With the 70th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting over a formation of crescent-shaped UAPs and of the Roswell “UFO crash”, I thought that this was a good time for providing a new blog entry with some reflections and links to some interesting information:

– PERSPECTIVES:
UFO researchers Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Thomas E. Bullard have issued a joint paper about their thoughts about the status of Ufology: “The nature of UFO evidence: Two views”, can be accessed from: www.academia.edu, at this link:
https://www.academia.edu/33352049/THE_NATURE_OF_UFO_EVIDENCE_TWO_VIEWS .
Milton W. Hourcade, responsible of the Unusual Aerial Phenomena Study Group, has also described the UFO theme in perspective, providing some relevant contextual background and views based on his long experience. To be read here:
http://www.uapsg.com/2017/06/70-years-after-arnold-case-ufo-theme-in.html

– UAP & THE HISTORIANS:
     Greg Eghigian, Associate Professor of Modern History at Penn State University, has written last April an interesting article in which he rightly asks: Why have academic historians all but neglected this subject ? Surely a significant phenomenon this large should warrant our attention…
https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2017/04/ufos-and-the-historians/

Talking about historical documents and correctly describing the UAP events, I strongly recommend the website of Jan Aldrich, founder and coordinator of the following website: (http://www.project1947.com/), which represents a gold mine of relevant information. Still many information are still missing and all researchers hope that they will eventually surface one day, allowing to shed further light on UFO history. Jan Aldrich and Barry Greenwood have recently nominated their 10 most wanted articles which have yet to be recovered. Here is their list:
http://www.project1947.com/folio/index.htm
http://www.project1947.com/folio/folio.htm

– UAP CASES:
     Missing relevant information pertaining to interesting UAP cases do not only relate to the beginning of the modern UFO history (1940s-1950s). For example, Dr David Clarke, Research Fellow in Journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, has last month uncovered, within the release by Britain’s Ministry of Defence of 15 of its last remaining UFO files at the UK’s National Archives, details about of a stunning Cold War close encounter witnessed by the entire crew of a US Air Force spy-plane during 90 minutes. A film of the 280 SU radar pictures and the tape on which radio transmissions were recorded, were made available for a study. The details of this October 1982 incident can be found here:
https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/2017/06/30/ufo-files-exclusive-cold-war-spyplane-incident/
Clearly there is a lot of information missing on this case, but it is interesting that this case was not known by anyone until 1 month ago. As usually done in such case, the interested researchers will need to submit official requests for attempting to recover any further information. (in that case through a FOIA towards USAFE (European section of the USAF), the AF Office of Intelligence, the Dept of Defense, and the Air Force Historical Center). 

– UAP & SCIENCE:
     It is obvious that the UAP field has principally relied on witness testimony for almost all of its data about UAP, and progress in understanding the phenomenon has therefore been stalled. To move forward, as in other areas of science, UAP studies require the collection of systematic, detailed physical data. Investigators have studied UAP in the field before, with the most prominent example being in Norway, at Hessdalen. A variety of scientific data have been recorded in the endeavors, but while quite valuable, this research has been sporadic due to a shortage of funding and a limited number of qualified and interested scientists and engineers. Witness testimony, photos and videos, and government documents have taken us only so far; instead, we need to record and study UFOs directly, as other sciences do with their own specific objects of interest. Of course, this is a daunting task, but it is made conceivable by advances in technology, software, communication capabilities, and power sources.
In that respect and after several years of preparation, the UFODATA team (with which I’m contributing) has taken this first step in creating a systematic science of UFO phenomena. (www.ufodata.net). 
The soon-coming new update note to its supporters on the UFODATA mailing list (and Facebook) will mostly cover the technical side of the project in 2017, focusing on the first developments in developing a prototype for a remote measuring station (RMS)—the working name for the UFODATA stations.

– RECENT INTERESTING BOOKS:
     Finally and in time for the summer, several new good books have appeared on the shelves during the last months. My personal preferences are for these three:
* The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs, by Mark O’Connell. (The biography of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who invented the concept of “Close Encounters” with alien life, inspired Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster classic science fiction epic film…);
* Unidentified: The National Intelligence Problem of UFOs, by Larry Hancock. (The book approaches the sightings of UFOs in the way an intelligence agency or military body would examine the information at hand. Is there a threat ? Are these reconnaissance flights ? What type of information could they be gathering ? This makes the reader consider the UFO issue from a completely different light…);
* UFOs: Reframing the Debate, by Robbie Graham. (This book represents a collection of original essays exploring alternative perspectives on UFOs and how we might more usefully study the phenomenon in the 21^st Century. Critical but constructive, this challenging volume represents a range of differing (even conflicting) alternative viewpoints on UFOs and related phenomena…).