'The Largest Single Collection of UFO Material Is Being Cataloged'

Thought this was a great photo shared by Chris Rutkowski and looks like the late Stanton Friedman donated all his 60 years of UFO research material to the Provincial Archives in New Brunswick, Canada.

Apparently archivists concerned about document preservation reached out to Stanton after he announced he was retiring from UFO research but the files were 'larger than expected' and 'it took five cargo vans to move all of Friedman’s substantial records'. 

The Largest Single Collection of UFO Material Is Being Cataloged


That's the good news. The bad news is that the files being cataloged are the ones scattered in the photo you see here.

Archivists are actively cataloging what is believed to be the largest single collection of UFO material in the world.

The files belonged to Stanton T. Friedman, a Canadian scholar and nuclear physicist who spent 60 years studying the UFO phenomena and who suddenly died earlier this year. As you can tell from the photo above, this is no small task. Archivists caution that it could take up to 10 years to comb through and catalog everything..


Kerr, who also chairs the Canadian Council of Archives, said there are three full time employees in the private records section where Friedman’s collection are being shifted through. However, unfortunately, Friedman’s files are only one in a number of collections provincial archivists are working on. No one can be dedicated to working on the famed Ufologist’s collection full-time.

Because the records are both sizable and in such disarray, Kerr said ideally she’d like to have two archivists focused solely on getting Friedman’s files cataloged and stored. “Maybe someone will start a GoFundMe or some such thing to raise money so we can hire a couple extra archivists on contract,” Kerr mused.

Even with two full-time employees working on them, Kerr says it could still take 3-4 years to finish organizing Friedman’s files. “There is definitely a demand to see the records and we definitely feel the pressure to make it available as fast as we can—but we also want to do the work right,” said Kerr.

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It's also mentioned in this article that the team has thousands of documents to go through (with 300 boxes so far and more on the way) and that Stanton 'wasn't much of a filer' and 'more of a stacker'.

Archivist delighted to comb through mountain of late UFO researcher's records


In the months leading up to his death, nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman started donating his vast collection of records to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. 

And he had a lot of records. 

Archivist Joanna Aiton-Kerr said they've received about 300 boxes so far — that's about 60 metres if you line them up single file, she said — and she expects several more cargo vans to come. 

But the daunting task of archiving the records has been anything but a hardship for her team, she said. It's a treasure trove that reflects a brilliant, curious mind, a thorough researcher and a funny, kind-hearted individual.

"This has been a real education for me, and I don't know if I've ever enjoyed helping to process something more than this one," Aiton-Kerr told Shift New Brunswick.

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Along with Kathleen Marden, Stanton gives one of his last interviews below discussing Robert Todd's FOIA research into early government UFO documentation, the curious transition between Project Sign to Project Grudge and the subsequent changes in Air Force regulation which made it a crime for military personnel to discuss UFO reports.

Also brought up is how in 1955 the Secretary of the Air Force lied to the public about Batelle Memorial Institute's BBSR14 UFO study and some pretty revealing info on the antics of debunkers Phillip Klass and Donald Menzel (who was secretly working for the NSA).






Other UFO Archives:

Unfortunately other UFO catalogues like NICAP's Richard Hall's files and the Wendelle Stevens collection are now in private hands but do think it's important to save (and share) all these UFO archives for posterity and future research.. so hats off to Stanton for making his publicly available. 

Also nice to see David Marler and Sweden's AFU both making their huge collections available for open research (upon request) and the John Timmerman archives being used to compile the book 'Grassroots UFOs' - most folks here are already aware but the efforts of ATS member Isaac Koi are also truly remarkable and his research pretty much speaks for itself.


Links:

Major Donald Keyhoe / Dr James E. McDonald / Professor Michael Swords / Wendy Connors / Robert Gribble / Ivan T. Sanderson / George D. Fawcett

a reply to: karl 12

Obviously Stanton's collection would be amazing to comb through, but kudos to these guys as well:

Also nice to see David Marler and Sweden's AFU both making their huge collections available for open research (upon request) and the John Timmerman archives being used to compile the book 'Grassroots UFOs' - most folks here are already aware but the efforts of ATS member Isaac Koi are also truly remarkable and his research pretty much speaks for itself.

Funnily, I recently watched a lecture by Håkan Blomqvist, one of the founders of AFU, it's worth a look:

a reply to: Zcustosmorum

Thanks for posting that presentation mate -thought he made a good point about 'self censorship' in the Bjorkvik case and did enjoy hearing about the history of the organisation - those guys really do deserve a huge pat on the back when it comes to preserving UFO heritage.

Another treasure trove for ufologists is the AFU Downloads website. AFU has around 80,000 magazine issues on paper, from 57 nations across the world. Of these 22,500 issues are digitized and many of these are aviable to download for free at the our website.

 Isaac Koi, of AFU’s International Advisory Board, is making an herculean effort to trace editors and publishers of journals and newsletters asking for the rights to scan the contents of old magazine volumes and making them available as PDFs. This is an ongoing work with new magazines added on a regular basis. An invaluable reference source for all types of research into UFO history.

Here you can find complete volumes of many rare old UFO and Fortean magazines: Australian Saucer Record 1955-1962, Saucers, Space & Science (Canada) 1957-1972, Topside (Canada) 1960-1971, Ouranos (France) 1952-1980), Flying Saucers (New Zealand) 1953-1957, Approach (South Africa) 1958-1960, Weltraumbote 1955-1961, Flying Saucer News (United Kingdom) 1953-1956), CSI Quaterly (USA) 1952-1954, Saucer Scoop (USA) 1966-1969 – to name just few.

link 1 / 2

a reply to: karl 12

Those are great news, as I'm sure their idea is to put everything online (if there isn't any personal information), as is the tendency for all archives for the last 20 years or so.

I hope they get the money to get a full time group working on it, as a group dedicated to that work will speed things up, as they will get to know how Friedman thought and worked, making it easier to understand the whole archive.

Too bad they are not thinking about digitising the archive, having that accessible online (preferably with an OAI/PMH option) would be great, but, from my personal experience, it would take another team of two people around one year to scan all those documents, and that's a work that should only be started after the archive has been organised, otherwise it would only make things harder to make the connection between images and original documents and they could be scanning documents not worth of being preserved.

PS: the company where I work just finished organising and scanning a 20 metres archive and we have been working with archives for the last 24 years, so I have some experience about it.

Collection of information probably has good knowledge within. But...

Doesn’t give credit to community that an expert is an unorganised hoarder.

a reply to: karl 12

I have a lot of spare time and i lived in Canada, I'd offer my services but not for free, not doing that as it would be a lot of hours work

a reply to: CrazeeWorld777

Are you an archivist?

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: karl 12

I hope they get the money to get a full time group working on it, as a group dedicated to that work will speed things up, as they will get to know how Friedman thought and worked, making it easier to understand the whole archive.

Certainly is some good news amigo and a GoFundMe page was suggested to hire a couple of extra archivists on contract in the first article - Zcustosmorum's posted vid also mentions how government programmes and subsidies have helped the AFU with extra employees (retired professionals have also volunteered).

By the sounds of it Friedman's archives are similar to Dr McDonald's in content and the University of Arizona did a great job there.

Dr James E McDonald’s Archives

Papers, 1904-1997 (bulk 1958-1971). Mostly correspondence, cases, reports, interviews, and printed materials relating to James E. McDonald's investigations, 1958 to 1971, into unidentified flying objects and similar sightings, and governmental investigations, responses and reports. Contains photocopies of approximately 580 Project Blue Book sighting reports, mostly by pilots, and some with airborne and ground radar verification. Also includes four handwritten journals, 1958-1971, describing UFO investigative activity; papers and talks, 1966-1977, given before conferences, symposia, and groups; research materials, including his 1967 trip to Australia and New Zealand; a referenced outline of an unpublished book; over 80 audio-tapes of interviews, talks, and conversations on UFO topics; photographic materials on various subjects; and supplemental material.

Link 1 / 2

originally posted by: ArMaP

Too bad they are not thinking about digitising the archive, having that accessible online (preferably with an OAI/PMH option) would be great, but, from my personal experience, it would take another team of two people around one year to scan all those documents, and that's a work that should only be started after the archive has been organised, otherwise it would only make things harder to make the connection between images and original documents and they could be scanning documents not worth of being preserved.

You certainly know your stuff mate and couldn't agree more - have been waiting on Michael Sword's digitized files for a while now (do think the man is a bit of a legend) but it's a long time coming and his blog hasn't been updated in quite a while.

Apparently he helped organize Richard Hall's basement archives back in 1989 and there's some further discussion about file digitization in the comments section below.

Just a Piece of "Practical" News

Cheers.

a reply to: karl 12

Hey Karl.

I often wondered what happened to the substantial files of UFO collection, of our own Colin Norris, when he passed away a few years ago.

I understand his son was caretaking it all......not sure.

Perhaps you can do some digging on home turf??

Im sure there are some interesting titbits, seeing Colin also researched for about 60 years.........

originally posted by: karl 12
By the sounds of it Friedman's archives are similar to Dr McDonald's in content and the University of Arizona did a great job there.

But it looks like it's not freely available.

You certainly know your stuff mate and couldn't agree more - have been waiting on Michael Sword's digitized files for a while now (do think the man is a bit of a legend) but it's a long time coming and his blog hasn't been updated in quite a while.

Apparently he helped organize Richard Hall's basement archives back in 1989 and there's some further discussion about file digitization in the comments section below.

Just one person, with the right equipment, can do a lot of scanning in one day. Things like letters and photocopies, that are just individual sheets all of the same size can be scanned at a rate of around 4000 per day with a good scanner (not one of those cheap scanners or multi-function devices), and even books can be scanned at a rate of about 4 pages per minute.

From what I read on that blog it looks like Michael Sword's work was done as a typical amateur work, without thinking of the destination of the information at the end of his process. There are (more or less) standard ways of organising archives, created to help the distribution of relevant information in an easy to understand way, readable by any modern (and near future) equipment.

For example, digitising documents can be seen as an easy job: you put the document in the scanner, press a button and accept all the default options the scanner software shows you. That may be enough if you are just creating a copy for yourself, but if you are making a digital version of the original document then you should get the best quality at the start, like Isaac Koi says on his comment. That usually means scanning in greyscale (if the colour information is not relevant, photos are always scanned at 24 bits per pixel), at 300 DPIs, saving the files as uncompressed TIFF images (uncompressed images allow relatively easy recovery of damaged files).

Distribution of the images can be done in a more "normal" format like PDF, but it does lose image quality, which may mean nothing in a letter but could be important in a photo.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: CrazeeWorld777

Are you an archivist?

I don't think you need any qualifications to be an archivist?

I've worked in many different jobs over time and office work was one.

originally posted by: CrazeeWorld777
I don't think you need any qualifications to be an archivist?

You do, you need to know the basics behind archival organisation and document description.

It's nothing special and can be learned in a couple of months, but it's not something we learn in school or in any other work. Many small archives try to use librarians to do the work and they usually fail, as they do not know the basics and try to apply library organisation to archives.

I suspect the real treasure trove of UAP material is in American hands in a top secret archive. Nick Redfern wrote "Final Events in 2010 and delves deeply into the multi-agency Collins Elite. Their report and files must be somewhere but unless you have a need to know you won't see them. My best,

Grant Cameron has been helping in the process as well.

a reply to: redmage

Redmire, thanks for posting that one.

Another interview here about the archives with Grant Cameron and John Greenewald Junior and apparently there are three archivists working full time on the collection; they're digitising audio and video; they completed a long oral history interview with Stanton before he died and also managed to retrieve files from his crashed computer - it's also stated that there are no plans to place the archive online but JGJ does offer free sever capability at the BlackVault.

originally posted by: gort51
a reply to: karl 12

I often wondered what happened to the substantial files of UFO collection, of our own Colin Norris, when he passed away a few years ago.

Hey mate - didn't realize good old Colin had a metallic disc sighting whilst being the turret gunner in a bomber over the Pacific in WW2 - very early report.

The Passing of South Australia's - "Mr. UFO" COLIN NORRIS (1920 - 2009)

Unfortunately, Colin passed away in July 2009, leaving behind his life's work, a comprehensive study of UFO's. 

'Aus UFO info' was commissioned to work with the "Australian International UFO Flying Saucer Research Inc." to record and correlate electronically, more than 50 years of UFO research. 

Our aim is to take Colin's collection consisting of thousands of official reports, printed articles from all over the world, hundreds of hours of film, tape and various other media that has been used, and convert it to electronic media. 

Once converted, it will be made available to the public that information which is NOT Confidential, or classified as secure, or secret, or restricted or marked "Not For Publication".

link

In the early days of IT (dates self), before the proliferation of the web even, I was involved in a digital archival system to scan the entire inventory of an insurance company, which included anything with text on it, including maps and graphics. It even translated hand written documents and some audio content as well.

We used a system called Excalibur, which not only made a digital database of the archive, but created a searchable digital index of everything as well. It was quite amazing, as after all the data was scanned, you could create countless detailed index queries that could find anything you wanted. I am sure today that there are better, but this system was incredible for it's time.

The parent company was called Hummingbird, but I could not find a reference to it presently.

Addend: While storage capacity is trivial today, it was paramount back then. The databases themselves were stored in giant CD Jukeboxes with electro-mechanical/ robotic volume retrieval,

So Stan Friedman had the final and true answer to the mystery of UFOs for decades, but it got buried under tons of paper and he forgot what it was. That seems about right.

Actually, I would like to know if he kept records of the military higher-ups he talked to confidentially who likely convinced him that the key to the whole thing was extraterrestrials and not just secret aircraft and certainly not having anything to do with all that high strangeness the kooks and weirdos talk about.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
So Stan Friedman had the final and true answer to the mystery of UFOs for decades, but it got buried under tons of paper and he forgot what it was..

Err no don't think that's the case mate - he did conduct some great UFO documentation research though (over 20 archives) and exposed how certain intelligence agencies were lying when they claimed 'no interest' or 'no records' on the subject.

Certainly agree with you about the high strangeness factor involved in specific cases but also don't think you have to agree with Stanton's conclusions about UFO origin in order to appreciate his research - his last book 'Fact, Fiction and Flying Saucers' was co-authored with Kathleen Marden and contains some great nuggets of info revealed from the American Philosophical Society Archives.

Here she is discussing the connections between Menzel, Klass, Condon and Low and disinfo campaigns against scientists like Hynek and Mcdonald - pretty interesting stuff.

originally posted by: karl 12
Err no don't think that's the case mate - he did conduct some great UFO documentation research though (over 20 archives) and exposed how certain intelligence agencies were lying when they claimed 'no interest' or 'no records' on the subject.

No offense to Friedman but I think anyone with more than two working brain cells could figure out that various branches of the government have or have had their own functioning UFO departments, even if all they did was collect newspaper clippings (and it's likely that's not all they do).

Overall, I think Friedman was a potentially good investigator who was essentially neutralized by various agencies into chasing the ET goose for way too long. And his lack of organization probably didn't help.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

No offense to Friedman but I think anyone with more than two working brain cells could figure out that various branches of the government have or have had their own functioning UFO departments

Yes plenty of authenticated government UFO documents out there that simply should not exist mate (thanks to folks like Friedman, Todd, Greenwood, Bryant, Dean, Gevaerd, Maccabee, Sparks, Greenewald etc..) -here's Gersten discussing the 1976 Tehran DIA ones.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

Overall, I think Friedman was a potentially good investigator who was essentially neutralized by various agencies into chasing the ET goose

Think scientists from the Army Air Corps originally (and very seriously) chased that ET goose back in the late forties (link) but whatever the case think it's fair to say that UFOs are an extremely serious mystery that governments take extremely seriously - also think Stanton made some very good points in this presentation about taxpayer funded scientific UFO studies.