The two shoe boxes crammed with many hundreds of ufo-related transparencies - many of which you recognize from popular books where the the Evans' family's Mary Evans Picture Library has been credited as picture source - arrived here a few weeks ago in one of Clas Svahn's regular batches from Stockholm.

Although we are not allowed to sell picture rights we might well help - in the future, when we have developed our picture database - with doing searches & referring interested parties to the MEPL. 

Each issue of Share International has colorful pictures, mostly from internet sources, believed to be visions of the heralding star. To help AFU get hold of this magazine, associates of Gerard Aartsen offered to pay for a gift subscription so that it can be preserved. Donations of old runs of this, and similar magazines, are welcome!

Western Finland, on the Baltic, has a  Swedish-speaking population and has always sought connections to their old motherland. Ufology is no exception. Many important cases from the Finnish wave of the early 1970s were reported across the Baltic, duely translated by the group. Mikael Westersund, one of the former members, has donated  the correspondence, investigations and clippings. This material has been filed  in good order by Clas Svahn. 

The first ten shares of Parthenon, registered on Edith C.M. Nicolaisen, the founder and primus motor of the company.

The AFU & UFO-Sweden picture library has received many important donations in recent years (including copies from the Bords' Fortean Picture Library - see the credits down this page - and the Bill Caulfield/John Otto collection). This new donation enriches us with more than 2.000 original photos in negatives and prints, and a large number of audio cassettes (conferences, investigations).

Clas and Håkan are regularly doing digital scanning of materials from our photo collections for a projected on-line picture library. The picture library is also co-ordinated with the 'new' report archives (see our Projects page). The AFU picture library might in the future become a major source of incoming funds to support the foundation!

The audio cassettes will, first of all, be entered in our database of more than 2.000 taped recordings so that we can relocate them by subject when wanted. Digital conversion will later be an important priority project since many recordings, particularly during the 1960's and 1970's are constantly loosing quality with time.

Bertil is keenly interested in the Swedish ghost rocket phenomenon (on-going since 1939, particularly during 1946) and copied several of our government and private research files on such cases.

You can see the materials on the right, the Lorenzen collection above, and the unsorted Røed donation below.

AFU has now received Erland's magazine collection (below left) and, most importantly, his report archive, which is being sorted and put into order by Clas Svahn.

Clas is also, himself, the most frequent contributor/donor of materials that he finds in antiquarian book-shops, review copies received, or things he finds on the internet, or orders from his friend Robert Girard, proprietor of the Arcturus Books Inc. in Port St. Lucie, USA.

Photo above by Clas Svahn.

One of Barry's projects as a new pensioner

Here came yet another batch of extremely well-kept books from Sven's personal bookcase, plus a box of magazines!

In the Petrakis collection were a lot of English language books and magazines that were really not needed by AFU (we had multiple copies before), but would be perfect acquisitions for SCEAU. We sent lists to each other and finally agreed on the exchange of more than a hundred items. By exchange AFU also received a full run of SCEAU publications (below) and about two shelf meters of French-language books that were not included with the Petrakis deal.

On the right the two meters of French ufo-related literature before cataloguing started at the AFU library.

The boxes from France also included big batches of the French magazine La Ligne Bleue Survolee? and a number of issues of the Belgian Inforespace, to make our collection of that title more complete.

As an exchange gift from us, Gunnar & Ulrika also carried, on their return trip to Paris, two heavy boxes of Scandinavian books and magazines for the SCEAU general archives, including a selection of UFO book titles and a full run of UFO-Sweden's magazine UFO-Aktuellt, since it's inception in 1980.

But, there are still other parts of the recent (Nov. 2008) Bord donation to credit, including books and a few boxes of correspondence and Fortean clippings. For the moment let's concentrate on, possibly, the most valuable part of the Bord's donation - copies of about 2/3 of the entire Fortean Picture Library (FPL). It is hard to find a book nowadays on 'phenomenology' that has no illustration culled from this collection run by the Bords! AFU now owns the third paper copy of the FPL files (the two remaining sets are in the UK, including one copy still with the Bords). AFU can now search 2/3's of the FPL and maybe help you find what you may be looking for? We can then refer you to Janet & Colin for dealing with the publicity rights. Plans are to make a searchable database for the FPL and other photographic collections we hold to facilitate searches.

On July 13, the collection finally arrived at AFU. It includes more than 400 phenomena-related books of which, surprisingly, some 150 turned out as new titles for our library, mainly books on parapsychology and similar themes. Our librarian Ingrid Collberg is hard at work with cataloguing as we write this in September.

The collection also held the minutes of 201 meetings of the Alingsås Ufological Society, of which Staffan was the primus motor, and some 35 folders of Swedish clippings, unfortunately, though, not the most well kept collection, but we will still search it for clippings we might have missed out on. We also got three book cases to supplement the 60+ book cases we have before at the library. Staffan's family are to be praised for their initiative to donate this valuable collection to AFU without any monetary compensation whatsoever. The material will be well kept here in the memory of one of the most hard-working Swedish ufologists of the 1970's.

On the left, some of the unique items received this time, including (in blue binder) Dr. Fu Man Chu meets the lonesome cowboy. Sorcery and the UFO experience, by Eugenia Macer-Story and (in green) two bound volumes of the Canadian publications Res Bureaux Bulletin and Quest (UFO Report), published by Mr. X and Kurt Glemser, respectively. Absolutely unique materials of 'vintage' (if the early 1970s now can be called that) - and almost complete runs of both!

We helped Gerard Aartsen, Netherlands student of the "Ageless Wisdom teaching", website here, with copies of the original Cosmic Science Bulletin by George Adamski, and he offered to send us this unique book, The Pawn of his creator by Henry Dohan, which focuses on Adamski and other US contactees, as a gift. Several of us on the AFU board had never heard about this one before. Had you?

He quotes every author and thinker in the "D" (design and propulsion) department of our library, from Nikola Tesla to Viktor Schauberger, and in between the Nazi engineers.

The most recent parcel included books, magazines (French and some Russian), leaflets, clippings, photos, et cetera. We will catalogue and put the 'non-cataloguables' in the general C.E.R.P.A. file.

It is a thick file of written reports of channeled messages 1964-1974 by a south-Swedish medium-contactee, Alve Holmqvist, and his esoteric study circle. A material that seems to be highly influenced by Mark Probert's séances for BSRF. AFU previously received, in 2004, other files from Holmqvist, to which the new file now will be added.

He finds items in used book stores and is probably the oldest and most faithful customer with Bob Girard's Arcturus Books. (Recommended!)

On the AFU sorting table you can see his most recent donations to our shelves, including continued deliveries in his series of own audio taped phone interviews with UFO & fortean witnesses (we have hundreds of these tapes covering decades of active  investigations...), and VHS video tapes (like other people Clas is replacing his tapes with DVDs and donates the VHS's).

Second picture: some of the most recent gifts, including the original uncut 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds" distributed by Arcturus.

One of the major donations came from Londoner Hilary Evans, who has been a long-time supporter of our attempts to 

From Hilary also: a two feet high heap (!) of unique magazines (see them on table on the left), mostly American and French. We are now, for instance, proud owners of the very first issues of Lumieres dans la Nuit and bound volumes of the very first Phénomènes Spatiaux (see picture above). A special list of magazines in this 2008 donation from Hilary is here. 435 mags!

Rare items, like twelve issues of the British Interplanetary Society's Spaceflight from the early 1960s and 1970s, twenty-one issues of Sky and Telescope (from the 1946-1957 period) and fifteen issues of Center Investigators Quarterly, a Center for UFO Studies' publication from 1977-1988.

The Greenwood collection includes thousands of original news items for 1947, sorted by the American states. Our own archival process, for taking care of this material, includes cutting off about 5 millimeters from the left or right side of each sheet to allow the sheets to fit into standard European 'A4' plastic sleeves for preservation. We have previously done this process to Greenwood's pre-1947 materials. The plastic cases are filed in uniform-style black file folders. Eventually it will form a very nice series on our shelves!

The first such parcel for 2009 came from Philip J. Jacobs, who calls himself 'Philel' and is one of the

In the parcel were two of the books sold by the group, a recent issue of their newsletter, a number of pamphlets and the recent Mark-Age Catalog. Thank you very much and please think of us again in the future!