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

While being a separate entity, in its own right, the AFU foundation 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 November 2003 this group was joined by Sandra Aronsson. Each of us spend at least five-six hours each week working for AFU. 

Sponsorships and supporters

The AFU foundation has, a) supporting members, who contribute 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).

The following were our thirty sponsors during 2003 (contributed sums in brackets, Swedish SEK):

Berndt Bartosch (200) Sture Blomén (1.200), Håkan Blomqvist (1.200), Tage Bång (650), Sean Donovan, Canada (600), Ruth Fagerström (1.500), Håkan Fenander (450), Jörgen Granlie (600), Mattias Johansson (1.340), Anders Liljegren (25.993), Tobias Lindgren (300), Bertil Lindqvist (1.200), Leif Lissjanis (1.200), Johnny Ljung (200), Annika Logren (500), Bruno Mancusi, Switzerland (600), Liza Marklund (17.059), Carl-Anton Mattsson (550), Mille Millianowicz (430), C.Göran Norlén (3.600), Andreas Ohlsson (805), Leif Persson (1.000), Lisbeth & Ulrik Rosén (1.320), Stefan Roslund (600), Niklas Ryman (750), Sven Schalin (720), Stockholms UFO-förening (200), Clas Svahn (5.410), Acke Svensson (500), UFO-Z (600). Note: Sponsorships for 2002, paid through UFO-Sweden, (3.400 SEK) were credited to their donors in the 2002 annual report. A separate list of donors to the new acquisition fund (with the priority of buying parts of a French UFO collection) will be included in the 2004 annual report.

At the board meeting in November the annual sponsorship price, was won by C.Göran Norlén, who has been one of the most generous sponsors since the inauguration of our sponsorship program in 1993. At the end of 2003 the archives foundation had 78 supporters, sponsors and past-donors who had paid the minimum annual fee (150 SEK), or had contributed equivalent services for the foundation.

In October, Clas Svahn and Håkan Ekstrand brought one of the most valuable donations in the history of AFU from London. More than 500 books and about 1.000 magazines were donated by British author Hilary Evans and the heirs of Gordon Creighton, veteran editor of the Flying Saucer Review. Our contacts for this was his son Paul Creighton.

The other major donation, this year, was the continued deliveries - mostly of books and magazines - from Ole Jonny Brænne, chairman of UFO-Norway. Brænne donated rare items from his own collection and also fetched - for preservation with AFU - the archives of Norwegian ufologist Odd-Gunnar Røed and his long-time involvement with Project Hessdalen. (Note: This collection has been sorted and archived during 2004).

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

Karyn Birkett (for her kind donation of a rare Australian book); Luc Bürgin (for exchange against his book on Swiss UFO phenomena); Lucius Farish (for his monthly UFO Newsclipping Service sent to us free of charge); Grazyna Fosar & Franz Bludorf (for donation of their German UFO book); Fundación Anomalía (for donation of their Cuadernos de Ufologia publication that completes our collection); Anders Gernandt (former test pilot and member of the Swedish parliament, donated his private UFO book library); Loren E. Gross (for his booklets on America’s official and unofficial UFO history); Ole Henningsen (for European magazines); Mattias Johansson (for donating a brand new video recorder to the audiovisual library); William E. Jones (for donation of a collection of books and magazines);  Kartbutiken i Stockholm (for continuously donating out-of-date editions of Swedish maps); Lisette Larkins and the Hampton Roads Publishing Co. (donation of a box full of titles from Hampton Roads); astronomer Bertil Anders Lindblad (for a unique copy of the original three-volume Condon report); Liza Marklund (for generously paying for a large number of books and magazines bought through eBay and other sources): Carl-Anton Mattsson (for donation of books related to UFO channeling); Joe McGonagle & Gary Anthony (for donation of copies from the Tyneside UFO Society clipping collection); Mario N. Rangel (for donation of his book); folklorist Ebbe Schön (for donation of one of his books on Swedish folklore); Mikael Sjöberg (UFO-Sweden's webmaster, for a collection of newsstand magazines); Roger Skoog (for donation of his Swedish booklet on UFO photographs); Clas Svahn (who brings us endless heaps of materials from his own collection (this year, for instance, almost complete collections of Jules Verne-magasinet (Swedish SF) and OMNI Magazine) and from all the people he convinces to support AFU); Tony Walter (for a collection of British UFO magazines).

From September 2002 - and with increased intensity during 2003 - some of our work focused on the internet web place www.afu.info with a continued plan to publish our work to a (potentially) million-headed world-wide audience. Several new groups of sub pages were added, including detailed inventories of books and magazines. Inventories have been published in html format to make them searchable by web spiders from Google, Altavista, and others. We are also planning to make the same databases available in SQL-searchable database form. The number of visitors increased to about 1.300 per week at the end of 2003. 

The web site generated a large, yet manageable, number of international enquiries for copies, scans, exchanges, research & other actions. AFU has handled an average number of one such enquiry each week during the year. In some cases we have been involved in long-term research international research projects. This is at the very core of what we intend the foundation to become. We cannot, however, make a priority of very large searches and translations from the archives. In these cases we recommend a personal visit to our premises in Sweden.

We produced two issues (# 45 and 46) of our AFU Newsletter, not the four issues per year that we aim for. Yet, this was what we had the time for, in view of the wealth of incoming materials! The AFU Newsletter is an exchange publication to help us receive archival copies of European and international UFO-related magazines and newsletters. HTML versions are available at the AFU web site. 

Book collection 

During 2003, AFU catalogued a record number of 776 incoming new titles/editions in our library.

Books, booklets and documents came from Hilary Evans (352 new titles), Liza Marklund (248), Ole Jonny Brænne (58), Gordon Creighton (37), Clas Svahn (12),  Anders Liljegren (11), Loren E. Gross (11), Lisette Larkins & Hampton Roads Publishing (8), William E. Jones (7), Anders Gernandt (7), Ole Henningsen (3), Mikael Sjöberg (2), Pia Andersson (2), Anne Griffin (2), Björn Borg, Chris Evans, Irene Scott, Karyn Birkett, Per Andersen (one each), and others.  Donations also provided hundreds of second and third copies to the reference/lending library, and copies that were (will be) sold. The Hilary Evans collection gave us a unique number of non-English UFO-related book titles, mainly from Spanish-speaking countries. The sale of the English UFO cult thesis by Stefan Isaksson, through Arcturus Book Service (Bob Girard), resulted in an exchange deal with UFO-Sweden of dozens of new books that UFO-Sweden donated to AFU.

A major project, during the winter 2002-2003, was a general re-inventory of the book library. It was now twenty years since the book collection was inventoried in it's entirety. Many books and documents, previously not catalogued, were now added to the inventory. The inventory now has about 5.000 different titles/editions or a total of about 8.000 volumes (counting copies two and three). 

AFU completed the first eBay/PayPal deal in February 2003. With the financial support of our new sponsor, crime novel author Liza Marklund, and through our own eBay sales (a sum total of USD 1.067 during 2003), we acquired some 250 (mostly used) books. Some of them are former library copies that now found a new library environment! We have bought a number of larger lots of previously missing materials, mainly from the 1980s and 1990s, and will continue to do so. In 2003 AFU bought books from the US, UK, Canada, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Brazil. 

The lending library, open to Swedish citizens who support AFU, expedited 103 loans of books during 2003. AFU lent materials for three academic thesis's at the universities of Stockholm, Linköping and Norrköping.

In November 2003 Clas Svahn and Håkan Ekstrand from UFO-Sweden brought a major collection of magazines from Hilary Evans and the Mary Evans Picture Library in London. This collection - for instance full sets of The Unidentified and OMNI Magazines - has been completely catalogued in the spring of 2004. UFO-Sweden also brought a collection of books and magazines from the heirs of former Flying Saucer Review editor Gordon Creighton. 

The collection of magazines, newsletters and other serials now counts more than 22.000 individual issues from more than 5.500 annual volumes of different publications. More than 2.000 of these annual volumes are complete collections for a particular serial title and year.

During 2003 Observer, our clippings service provider, found 209 articles in the Swedish printed news media (259 in 2002). This was the all-time-lowest since the start of our clipping subscription in the early 1970’s.

As in previous years 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 interested. Subscribers to the service received, during 2003, copies of clipping materials that cost AFU and UFO-Sweden 25.000 SEK to acquire. 

The largest acquisition in this area was the Norwegian archives from Odd-Gunnar Røed and Project Hessdalen.

Report archives

In March, UFO-Sweden brought the Scandinavian UFO Information (SUFOI) UFO report archives from Copenhagen to Denmark. SUFOI has been the main UFO report collector in our southwesterly brother-country since 1958. Although not complete, the Danish report archives will eventually be integrated into our chronological Scandinavian report archive and appropriately recorded in the ScanCat database. The turnover of the archives coincided with a Danish-Swedish-Norwegian meeting in Copenhagen of the chairmen of the three major Scandinavian UFO groups. 

AFU also received, for sorting and preservation, the 2000 and 2001 Swedish report archives from UFO-Sweden after their processing by the national report centre. AFU was the host for a series of meetings at the archives on November 22: board meetings for both UFO-Sweden and AFU, and a conference on the integration of UFO-Sweden's report procedures with AFU's ScanCat (UFO report) database on the Internet.

AFU focuses on 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.

In February, a journalist from the Swedish Radio's Channel 1 made interviews at the archives for a projected documentary on UFOs and ufologists.

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