in 1989 in Rome and it is still active. Between 1988 and 1992 about eight issues of a bulletin completely devoted to the computer applications to UFO research, "The Computer UFO Newsletter", have been published as an early experiment to spread and promote the subject, completely unknown to most UFO buffs. Circulation was quite limited and the reaction from the UFO movement was quite cool, likely beacuse ahead of the times.

The use of computers is now normal in the activity of most Italian ufologists, so much that three quarters of the material currently produced by the Italian Center for UFO Studies is available as files for MS-DOS personal computers or Macs. A large percentage of exchanges of material (articles, papers, images, letters, etc ....) takes place by floppy disks, saving money, time and adding a higher flexibility in the management of such information.

Among the works and research projects based on computer facilities, some of them are worth to be introduced as meaningful examples of Italian ufologists activities. Most of these projects have been carried out on behalf of the Italian Center for UFO Studies, the leader organization as regards quantity and quality of produced information and services. Besides promoting the scientific study of the UFO phenomenon, CISU aims at the spreading of information and development/support of research activities, fields where computer facilities may deliver an oustanding help.

ITACAT and TRACAT

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 "occupants"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.

PHOTOCAT AND THE QUESTION OF PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

PHOTOCAT is the Italian Catalogue of cases with photo or video evidence. Before describing the work behind such a catalogue, it is more convenient to introduce shortly the question of photo evidence.

Thousands of pictures of alleged UFO phenomena have been offered to the general public and UFO buffs as a proof of the physical reality of what has been called "flying saucer" for a long time. Photographs emerged in the early days of the UFO era, in the United States of July 1947, producing a lot of debate at once. Faking a picture, especially in a situation where more blurred details in the image oddly mean more mystery, has been a quite simple art. It was a good way to foul friends or journalists, as well as an interesting business for those "skilled"guys who have been selling hoaxed UFO pictures to newspapers or magazines or gullible guys eager to see a "real spaceship".

Most UFO researchers consider photographic evidence nothing but a very suspicious aspect of UFO related stories, something like a side-effect of the deeply rooted myth associated to them. Pictures are too easy to be faked to be considered a valuable "proof". All of us have experienced terrible situations, where pictures have been declared "genuine" and "really portraing a puzzling unknown object" and later found more or less complex hoaxes. Some UFO buffs tried to defend clearly faked pictures just in order to have something concrete in their hands able to demonstrate the physical reality of "flying saucers", so to show that they were not nuts. This attitude has been common throughout the whole history of the UFO movement (suffice to think to the highly controversial Gulf Breeze saga), involving also other individuals. The famous Italian case of Mr. Giampiero Monguzzi (a man willing to become a journalist who presented a series of astonishing photos portraing a classic domed saucer landed on a mountain landscape, with a strange astronaut-like figure next to it) is a clear example: the photographer confessed the hoax to a magazine, also showing the original models, yet somebody argued he had been forced to deny the reality of his encounter with an "alien spacecraft".

Many contactees, since the pioneer G.Adamski, showed several photos as "proof" of their wonderful experience with outer space beings: visual evidence has always been one of the most convincing easy-to-be-made tools to make people believed about the reality of their contacts. Unfortunately, nearly all of the pictures supplied by these folkloristic people have turned into hoaxes or look highly suspicious. Other people and journalists have been responsible for photographic tricks produced in order to get publicity, sell the photos or get a "scoop" useful to increase newspapers or magazines circulation.

As far as I know no project devoted to a comprehensive collection of photographic evidence cases has never been accomplished, even on national scale. Something seems to have changed during the very last two years, but no real work has been produced yet with the honorable exception of a Mexican project headed by the staff of the magazine "Perspectivas Ufologicas". It is highly recommended to national UFO associations or active researchers to start a well-organized project aimed at the comprehensive collection of the valuable video-photographic evidence of their own country, possibly making use of computer technology. International catalogues1 [SS1] or books2 3 devoted to alleged UFO pictures, including "Los OVNIS y la evidencia fotografica" published in 1978 by two Argentinian researchers about a study on UFO pictures and some South and North American cases, have been produced in the past yet these works may be considered far from being complete and, anyway, never updated. Several thousands of pictures should be available all around the world. Archiving of such evidence would be very interesting for two reasons at least:

· a visual collectioailable all around the world. Archiving of such evidence would be very interesting for two reasons at least:

· a visual collection of directly UFO-related imagery

· an in-depth analisys of the features of such documents, the motifs present in them and the reciprocal influence with the UFO myth.

In 1991 I started a new project within the Italian Center for UFO Studies, fully devoted to the collection of all Italian photo and video documents portraing alleged unusual aerial phenomena. All available material was randomly distributed among private archives, magazines, loose newsclippings and often still in the hands of the witnesses themselves. Besides collecting such a material, the problem about how to manage such a mass of documents emerged. Main goal of the project was and still is the establishment of a comprehensive catalogue of photos and videos including their reference data: this is a very first step of a more ambitious work about an in-depth survey of collected evidence under different viewpoints (image patterns, motif patterns, computer image analyses, comparison between faked pictures and "genuine" ones, reasons of forging, etc ....). To carry out project's first goal the use of computer technology has been taken into consideration in order to reduce times and allow a more flexible access and distribution of available data.

At time of this writing about 600 cases have been filed in the database and more or less the same number of images has been acquired by scanner, mostly in grey levels. About 70% of the cases has one image at least, even though sometimes coming from low-quality sources like magazines or newspapers. It is expected to increase such a figure to 75-80% at most when the collection project will be really over: it is practically impossible to have access to some original sources, while others don't carry the related pictures at all. The accumulated photographic evidence from Italy now counts in excess of 80 Megabytes of TIFF images, also available in a highly compressed JPEG format.

Besides collecting pictures of alleged UFO sightings, PHOTOCAT features a sub-catalogue where fakes, conventional phenomena and strange-looking photographic effects produced by camera (ie.: lens flares) or development defects have been stored as well. This is an interesting collection of items to be used as a reference sample against the "real" PHOTOCAT catalogue, in order to compare the two sets in search of possible different patterns. At first glance, alleged photos and recognized fakes don't show any evident difference, yet such a matter will be carefully approached by a future advanced research activity.

PHOTOCAT may well be considered the starting point of further more interesting research projects, including photo analyses. Of course such a task requires first generation pictures at least and excellent scanners featuring high or very high optical resolutions: this means that pictures originally stored into the database have to be scanned again. Professional colour scanners and image processing software are required, as well as a quite powerful hardware configuration: what is even more important is a good knowledge of photographic parameters/rules and optics. Without experience in such fields, evaluation and interpretation of results from a computer-based image analysis would be really limited if not meaningless. It is not enough to carry out seemingly attractive image enhancements or filtering, supplying a different, much more "technological", view of the original picture able to wonder enthusiast people. Computer aided image processing must be coupled with rigorous interpretation of the results, otherwise the whole work could be practically valueless. I have personally experienced that computer technology may fail in finding the clues of a faked pictures, such as a thread sustaining a UFO model, even when the thread was actually there ! Several factors must be considered when examing a photo evidence and evaluation of results must be cautious: the absence of a thread, I repeat, doesn't mean necessarily that the picture is not faked. A thorough investigation about a single photographic case takes a lot of time and money, also due to the many different information to be collected and evaluated. Anyway, Italian photo evidence is available to anybody interested in developing a cross-analysis about the best pictures4 . I have already carried out a quite extensive survey about a two-photo set taken at Battipaglia (Salerno, Southern Italy) on April 9, 19925 , also producing a 20 colour slide collection showing different steps of the analysis, together with related pictures and detailed comments. Results pointed out several doubts about the reliability of the sighting's tale and the real features of the portraied object: final conclusions, also supported by indipendent analysis carried out by American researcher Jeff Sainio, refer to the possibility of a model shot next to the camera. This may be well defined the very first in-depth analysis of an alleged UFO picture carried out in Italy by local researchers. Two other colour pictures, reportedly taken in Sicily in January 1995 by two different guys, have been recently examined and one found to be faked: a cool thread was just on top of the domed saucer !

My personal recommendation to international researchers is the start up of a comprehensive collection of their country's alleged UFO photographs and videos. That's a valuable sample of UFO hystory which features a lot of now neglected information, as well as an outstanding gallery of visual wonders. Preservation of such an evidence, beyond its possible real value as "proof"of an original physical phenomenon, is a real must for any study group or single researcher6 .OTHER COMPUTER-BASED PROJECTSIMAGE BANK is a visual database of UFO-related artworks coming from different sources, something like BUFORA Picture Library. Images have been scanned and stored in standard graphic format in order to be easily available for any kind of use. A short description for each of them allows quick searches. One of the main goals of such a collection is the future possibility to carry out a research work directed to the study of the evolution of the popular perception of UFOs through artworks and other artistic production. Several hundreds of colorful images are now available, offering an impressive illustrated history of UFO imagery.

INTPHOTO is a worlwide database of alleged UFO pictures, now counting about 700 images available as standard digital files. As of the originals, their quality is not always good and most of them are clearly faked, but their value as visual documents, of the UFO myth rather than the UFO phenomenon, is exceptional. This kind of evidence may be studied not only through image processing software looking for possible clues of faking, but mainly as a survey about the evolution of shapes and portraied UFO features throughout times, the motifs you may find in photos, the tricking techniques and the reasons of a so huge availability of documents from all over the world. INTPHOTO doens't want to be a comprehensive international catalogue of alleged UFO pictures, at least for the time being: the evidence you may find in all over the world is so huge that a single researcher cannot afford such a task. Merging of different projects could be a reasonable solution.

Project "ITALIA 3" has been started in the early '80s by the CISU member Paolo Fiorino to collect all the Italian cases of close encounters of the third kind, including fringe events such as contactee cases, bedroom visitors, psychic contactism and strange creatures not directly associated to UFO phenomena. The collection is now in excess of 600 entries including the basic data and the original sources stored in a standard database format.

AIRCAT is a catalogue of the Italian sightings having civil or military pilots as witnesses. Managed by CISU members Marco Orlandi and Renzo Cabassi, it now includes more than 120 cases currently stored into a standard database software for personrs Marco Orlandi and Renzo Cabassi, it now includes more than 120 cases currently stored into a standard database software for personal computer. Each entry offers several data, including a short description of the sighting.

Another interesting project where the computer plays a basic role is called "1978". It refers to the collection of the complete documentation related to UFO cases taken place in Italy and reported by the press during 1978, the year of the big wave. It is possible to estimate in 2,000 the number of sightings during that incredible year. The project also involves the collection of all the generic UFO-related newsclippings published by the Italian newspapers and magazines in 1978, just to be able to carry out an extensive analysis of the press coverage of that time and its bias on the development of the wave itself. A database program is used to store all the information about the collected newsclippings, including titles (a study about how journals presented the subject through titles has been planned and funny interesting results are expected) and a short sighting summary. Among the data included in each record there are some "keywords" taken from the text of the press articles, in order to carry out a preliminary experiment: to find possible language patterns in the journalists' treatment of the UFO subject and compare them with tales coming from UFO witnesses. In order to make the information evidence of the 1978 UFO wave even more complete, original newsclippings are being to be scanned and linked to each database record as image files. When looking up the electronic archive, the researcher will be able to have access to all the record information, as well as to the readable image of the newsclipping itself. The same philosophy has been applied to another running Project called "Origins". It deals with an analisys of the press coverage during the early very interesting years of the "flying saucer"debate in Italy, namely between 1947 and 1952. Preliminary statistical results from the project are expected in the first quarter of 1996, together with the availability of the whole computer-based catalogue.

Scanning newsclippings, especially those directly related to UFO sightings, is becoming a regular activity in many CISU projects, including the maintance of local sighting databases run by the representatives of the Center. The reference of the scanned newsclipping image is linked to each case, so that it could be displayed when accessing the case itself. This is a first step towards the availability of real multimedia UFO catalogues, where researchers can find different kinds of documents just at their fingertips.

Even though not very well known abroad, Italy offers a lot of examples of advanced use of new communication facilities applied to UFO research. As the American colleagues, Italian ufologists have established a UFO WWW site on INTERNET in Italian and English language, and a network of BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) offering a large selection of UFO-related text files and images, as well as areas for common discussion and presentation of the latest news and sightings. The network is called "UFONET" and counts more than a dozen of different sites all over Italy. The discussion forums have been visited by hundreds of people each month: one of the most direct benefits for CISU is the even more complete coverage of many areas of the country, so being able to get news about alleged sightings in a very short time. These and other kind of information (also coming from all over the world) are weekly offered to all UFO buffs and whoever interested in the subject through a phone service named "UFOTEL". Just paying for your phone call, you may listen to a three-minute report updating you about the latest news from the UFO scene. A similar service is also available through "Videotel", an on-line service run by Telecom Italy (similar to the well known French Minitel) you can connect through a special terminal supplied by the same company. CISU has also three 24-hour automatic answering machines in Northern, Central and Southern Italy to allow witnesses to report their own sightings, plus others locally.

MULTIMEDIA CATALOGUES

Another great application of current computer technology to the management of UFO information evidence comes from the development of easy-to-be-distributed multimedia catalogues.

Special catalogues of UFO events, such as ITACAT, TRACAT and PHOTOCAT, take a lot of physical space under the form of paper documents and related imagery. Of course, handling and distribution of such a huge mass of information is far from being easy and efficient. More, data exchange among researchers is always difficult, time-consuming and costly. Computer technologies, again, may offer interesting solutions through an affordable investment. Most database programs may now handle different kind of information: data, text, images, graphics and even sound and video. That is just the same kind of stuff researchers have to manage in their nuts and bolts archives.

The idea is to make all of this documentation directly available on a computer screen, where the user may decide what to see. Imagine to have a card (called "record" in computer jargon) on the monitor for each reported sighting: all main data about the case are displayed, including original sources. More, you have references about different documents linked to that same case: newsclippings, witness' sketches of the reported phenomenon, an abstract of the report, photographs of the sighting environment or possible ground traces, etc ... Displaying these information on the screen is very simple: it is enough to point the mouse cursor on a suitable control button and click. You may imagine the noteworthy advantages coming from such a computer application: to have an on-line comprehensive documentation of each stored case on a cheap support, able to deliver great flexibility in data management. Other side benefits are preservation and easy duplication of the collected documentation, which digital nature may find further use for other projects.

An extension of the concept of a generic database software able to manage different kinds of documents is the development of a special UFO-oriented program. A brand new multimedia product will be soon released by myself as a first example of a new way to offer UFO information to all researchers and buffs. Available on floppy disk (limited edition) or CD-ROM, it delivers a professionally developed software running under Microsoft Windows on personal computers, featuring a very attractive and efficient user interface especially designed for such a task.

Three main catalogues of Italian UFO sightings are available through the product: ITACAT (close encounters), TRACAT (landing trace cases) and PHOTOCAT (photo cases). Each of them comes with an extensive set of highly defined pictures and sketches, besides all the main data and full abstracts with comments for most events. More, a general catalogue of Italian sightings (about 10,000) is included together with suitable software for browsing and queries: this allow the researcher to carry out easily any kind of search on the database. Among the other stuff included in such a huge work, there is IMAGEBANK (an international collection of UFO-related artworks and illustrations able to offer a first appreciation of artists' coverage about the theme of "flying saucers"throughout the years), INTPHOTO (a catalogue with hundreds of alleged UFO photos from all over the world), a multimedia lecture with a few tens of colourful slides, a complete bibliography of Italian UFO books (including description and cover image of them), a complete presentation of the Italian Center for UFO Studies publications and a set of statistical graphs plotted on the ground of the data available through the included UFO sighting catalogue. Among the more than 350 Mbytes of material making the multimedia project, you may count nearly 2,000 images. Even though mostly related to the Italian sc 350 Mbytes of material making the multimedia project, you may count nearly 2,000 images. Even though mostly related to the Italian scene, this work delivers a lot of material from everywhere in the world. Its new way to present and manage available information, makes it something quite different from the other two UFO CD-ROM now available on the market (others have been announced and will be available soon), namely Wendelle Stevens' "UFO - This Planet's most complete guide to close encounters"(published in 1994) and the interesting Stanton Friedman's "UFOs - The Real Story" (1995).

A CONCLUSION ....

... may refers to the awareness of having an incredible evidence in our hands, the UFO information, which is so huge we cannot manage it efficiently. This means that is not fully accessible to the scientific establishment and UFO researchers as well, reducing its outstanding value. Such an information is the real unquestionable evidence of the presence of something reported by millions of people around the world. We must not miss it.

Computer technologies may help us dramatically in making information easily and quickly available to everybody seriously interested in coping with the UFO question. Switching from a paper-based archive to an electronic one is not easy and fast for people like ufologists sharing limited resources. Anyway, the work has been already started and the future will show us the results of such a revolution. Maybe a dusty file is much more fascinating than a cold piece of hardware filled in with chips and wires: probably that's true, but progress goes on quickly and all of us need new more efficient tools to deal with UFO information and related research. Ten years ago, most of the things reported in this paper looked still somewhere in a distant future. now they aren't. In ten years expect even more.

Maurizio Verga, May 1995

for the 8th BUFORA International UFO Congress, Sheffield, 19th-20th August, 1995.

1 Delair J.B., Cox E. & Twine R. (1975-1978) "A provisional catalogue of UFO photographs" UFO REGISTER Vol. 6, n° 2 + Vol. 7 n° 2 + Vol. 8 n° 22 Stevens W. & Roberts A. (1985-86) "UFO Photographs around the World" Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, UFO Photo Archives3 Fusco S. & De Turris S. (1975) "Obbiettivo sugli UFO - Fotostoria dei dischi volanti", Edizioni Mediterranee, Italy4 International groups or researchers interested in knowing more about PHOTOCAT and exchanging photographs or videos may write to this author: Maurizio Verga, via Matteotti 85, 22072 Cermenate (Co), ITALY. Please state, if available, a fax number.

5 A metal-made looking object was seen to fly slowly over some buldings just in front of the witness' house (the mother of him stated to have seen the object before the son). The young man took two pictures, eight seconds one from the other, by an old Russian camera he had on a table. Then the object took off vertically at high speed.6 This author is available to anybody interested in such a project for consulting or delivering of suitable information/material.

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[SS1] Delair J.B., Cox E. & Twine R. (1975-1978) "A provisional catalogue of UFO photographs" UFO REGISTER Vol. 6, n° 2 + Vol. 7 n° 2 + Vol. 8 n° 2 he even more complete coverage of many areas of the country, so be