As in previous years, the AFU Foundation was based entirely on non-salaried, idealistic work.

While our resources for buying materials are very meager, the foundation provides and develops a basic framework where people & organizations interested in UFOs and related subjects can donate, or deposit, media and documents for future preservation. The other side of the coin is that people, who share the same interests, have a resource center  they can turn to when they are eager to find out more about UFO-related subjects.

By taking care of a steady stream of donations, the archive aims to develop one of the world’s best collections of UFO documentation and folklore on UFO-related themes. The archive is unique in the breath of its work. We try to cover all aspects: from the esoteric to the extraterrestrial, from New Age channeling with claimed space beings to the debunkers’ disbelief in UFO’s as anything but explainable natural phenomena, and so on.

While being a separate entity and a private foundation in its own right, the archive enjoys a very powerful support from the Swedish national UFO research organization UFO-Sweden.

The AFU board consisted of Anders Liljegren (chairman), Clas Svahn (vice chairman), Andreas Ohlsson (secretary), Sven-Olov Svensson (treasurer) and Håkan Blomqvist. The voluntary workforce at the archives consisted of Anders Liljegren, Sven-Olov Svensson and Sussie Andersson.

In June 2002, after months of preparation and fitting out, we moved part of our collection into a new 62 square meter library facility.

The AFU foundation has, a) supporting members, who pay 150 SEK each year, and b), sponsors, who provide 50 SEK or more each month, to help run the library and archives (rents, electricity, telephone, web site costs and clipping subscription). This is a world-unique scheme that works very well.

The following were our thirty-four sponsors during 2002 (contributed sum in brackets, Swedish SEK):

Lars Alatalo (480), Per Andersen (400), Leif Andersson (300), Sture Blomén (1.000), Håkan Blomqvist (1.200), Tage Bång (800), Håkan Fenander (750), Jörgen Granlie (600), Tora Greve (750), Erling Häggström (400), Bjarne Johansson (600), Anders Liljegren (21.842), Tobias Lindgren (300), Bertil Lindqvist (1.200), Leif Lissjanis (900), Annika Logren (500), Bruno Mancusi, Switzerland (600), Carl-Anton Mattsson (800), Mille Millianowicz (550), Göran Norlén (3.033), Andreas Ohlsson (900), Magnus Olofsson (1.800), Leif Persson (1.200), Pelle Persson (600), Stefan Roslund (800), Niklas Ryman (1.500), Sven Schalin (720), Stockholms UFO-förening (500), Erika Stoiss (500), Clas Svahn (5.150), Svenskt Skadedjurskydd AB (500), Acke Svensson (950), UFO-Köping (500) and UFO-Z (600).

At the board meeting in June the annual sponsorship price, a copy of "UFOs 1947-1997: fifty years of flying saucers", was won by Niklas Ryman.

At the end of 2002 the archives foundation had 87 supporters, sponsors and past-donors who had paid the minimum annual fee (150 SEK), or had done equivalent services for the foundation.

A new 62 square meter library was inaugurated in June 2002, after half-a-year of planning, cleaning and painting. The landlord (Hyresbostäder) provided us with new electrical wiring systems, fluorescent lamps, a new solid entrance door, new entrance lighting, new linoleum floors, a new wash-basin, paints and other repairs. Our sincere thanks to Jan Nilsson, from the landlord, and all of the repairmen who helped us.

Books & documents, plus audio, video, microfilm and picture collections, were moved to the new library in May and June. There was a peak of activity on June 16, combined with a board meeting of UFO-Sweden at the archives. Our sincere thanks to all the numerous people who helped the AFU team with the move, especially Conny Ljung, Johnny Ljung, Andreas Ohlsson and Wolfgang Randisek.

The new library consists of a hallway (housing our growing collection of videos and shelves for new, incoming titles), a room to the left (with thousands of audiotapes & pictures), the main book library room to the right (with 6.500 books and documents), a small room for storage and non-catalogued items, and a toilet. The library has the potential capacity for at least twice the current number of volumes, although we would then need to add a number of new shelves.

The library had an all-time-high number of added titles. A catalogue produced in the summer of 2003, numbers 743 new titles or new editions for 2002. Besides numerous donations by Ole Jonny Braenne, acquisitions include a lot of paranormal "borderlands" literature, science & space-related books, and science fiction, not previously catalogued.

The lending library dispatched 68 titles on short-term loans to Swedish supporters. The library also provided long-term loans of UFO-related literature to several groups and individuals who were writing university level dissertations on UFO-related subjects such as UFO cults, UFOs related to science fiction, and astro-archaelogy.

The move of books and documents vacated space for new collections in our main archive facility (75 square meters in space), as well as in our storage facility (e.g. our oldest archive, of 38 square meters). To help finance our rents, a minor part of the oldest archive has been re-rented, short-term, for use as an archive by another (non-UFO) organization.

To fill the empty spaces in our main archive, where the book library had previously been, we bought a number of new shelves from IKEA at a cost of 8.500 SEK. This provided us with needed space for incoming donations during this year and a few years ahead.

In 2002 AFU catalogued the final parts of the Bruno R. Ericsson collection, which were bought from the heirs at a cost of 10.000 SEK. A money collection organized by Clas Svahn brought 8.000 SEK to the deal and AFU provided the remaining 2.000 SEK. The book collection was sanitized from a layer of brown tobacco smoke by a hired specialist firm. Out of about 1.500 books, some 500 were connected to the UFO subject. About 200 of these were new titles catalogued in the 2002 library inventory, the others provided the second or third copies of many items. 

Bruno R. Ericsson with photo display in his Stockholm home. Large parts of Ericsson's UFO collection are now in the Archives for UFO Research inventory.

The other major donation, this year, came from Norway. Ole Jonny Braenne, new chairman of UFO-Norway, donated parts of his private library, combined with files, books and magazines from Mentz Kaarbø and from deceased ufologists Finn W. Kalvik and Kolbjørn Stenødegård. More than 350 kilos of Norwegian materials were sorted and archived by the AFU staff during 2001 and 2002.

AFU would also like to thank, among others, the following benefactors during this past year: 

Berit Bergqvist (for books and magazines); Dan Eklund (for donating books for our library); Enköpings UFO-förening (for organizational materials); Lucius Farish (for his monthly UFO Newsclipping Service sent free of charge); Loren E. Gross (for his booklets on America’s official and unofficial UFO history); William E. Jones (for a collection of original clippings from American tabloids and other materials); Boris Jungkvist (for books and an historical audio tape); Kartbutiken i Stockholm (for donating old editions of Swedish maps); Barbro Magnusson (for lending us audio tapes from her Hessdalen interviews); Jean-Francois Meyer (for his booklets on religious cults); Mats Nilsson (for a new labeling machine); Stefan Roslund (for Russian books and magazines); Eduardo Russo (of CISU for copies of several dissertations); the heirs of Berndt Schumann (for more than 80 video tapes); Willy Smith (UNICAT Project) (for book donations); Clas Svahn (who tirelessly brings us heaps of materials from his own collection and from people he convinces to support AFU) and Tony Walter (for 33 video tapes and a collection of magazines).

We produced two issues (# 43 and 44) of our own Newsletter, far from the four issues per year that we aim for. This delay in publication was mainly caused by a nasty computer virus that wiped out many of our files in March.

The AFU Newsletter is an exchange publication to help us receive archival copies of European and international UFO-related magazines and newsletters. A more active exchange program will be started in 2003 in co-ordination with UFO-Sweden and their high quality (print- as well as content-wise), quarterly "UFO-Aktuellt".

During 2002 Observer, our clippings provider, found 259 articles in the Swedish printed media, slightly more than during the previous year (241 in 2001). The 2001 figure was the all-time-lowest since the start of our clipping subscription in the early 1970’s.

Sussie Andersson has done a remarkable job on our clipping collection since she started her work at the archive in year 2000. She has sorted, pasted and copied materials from a number of clipping collections previously donated to AFU, into the chronological master files of Swedish clippings and reports (in cases where the clipping mentioned a sighting).

AFU provided its Swedish-reading contact net with scanned PDF-files of recently published articles from Swedish newspapers and magazines. These Acrobat files are distributed via a yahoo group, open to anyone who is interested. Subscribers to the service received, during 2002, copies of clipping materials that cost AFU and UFO-Sweden almost 21.000 SEK to acquire. We also produced, sold, and used as exchange, a CD-R disc with nine AFU databases recorded in Access format.

The largest acquisition in this area was the Norwegian archives from deceased ufologist Finn Kalvik, who for decades was active in organizations like UFO-Bergen, Norsk UFO Center (NUFOC), Scandinavian UFO Information (SUFOI, Copenhagen, Denmark) and UFO-Norway. The archive was ordered chronologically and a catalogue published on our web site.

AFU focuses on its internal work in order to make our collection better, to provide a good order of the collected materials and to help and serve inquiring researchers. On a number of occasions we had guided tours for local societies and visiting UFO groups, as well as interested researchers.

A Swedish TV team, who produce documentaries for the TV-4 channel, visited the archives on September 24 to film scenes for an upcoming UFO documentary.

Since many years AFU is a member of two archival organizations: Folkrörelsernas Arkivförbund (FA) and Östergötlands Arkivförbund (ÖLFA).