While being a separate entity, the AFU foundation enjoys 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, Sussie Andersson and Sandra Aronsson. Each of us spent at least five-six hours per week working for AFU. 

Sponsorships and supporters

The AFU foundation has, a) sponsors, who provide 50 SEK or more, each month, to help run the library & archives (rents, electricity, telephone, web site costs and the clipping subscription), and, b) supporting members, who contribute 150 SEK each year.

The following were our twenty-eight sponsors during 2004 (contributed sums in brackets, Swedish SEK):

Berndt Bartosch (900) Sture Blomén (600), Håkan Blomqvist (1.200), Tage Bång (300), Lennart Dembrink (600); Ruth Fagerström (1.500), Håkan Fenander (300), Jörgen Granlie (600), Britt-Marie Johansson (600), Anders Liljegren (22.627), Tobias Lindgren (450), Bertil Lindqvist (1.200), Lars Lindqvist (200); Leif Lissjanis (600), Johnny Ljung (300), Annika Logren (300), Bruno Mancusi, Switzerland (600), Liza Marklund (6.148), Carl-Anton Mattsson (300), Mille Millianowicz (720), C.Göran Norlén (3.633), Andreas Ohlsson (910), Leif Persson (850), Niklas Ryman (300), Sven Schalin (360), Karl-Olof Sjöö (500), Clas Svahn (6.300),  UFO-Z (300) and Bo Ulfberg (1.000).

A large number of donations were also made to our new fund för the possible acquisition of a French archives, more on that below. At the end of 2004 the archives foundation had 75 supporters, sponsors and past-donors who had paid the minimum annual fee (150 SEK), or had contributed equivalent services for the foundation (including previous donors).

In November, Clas Svahn, Anders Persson and Mikael Sjöberg brought another car-load of books, magazines and other materials from the London area. Hundreds of books and thousands of magazines were donated by Hilary Evans of the Mary Evans Picture Library, John Rimmer of Magonia Magazine and by Robert Rickard / Paul Sieveking, founding editors of the Fortean Times. These British donations enriched the archive with a wealth of new and unique materials.

2004 was also the year when an active international exchange program was set afoot, particularly with Rod B. Dyke of Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington on the U.S. West Coast. Dyke manages the Archives for UFO Research, News and Information Service, that aims to build an American archive quite similar to AFU. In October, AFU received more than 60 kilos of rare American UFO-related publications. All in all 659 items.

AFU would also like to thank the following kind donors: 

Håkan Blomqvist (a large number of books from his private library); Björn Borg (for copy of his most recent UFO book in Finland); Ole Jonny Brænne (for many new boxes crammed with materials from Norway); Wendy Connors (for several audio CDs in her Faded Discs series); Sean Donovan and his Danielfry.com website (for a CD with the Daniel Fry material he has collected, and a number of other items connected to Fry and other contactees); Dan Eklund (for a unique collection of booklets published by the QDW Australia UFO cult); Lucius Farish (for his monthly UFO Newsclipping Service sent to us free of charge); Joseph Glapa (for his booklet on a gravitational engine); Loren E. Gross (for his unique series of booklets on America’s official and unofficial UFO history - now entering the 1960s - sent us free of charge); William E. Jones (for donation of a collection of special documents and newsletters from MUFON of Ohio, and more than 2.000 unsorted news clippings that came from deceased American ufologist Earl J. Neff); 

Further:  Kartbutiken i Stockholm (for continuously donating out-of-date editions of Swedish maps); Liza Marklund (for generously paying for a large number of books and magazines bought through eBay and Arcturus Book Service's sales): Andreas Ohlsson (for his university essay on the 1946 ghost rockets); Claude Poher (for donation of his book on gravitation and UFOs); Mario Rangel (for his CD with a database of UFO hypnotists worldwide); Bertil A.G. Schalén (for a bound copy of his essay on a Swedish UFO cult); Irena C. Scott (for copies of three of her published books); Mikael Sjöberg (UFO-Sweden's webmaster, for a book collecting UFO-SF stories published by the Chalmers Technological High School); Giuseppe Stilo (for his book on the Italian ghost rockets of 1946); Clas Svahn (our 'tireless ant' comes here with hundreds of items from his own collections, and from all the people he meets worldwide and convinces to support AFU); Diego Zuniga (for books, magazines and a bibliography from his homeland Chile);  Jöns Åkerlund (for donation of three UFO books in Chinese); and (finally) a number of publishers for copies of their published books. Keep supporting us!

In late 2003 AFU and UFO-Sweden took the initiative for a Swedish-international money collection for acquiring parts of the SOS-OVNI archives owned by French UFO researcher Perry Petrakis. The collection was made in close collaboration with ufologists and groups, interested in archival preservation, from France (SCEAU), Italy (CISU), Spain (Fundacion Anomalia), and also parties in the United States, and numerous other countries. Petrakis' needed money to pay for the printing costs of the final issues of SOS-OVNI journal Phénomena. The collection resulted in more than 40.000 SEK to our newly established acquisition fund.

Negotiations with Petrakis continued throughout 2004. It was only in the summer of 2005 that a final agreement could be made. The results of this agreement, a report on the use of the money collected, and a list of all contributors to the money collection, will be included with the annual report for 2005.

The Internet

Several new headings, pages and regular updates were added to our website at www.afu.info, including detailed inventories and presentations of newly received books, magazines and collections. Inventories are published in html format to make them searchable by web spiders from Google, Altavista, and others. The number of unique visits increased to a mean figure of about 1.600 per week. 

The web site generates a substantial number of international enquiries for copies, scans, exchanges, research & other actions. AFU handles an average number of one such enquiry each week during the year. We cannot, however, make a priority of very large searches and translations from the archives.

We produced two issues (# 47 and 48) of our AFU Newsletter, with HTML versions freely available at the AFU web site. Unfortunately, we didn't have the resources (time & money for postages) to send printed copies to our exchange partners worldwide, but hope to compensate this later by sending each partner (journals, magazines, research friends) a retrospect combined package of all the issues you have missed.

Books, documents & media reference library

During 2004, we catalogued 456 incoming new titles/editions in our library.

Books, booklets and documents came from: Liza Marklund (donations to acquire 211 titles), Hilary Evans (88 new titles), Håkan Blomqvist (31), Ole Jonny Brænne (17), AFU's own acquisitions (17), Clas Svahn (14), William E. Jones (14), Dan Eklund (11), Anders Liljegren (7), Loren E. Gross (4), Jöns Åkerlund (3), Paul Sieveking (3), Mikael Sjöberg (3), Wendy Connors (2), Irena Scott (2), Alve Holmqvist (2), Boris Jungkvist (2), Sven Andersson, Björn Borg, Sean Donovan, Jonathan Downes, Håkan Fenander, Robert Lesniakiewicz, Conny Ljung, Andreas Ohlsson, Claude Poher, Bertil Schalén, Giuseppe Stilo, Diego Zuniga (one each), and others (including copies received from publishers).

Donations also provided hundreds of second and third copies to the reference/lending library, and copies that were (will be) sold to generate new money for new materials. During 2004 AFU sold materials for more than 21.000 SEK, which generated money for (among other things) new shelves and shipping costs to exchange partners.

At the end of the year the library - according to our database - consisted of 7.939 books/volumes/media, representing 5.313 different editions.

The lending library, open to Swedish citizens who support AFU, expedited only 31 loans during 2003. Compared to 103 the previous year this is a significant decrease, which is due to the fact that the Swedish Postal Service no longer sponsor sending books at cheaper rates so we have had to increase our loan fees. AFU lent materials and gave archival support for several academic essays at universities and high schools.

In November 2004 a UFO-Sweden delegation to the London area brought major British collections of magazines from Hilary Evans and from Magonia Magazine editor John Rimmer. With the exchange material received from Rod B. Dyke the magazine collection (659 items), this means we increased the serials/magazine collection with more than 1.000 issues. Every issue was entered into a database.

The collection of magazines, newsletters and other serials now tally more than 24.500 individual issues from more than 6.000 annual volumes of different publications. More than 2.400 of these annual volumes represent complete collections for a particular serial-and-year.

During 2004 Observer, our clippings service provider, found 215 articles in the Swedish printed news media (209 in 2002). Despite the down-going statistics of articles in the printed media (table below), there seems to be a tendency for larger, more penetrating, and more illustrated articles and also an increasing number of appearances by Swedish ufologists in radio and television media (these media types are unfortunately not covered by our subscription).

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 fortnightly via a yahoo group mailing list, open to anyone interested. Subscribers to the service received, during 2004, copies of clipping materials that cost AFU & UFO-Sweden more than 25.000 SEK to acquire. 

Archival sorting and ordering of the Earl J. Neff clipping collection (donated by William E. Jones) is underway through the work of Clas Svahn. Clas Svahn also provided a three folder collection of UFO clipping copies from the combined text archives of the Swedish newspapers Expressen and Dagens Nyheter.

AFU acquired the files of Köpings UFO-förening, one of the first (and most important) early member groups of UFO-Sweden. Karl-Olov Pettersson & Bevan Berthelsen were two of the board members who donated the material which includes administrative papers, accounting & membership documents.

Ingrid Holmqvist  donated the archives from deceased ufologist Alve Holmqvist, one of the old-timers in ufology and Swedish New Age.  Ebbe Johansson donated tapes and materials related to "his" UFO society - Malmö Interplanetariska Sällskap (MIS).

UFO report archives and database

A preliminary sorting and archiving of the report archives from the (Danish) Scandinavian UFO Information (SUFOI) was accomplished. Work on this project will continue during the coming years.

Work on the continued update of Swedish UFO reports - 1996 and onwards - in the ScanCat database, was assumed at the end of the year. UFO-Sweden has started a project to combine data from ScanCat with newly recorded data and documents from observers and investigators through a centralized webpage.

AFU focuses much on internal work in order to make our collection more usable and to serve inquiring researchers, media and the general public. On a number of occasions we had guided tours for local societies and visiting UFO groups, as well as interested researchers. Researchers, journalists and interested people are, increasingly, on the international level, contacting us through the Internet.

Since the mid-1990's AFU is a member of two archival organizations: Folkrörelsernas Arkivförbund (FA) (a national group of hundreds of archives) and Östergötlands Arkivförbund (ÖLFA) (a regional group of about 25 archives) where experiences and news are shared through conferences and newsletters. The AFU board are also members of the UFO Archives mailing list, the Sign Historical Group, Project 1947, and similar contact channels.