FAST searching of major free online collections of UFO journals (or just browse/download them)

It is now possible to download the journals published over the last few decades by several significant UFO groups (including NICAP, MUFON and APRO) and do REALLY fast searches of them.

Introduction

If you want to understand ufology, you need to know a bit about it (often frustrating) history... To get an insight into that history, it's worth spending a bit of time glancing through some of the journals published by a few of the better know UFO groups. Logistically and financially, this wasn't always easy to do. However, in the past couple of years, there has been an explosion in the amount of scanned material made available free online by various UFO groups (although I wish some of those groups would make considerable more material available online…).

Many people posting on Internet discussion forums do not appear to be aware of these resources or, at least as importantly, the ability to search them quickly.

I’ve lost track of the number of discussions that would have been improved by a quick search of the journals published by the more significant UFO groups. Quite a few of the sightings that have been discussed on ATS since then are in fact covered in more detail in those journals than in the material available online... Hopefully, this thread (if it gets noticed) will assist and encourage people to do such searches.

As part of researching an element of my thread on astronomers and UFOs, I came across the search method outlined below last week.

I really wish I’d been able to do such fast searches of major collections of UFO journals a few years ago…

Being able to do such searches would have saved me a LOT of time and effort laboriously reading through issues of such publications trying to find relevant material.

I’ve been pretty amazed at the speed of the searches outlined below.

I’ve previously referred to a couple of these collections being available online, but I thought it worth starting a new discussion due to several factors (e.g. the search method outlined below, the NICAP material now also available online, and other journals also now available). If you don’t mind, I’ll repeat some of my previous comments to make this thread more-or-less self-contained.

It may be that other people are already aware of this method (or something similar). I wasn’t. Presumably some other people are currently as blind I was, so some people may appreciate this outline.

I’ll give more detail below, but basically:

(1) Step 1 (scroll down or click here): Download the material you want to be able to search. I’ve previously given links to I’ll give links to that material and a few more treats below (particularly NICAP journals).

(2) Step 2 (scroll down or click here): Download a free piece of software called “PDF-XChange Viewer”.

(3) Step 3 (scroll down or click here): Use the search functions in “PDF-XChange Viewer” to search an entire directory of journals in one go.

(4) Step 4 (Optional) (scroll down or click here): Make the filenames more informative (e.g. by adding a prefix giving the name of the relevant Journal, using a free tool such as “Bulk Rename Utility”).

In relation to steps (2) and (3), I know that Adobe Reader 10 (and presumably other pieces of PDF software) does allow searching multiple PDF files – but the speed of this PDF-XChange Viewer’s search function makes the Adobe Reader’s equivalent search look incredibly slow.

(Of course, searching can never entirely replace reading through material – but it can be a pretty good start… In a few minutes of searching on various topics, I’ve found material on those topics that I can’t recall ever seeing online or in any of the UFO books I’ve read).

Step 1 : Downloading the material you want (including NICAP, MUFON and APRO journals)

The most significant collections available include:

(1) NICAP “UFO Investigator” bulletins, at the link on the top of that webpage.

(2) APRO bulletins

(3) MUFON Journals




1a. NICAP material (including the “UFO Investigator” bulletin)



NICAP’s bulletins (plus, significantly, quite a few internal NICAP documents) have been made available online by CUFOS and can be accessed (for free) via the CUFOS website at the link below:
NICAP “UFO Investigator” Bulletins and other NICAP material



Most people that regularly visit UFO forums or have read almost any decent UFO book will have come across NICAP, but just in case I’ll embed a video below of an interview from 1958 of the most significant leader of NICAP – Donald Keyhoe:




The NICAP internal documents made available by CUFOS give helpful insights into how major UFO groups operated and the concerns of its leadership and members. Many of you may have encountered suggestions that NICAP failed because of infiltration by CIA agents (see, for example, the thread on ATS entitled “Spooks infiltrating UFO community”, but the internal NICAP documents indicate the many petty disputes and arguments that took place within NICAP over a prolonged period (which may seem familiar to those that have followed the recent spats within MUFON…):

See, for example, the following letter from one influential NICAP insider (Don Berliner, still active in ufology) to another NICAP researcher - Julian Hennessey – voicing private thoughts in a letter which was stated to be intended for Hennessey’s eyes only:

www.ufodocarchive.org...




www.ufodocarchive.org...



Kandinsky has recently linked to material from NICAP’s bulletins in his recent interesting thread “ ‘It's a UFO! Kill It!’ Beaufort Farm Incident”).





1b. MUFON Journals
www.theblackvault.com...


Some of you will already know that the Black Vault website and MUFON had a joint project a while ago, under which a lot of MUFON's old journals were made available to download free at the link below:
MUFON Journal collection

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/6858e958e095.jpg[/atsimg]

For those that aren't familiar with MUFON, see the relevant wikipedia entry:
en.wikipedia.org...

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is an American non-profit organization that investigates cases of reported UFO sightings. It is one of the oldest and largest UFO-investigative organizations in the United States.

MUFON was originally established as the Midwest UFO Network in Quincy, Illinois on May 30, 1969 by Walter H. Andrus, Allen Utke, John Schuessler, and others. Most of MUFON's early members had earlier been associated with Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO).

The organization now has more than 3,000 members worldwide, with a majority of its membership base situated in the continental United States. MUFON operates a worldwide network of regional directors for field investigation of reported UFO sightings, holds an annual international symposium, and publishes the monthly MUFON UFO Journal.

The stated mission of MUFON is the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity through investigations, research and education.

Or see this video:



The issues of MUFON’s journal available online span several decades, under the original title of “Skylook” to its more modern “MUFON Joural” title.





The multitude of issues available can be downloaded quickly and easily using various download managers. I used a free piece of software called “Flashget”. You can download Flashget free here. After installing Flashget, when you are on a page listing the relevant issues you can simply right click and select the “download all links with Flashget” option and untick everything but the PDF option, as in the picture below:






A very useful (albeit slightly incomplete) Table of Contents for the MUFON Journal has been posted online by "Rike" on the MUFON Forum:

forums.mufon.com...

A brief sample is posted here to draw attention to this resource generously shared by Rike:

December 1989
www.theblackvault.com...

ALIENS VISIT VORONEZHMoscow News
CURRENT CASE LOGDan Wright
IN OTHERS' WORDSLucius Parish
VIEW PENSACOLA UFOWalt Andrus & Gary Watson
UFOs & THE US GOVERNMENT: PART IIWilliam L. Moore
LOOKING BACKBob Gribble
LETTERSFuller, Hill, Spencer, Ring, Others
MIXED MESSAGEJohn Carpenter
DECEMBER NIGHT SKYWalter Webb
JANUARY NIGHT SKYWalter Webb
DIRECTOR'S MESSAGEWalt Andrus


November 1989
www.theblackvault.com...

ROSWELL & THE X-15: UFO BASICS Leonard H. Stringfield
UFOs & THE U.S. GOVERNMENT: PART I William L. Moore
CURRENT CASE LOG Dan Wright
REPORTED UFO SIGHTING Leland Bechtel & Robert MacKenna
USSR UFO LANDING WITH ENTITIES Walt Andrus
LOOKING BACK Bob Gribble
THE UFO PRESS Dennis Stacy
THE NOVEMBER NIGHT SKY Walter Webb
DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE Walt Andrus
UFOs AND SECURITY Soviet Military Review

1c. APRO Bulletins

I have previously mentioned that the “Open Minds TV” website has helpfully made available for free download a whole bunch of APRO Bulletins. I have also previously given a link to those bulletins.

Unfortunately, ATS currently has a policy of replacing any links to that website with “No link”, so you will either have to do a Google search for them or go to the MUFON forum - where my post on this subject has not been altered and contains the relevant link.






The covering article by Antonio Huneeus on the “Open Minds TV” website includes the following:

One of the many interesting items in the Wendelle Stevens UFO collection acquired by Open Minds was a nearly complete set of The APRO Bulletin, the official publication of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. Founded in Wisconsin in 1952 by Coral Lorenzen and ran jointly with her husband Jim Lorenzen into the mid-80s, APRO played a key role in the history and development of both American and international ufology. To paraphrase Star Trek, APRO went where others had not dared to go—the rich and uncharted territory of humanoid cases, close encounters of the third kind (CE-III) and eventually abductions. These subjects were mostly ignored back then by the official Air Force Project Blue Book, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the other big UFO organization of the time, and most mainstream researchers and scientists. The mindset back then was to concentrate mostly on UFO sightings and stay as far away as possible from the colorful claims of ET contact paraded in the media by George Adamski, Howard Menger and other popular contactees.

APRO started in 1952, the year of the great American UFO wave, as a small, dues paying membership organization with a mimeographed periodical, the APRO Bulletin, edited by Coral Lorenzen. In 1954, the Lorenzen family moved from Wisconsin to Alamogordo, New Mexico, as both Jim and Coral were hired to work as civilian employees at Holloman Air Force Base. In 1960 Jim was hired as senior technical associate with the Kitt Peak National Observatory and so the Lorenzens moved to Tucson, Arizona, where they lived till the end of their lives in the 1980s. In 1964 Jim became the director of APRO and Coral served as secretary-treasurer and editor of the Bulletin. Lt. Col. Wendelle Stevens moved to Tucson when he retired from the USAF, where he had the opportunity of working closely with the Lorenzens for many years. His collection of the Bulletin spans decades, from 1954 into the early1980s, providing an invaluable record of that ufological era.

(Some of you may be familiar with Antonio Huneeus. He was one of the people involved in writing the Rockefeller Briefing Document, discussed in a previous thread at : Best cases - Rockefeller Briefing Document

1d. Other collections

There are also quite a few other significant free collections of PDF versions of various UFO journals worth obtaining – including:

(a) Sunlite (Tim Printy).

(In my view, this is the best sceptical journal currently being made available that covers ufology)





(b) Journal of UFO History (Richard Hall)

Comments and material from one of the most experienced ufologists, sadly now deceased.



(c) Zetetic Scholar (Marcello Truzzi)

Interesting and scholarly articles, particularly relating to sociological and philosophical issues arising from UFO/anomaly research.


(d) UFO Historical Revue (Barry Greenwood) and “Just Cause”, under the “Publications” tab on the menu on the left hand side of the webpage.


(e) Afrinews (Cynthia Hind)

Material relating to UFO sightings in Africa.

The online source of scanned issues of Afrinews was kindly mentioned to me by another member of ATS, “Netties Hermit“)


(f) Cowflop (Robert Todd),

Relatively short lived publication, but by an influential researcher.




(g) Northern UFO News (Jenny Randles)

This publication is not very well known outside the UK, but Jenny Randles is one of the most level-headed UFO researchers you will come across so it is worth including.

At the moment, the collection appears to be incomplete. Few of the issues before Issue 140 actually being downloadable. I’ve mentioned this to Robert Moore, the researcher that has generously worked (with Jenny Randles) to make this publication available.





There are also samples of quite a few more publications online, many of which are usefully collated together on the Libriufo website at the link below (which can, however, be a bit frustrating to use since it is not obvious from the title pages which collections are actually downloadable):
www.libriufo.it...

Step 2: Download a free piece of software called “PDF-XChange Viewer”

PDF-XChange Viewer can be downloaded from the link below (free):
pdf-xchange-viewer

There appear to be “pro” (or paid-for) versions of the software, but the free version appears to include the relevant search functions and I’ve been using the free version very happily for over a week without any problems.

As I mentioned above, I know that Adobe Reader 10 (and presumably other pieces of PDF software) does allow searching multiple PDF files – but the speed of this PDF-XChange Viewer’s search function makes the Adobe Reader’s equivalent search look incredibly slow.

Step 3: Use the search functions in “PDF-XChange Viewer”

PDF-XChange Viewer can be used to search an entire directory full of PDF documents (or, indeed, containing sub-directories full of different collections of PDF documents). For example, I have a directory entitled “Journals” which contains sub-directories for journals published by NICAP, MUFON and APRO. I can search one of the sub-directories or all of them using one simple (and amazingly fast) search in PDF-XChange Viewer.

After installing the free version of “PDF-XChange Viewer” (see Step 2 above), when you run the program you simply:

(1) Click on the search button (i.e. the image of the binoculars)

(2) Type in the word you want to search for (and select any options, e.g. making the search term case sensitive)

(3) Click on the drop down box and select “browse” at the bottom. You can then select the directory of journals you want to search (e.g. your MUFON journal directory or a directory containing ALL the journals you have downloaded)

The relevant steps are illustrated below:


Very quickly, a search for, say, “pilots”, generates a list of results such as the one below:



You can very quickly click on the various results in turn and they are displayed (with the relevant keyword highlighted) in a separate window next to the list of results.

An example is shown below.

Step 4 (Optional) : Make the filenames more informative

The NICAP bulletins and MUFON journals have file names that are not very informative when found using one of the above searches of several collections of journals. For example, an indication that a file with the name “July 1968” contains 10 instances of a particular word does not tell you if that journal is from NICAP, MUFON or from one of the many less significant publications.

See, for example, the snippet of the results of a search for “Rendlesham” in the picture below:



I’ve found small additions to the file names to be very useful (e.g. inserting “NICAP” at the start of the NICAP bulletins) to indicate the source of results of a search of various journals.

This can be done quickly using a free and useful (if somewhat unfriendly looking…) piece of software, called the “Bulk Rename Utility”.

Once installed and run, the options can look rather intimidating but for the current task you simply have to put the put the relevant word (e.g. “MUFON)” in the “Add” column and then click on the “rename” button on the bottom right – see the illustration below:

REFERENCES

NICAP “UFO Investigator” bulletins

www....(nolink)/apro-bulletins/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow">APRO bulletins

MUFON Journals

Sunlite (Tim Printy)

Journal of UFO History (Richard Hall)

Zetetic Scholar (Marcello Truzzi)

UFO Historical Revue (Barry Greenwood) and “Just Cause”

Afrinews

Bulk Rename Utility

pdf-xchange-viewer

Superb information IsaacKoi,very much appreciated and a big thank you for your time and effort;Will be downloading a lot of this data,cheers;

Your...brain...is...too...BIG! Thank you. Looks like I'm gonna learn about more than UFOs by the time I get through with this excellent research lesson.

Hey, that San Antonio UFO piece really caught my eye. Not much to go on, but a seemingly really solid sighting. The stories we're all familiar with aren't necessarily the "best" ones.

A lot of good reading/research ahead...

reply to post by IsaacKoi
Thanks for this Isaak, I'll certainly give the app a try; it looks potentially very useful.

I've got thousands of journals and papers covering anything from archaeology to aviation safety and ufology to anthropology. Books on art, psychology and folklore etc. If it's interesting - and a pdf - there's a folder for it on one of the hard drives. In most folders, there are textfiles of indexes and cross-references to help find what I want.

The FSR index I showed you took hours to finish and only accounted for some 30 issues.

This app should make a lot of that effort as easy as 1-2-3.

I'd like to add links to some UFO-related pdf magazines and journals that weren't in your OP. The first is Phenomena Magazine, where writers (known and unknown) present UFO cases as well as paranormal articles. It's a UK endeavour and worth reading - 29 issues so far.

The Journal of Scientific Exploration is a great source of papers authored by core researchers like Michael Swords, Peter Sturrock, Jacques Vallee and Massimo Teodorani.

They also publish the Edge Science magazines that cover many aspects of cryptozoology and paranormal subjects.

Jacques Vallee's site also has a section of some his UFO studies over HERE.

There's a stack of good resources for anyone willing to dig around. An app that makes many of them searchable can only be a good thing.

ETA: I forgot to add Martin Shough's research papers from his site over HERE.

reply to post by IsaacKoi


Well done. An excellent resource, but much chaff to separate from the wheat. No doubt there are thousands of cases that may have been reasonably well investigated, but were documented at most once. There is one on 20 August 1995 in Central New Jersey, USA that I continue to look for.

Once again an excellent thread Issac!!! Thanks so much for this, it definitely should be a sticky thread...

The link didn't work for me.

This one did.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
I'd like to add links to some UFO-related pdf magazines and journals that weren't in your OP. The first is Phenomena Magazine, where writers (known and unknown) present UFO cases as well as paranormal articles. It's a UK endeavour and worth reading - 29 issues so far.

Thanks for the extra links Kandinsky.

Is the Phenomena Magazine available to download? I can't seem to find downloadable PDFs on the website.

Thanks also for pointing out the link to "pdf xchange viewer" didn't work. I've fixed the space that somehow crept into the URL, so that the above posts include this link (which works for me):
www.tracker-software.com...

Again,amazing thread.
I think this is your best thread ever Isaac!

Originally posted by disownedsky
Well done. An excellent resource, but much chaff to separate from the wheat. No doubt there are thousands of cases that may have been reasonably well investigated, but were documented at most once. There is one on 20 August 1995 in Central New Jersey, USA that I continue to look for.

Hi disownedsky,

If you can tell me a bit more about it, I'll be happy to check a few of the larger UFO databases that I own.

I've already checked the biggest (UFOCAT, sold by CUFOS) and there isn't a single sighting in there for that date.

reply to post by IsaacKoi
The downloads are through the 'back issues' tab...here.

There seems to be a few dead links that aren't ordinarily there, but most issues are available if you click on the cover images. You can email them or I can email them to you.

BUFORA used to have a page of pdf research/discussion articles but I can't find the page to link.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
reply to post by IsaacKoi

 

The downloads are through the 'back issues' tab...here.

There seems to be a few dead links that aren't ordinarily there, but most issues are available if you click on the cover images. You can email them or I can email them to you.

Thanks. I'll try to sort something out.

BUFORA used to have a page of pdf research/discussion articles but I can't find the page to link.

I may start a separate (short) thread soon about a CD being sold by BUFORA, which has their journal and many other research publications on it - for a very reasonable price (unlike the price they put on a CD they sell with just their Vehicle Interference Report on it). I'll keep the current thread just for free collections of journals/magazines.

Originally posted by Nikola014
Again,amazing thread.
I think this is your best thread ever Isaac!

Thanks for the kind words Nikola014, but I doubt this thread will appeal to many members of ATS.

I hope, however, that it causes a few members to download the relevant material and use the search method I've outlined (or some other method) to contribute to relevant threads. There's a lot more information in print (on classic cases and well well known cases) than many people realize from reading websites - quite a few of which tend to cut and paste the same material.