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Recent donations 2010 - thanks for your very kind support!

From Ole Jonny Braenne, Oslo, December 2011
Ole Jonny Braenne was voted a new member of the AFU board at our Dec. 17, 2011 meeting, held at our nice new  headquarters. Pictures from the meeting can be found on the blogs of AFU board members Håkan and Clas.

Just a few days later the latest gift parcel from our Norwegian colleague arrived and has now been catalogued. It contained books in English, Norwegian, French, Russian and Chinese. Those that were new to our collection are pictured to the left. The titles will be included in the 2011 edition of our library list to be posted here in early 2012 when we have had the time to complete cataloguing of a few other recent collection which are on our shelves.

   
From UFO-Finland, January 2011
Håkan Blomqvist's Swedish book Främlingar på vår jord (Strangers on our earth) has just been published in a Finnish translation by UFO-Finland, one of the two major Finnish UFO societies.

UFO-Finland kindly sent us three copies of the translation, but also four other recent titles from their own imprint, two of which are Finnish renderings of Timothy Good's Need to know and the conference proceedings on UFO evidence led by astronomer Peter A. Sturrock. Mattias Päätalo has written a book on astronomy and contact with extraterrestiral life and military historian Atso Haapanen a book about 300 ufo-related documents found in Finnish military records. Some of the Finnish cases are quite exciting, including a 1969 jet dog-fight and radar case. Unfortunately some Finnish records have been burned.

   
From John Hanson and Dawn Holloway, Alvechurch, Birmingham, the UK, May 2010
Ex-policeman John Hanson and his wife Dawn Holloway is travelling the United Kingdom interviewing ufo witnesses. A ufological groundwork, indeed. AFU has tried, now and then, to assist the couple with information and  some doings. Clas Svahn visited them at their home on May 2, and received a donation of books, magazines, audio tapes and correspondence. We also received a full set of early manuscripts for the Haunted Skies book series they are now publishing.
Volume One in the Encyclopedia of British UFOs series covers the years 1940-1959. Correspondence and other materials donated was put into order by Clas during August and is now available at AFU, resulting, for instance, in the files seen to the left.
From Gunter Hofer, Croydon, the UK, November 2010 - the Cynthia Hind archives
Gunter Hofer was a close associate of Rhodesian (Zimbabwian) UFO investigator Cynthia Hind and worked with her until her death. He has kept parts of the investigate files for Hind's UFO Afrinews magazine (available for free download, here). There are still some boxes in a house in Zimbabwe and these will be donated to AFU upon Gunter's return to Zimbabwe, the shipping cost paid by AFU. Paying for shipping to Sweden of any collection is now a new possibility, with better resources available to AFU.

Gunter Hofer (photo by Clas Svahn)
Although it is feared that the bulk of Cynthia Hind's files have disappeared, some of the investigative files now with AFU include a number of well known cases like the Elisabeth Klarer contact and the 'African School' case.

It is expected that the material will be ordered, eventually, and placed in acid-free folders.

From Uwe Schellinger, IGPP archivist, spring/ summer of 2010

Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) was created by German doctor and psychologist Hans Bender on June 19, 1950. An English rendering of the Institute's name is The Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health. The institute "engages in systematic and interdisciplinary research concerning insufficiently understood phenomena and anomalies at the frontiers of current scientific knowledge. These include altered states of consciousness and modes of experience, mind-matter relations, and their social, cultural and historical contexts from the perspectives of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences". The institute operates "a comprehensive special library and a research archive for parapsychology and frontier areas of psychology".

According to the Biennial Reports sent by IGPP archivist Uwe Schellinger the institute has some 50.000 volumes in its library related to parapsychology and frontier areas of psychology but also on UFO research, Fortean literature, ancient astronauts and cryptozoologly. Mr. Schellinger includes an inventory of "UFO-Akten iim IGPP-Archiv" which lists 13 folders with case investigations & information from the archives of Hans Bender and Lou Zinsstag. There are also magazines, clippings and manuscripts in the archive. Find more info on the Freiburg institute here. An open contact and collaboration with the IGPP institute seems interesting not the least in view of the addition to AFU of the Hilary Evans library, this winter, which covers most of the areas where IGPP also has an active interest.

 
From various donors during 2010
Some of the audio-visual media received from varous donors during 2010:

Upper row, two VHS cassettes with taped conference presentations by Max Burns (London, 2001) and Mary Rodwell (Colorado, 2004). Donated by Judith Jafaar of the BUFORA board.

Lower row, Norwegian DVD on crop circles (donated by Yngve Freij); another DVD, The day before disclosure (donated by Ole Jonny Braenne) and, finally, The encyclopedia of extraterrestrial encounters, and e-book in Word and PDF formats (donation by Peter Rogerson).

We also have received a large number of VHS tapes recorded from television by Lennart Lundh.

From Mikhail Gershtein, St. Petersburg, Russia, November 2010.
On the left, the contents of Mikhail Gershtein's most recent parcel. As always the material from Mikhail is absolutely unique and includes several Samisdat documents, mostly investigations of Russian cases, typewritten during Soviet times and distributed in very small numbers across the (then) Communist republic. Some of the books have their titles imprinted in gold on the protective covers. How we wish we could consume the contents of these extremely rare books but they are now available for researchers probably for the first time in the West!
From Anders Kjellson, Herrljunga, Sweden, November 2010.
Anders Kjellson is the grandson of Henry Kjellson who died in 1961. Anders' father Lennart Kjellson recently left this existence and parts of Henry's and Lennart's collections have been donated to AFU, through Clas Svahn, who collected the material in Herrljunga on November 26, shortly after arriving home from the UK.

Lennart had governed over Henry's collection and parts of the books and the sources Henry used when he wrote his books on ancient technology in Egypt (in the early 1950's long before anyone had heard about Erich von Däniken) are now in the possession of AFU (the upper left half  shelve in the picture on the right). Henry is also well known in Swedish ufology as one of the leading members of the 1946 ghost rocket committee, within the Swedish military forces. It does not seem that the collection we have received so far has any leads to Henry's thoughts on this early UFO phenomenon but more material may come forth later on.

Lennart himself a professional M.D., was interested in a number esoteric and scientific subjects including Egyptology and the Turin shroud, which he wrote about. His interests are reflected in the book collection now donated to AFU.

On the left picture, Anders Kjellson in his own library when the material from Henry and Lennart was turned over to Clas Svahn.  
   
From Leif Persson, Sundsvall, Sweden, October 2010.
Leif Persson has been chairman of the UFO-Sweden group UFO-Sundsvall and he has also worked with UFO-Swedens Report Centre. Today he is one of the editors of UFO-Swedens internal magazine Rapportnytt which contains, for instance, short lists of all Swedish reports received by the Report Centre.

Leif has donated a number of books to AFU and from him also came a batch of report investigations which will now be added to our Swedish report files.
From Edoardo Russo, Maurizio Verga and CISU on October 16, 2010.
On October 16 your webmaster paid a visit to CISU headquarters in Torino during a work conference in Bergamo. My impressions will be summarized in an article written in English.

There were a large number of (to me) unknown Italian books and booklets on the sale shelves. You can botanize among the CISU-UPIAR book offerings for yourself, here.

For AFU, I sorted out some books and made an agreement with Edoardo and Maurizio where I bought titles not published by CISU's publishing arm UPIAR, while UPIAR books were kindly donated to AFU.

The UPIAR publications included a 2010 edition of the bibliography on the ufo-related Italian literature since 1948 (with an accompanying CD holding the bibliography database) and a 2010 edition (the 3rd) of CISU's field investigator's manual.

Edoardo also had a surprise present for AFU: a CD of eZines 2007-2009 where he has collected 177 issues of Italian and international eZines available on the internet. Great groundwork!

   
From Erik W. Östling, Stockholm, September 2010
Erik Östling is one of the university students/researchers who has frequently used AFU as a source. He has been with us several times to look through our files and to borrow books he has used in his academic writing. We recently received some of his digital research files, including a unique collection of papers in academic journals. (We are waiting for the time & opportunity to catalogue this important material to our e-book library).

The most recent gift from Erik is his first academic treatise (in its original form) which has also been reproduced in the volume 1, 2009, issue of Aura, a magazine for academic studies of new religions, published by FINYAR. Aura is a joint project between religious and psychological departments at Swedish universities. Eriks work has the title The Raëlian movement - a scientific religion or a religion in semi-scientific

 
   
From Rémy Fauchereau, Charbuy, France, October 2010
Two parcels from France contained these four wonderful compilations of French ufo-related clippings from the years 1965-2008. The leftmost volume has the clippings archives of the 1965-66 wave of French ufologist Jean Lebiez, while the other three are more general compilations of local clippings from the periods 1967-1976, 1973-1987 and 1977-2008.

The volumes (some 600-700 pages) will be catalogued with our book library but physically placed in our clippings archive.

   
From Philip Mantle, the UK and Ole Jonny Braenne, Norway, during 2010.
Above two fine audio tape collections received at AFU during this spring/summer. On the left three boxes of tapes from Norwegian and Danish ufology donated by Ole Jonny Braenne. On the right a full box of British tape recordings from British researcher and UFO activist Philip Mantle. The tapes have been labeled with "OJB" or "Mantle" and the year and will eventually go into our digitizing project where most of the material will be secured for the future and catalogued in our audio tape §§§§§§§§§§§database.
From Mikhail Gershtein, S:t Petersburg, Russia, October 2010.
AFU depends on tireless people like Ole Jonny Braenne, Bill Jones, Rod Dyke, Barry Greenwood and Mikhail Gershtein who regularly sends us parcels of materials for preservation with what must by now have become the world's largest library of UFO-related literature. AFU is becoming sort of a world memory for what has happened within ufology and fortean studies.

The picture on the left shows the contents of Mikhail Gershteins latest parcel, one of several this summer-autumn. At the top of the picture are four samples of very unique Russian Samisdat publications, type-written with carbon copies and beautifully bound in volumes which were distributed hand-to-hand between Russian ufologists. Some of these manuscripts exist in just 3-4 copies and AFU's copies are probably the only available in the west.

   
From Philip J. Jacobs ('Phillel'), Pioneer,Tennessee, September 2010. Philip is one of the coworkers of the old Mark-Age organization, still thriving. This is not a mainstream UFO organization but a very 'new agee' group that spreads the channeled messages of Nada-Yolanda, and others. The group celebrates a 50th anniversary this year. As a broad-working archival group we are delighted to preserve also materials from groups such as Mark-Age. I am suspecting, maybe we are the only UFO/archival institution in the world that openly invites such printed or recorded information for preservation!?

Philip now sends us a copy of the groups most recent (2010) book Anchoring: The light body on Earth, channeled by the The Spiritual Hierarchy through Nada-Yolanda. The book claims direct spiritual contacts with Sananda, which is just another name for Jesus Christ. You may believe what you want in this case, but the material deserves to be preserved. Philip also announces that AFU is now on the mailing list for the groups bimonthly I Am Nation News. He has mailed the three most recent issues.

     

From Sören Andersson, Linköping, July 2010. Håkan Blomqvist phoned Sören Andersson who was 'the master translator' of UFO reports into Swedish during the 1970s and 1980s. We knew that Sören had a big collection and that he was no longer active as a ufologist. Without much hesitation Sören gave his OK to collect the materials at his home, just 45 kilometers from the AFU archives.

As a young lad, in 1960, Sören started a UFO Society, UFO-Linköping, with his father and friends. The society existed for decades, mostly as a discussion group. But Sören and members of UFO-Linköping also visited the Warminster UFO 'window' area in England in the mid-70s. We have, previously, an archive that covers most of Sören's translation work, carefully arranged by year and month of incident:

This archive will now be completed with some 38 file folders with Sören's own originals of the same translation work, as well as clippings and correspondence. The collection also included 100-150 books and a large number of magazine folders and a saucer model built by a member of the Linköping UFO society, see pictures of it all on Håkan Blomqvist's blog here.

Some of the rarer new items can be viewed in the following two pictures. On the left, all of the magazines which were completely new, including issues of UFO-Linköping's own InterPlan (in the upper left). On the right, you can see two examples from the books & booklets: Gordon Lindsay's The riddle of the flying saucers upon Ahmad Jamaludin's A summary of unidentified flying objects and related events in Malysia (1950-1980). Sören's collection also included fairly complete runs of CUFOS and ACUFOS (Australian Center for UFO Studies) special publications which make very nice additions on our library shelves.

    

From Mikhail Gershtein, St. Petersburg, Russia, July 2010. Below, the latest parcel from our Russian co-worker. This time Mikhail sent us extremely rare Samizdat books and documents, ten of them bound volumes, and another eight in loose-leaf format. Samizdat books were (re)typed and carbon-copied on typewriters during the communist regime and secretly distributed throughout the Soviet Union.

Some of the books are written by contactees and some are translations (of Vallée, McDonald, Bloecher) from other languages. One book is a listing of rocket/satellite launches mistaken for 'real ufos'. Catalogues of Russian witness reports, the Petrozvodsk phenomenon (1977), and an expedition to the Russian 'forbidden zone' (where paranormal phenomena are frequently reported) are the subjects for others of the 'Samizdats'. The books include original sketches of Bigfoot creatures, with footprints, and of reported phenomena in the sky. All of the books are 'handmade' with photos that were glued into the books one-by-one. An extremely rare collection which we are very proud of!

From Philip Mantle, UK, April 2010. Philip Mantle has been an activist in the United Kingdom UFO research movement for many decades, from the beginning - if my memory serves me well - in company with the Birdsall brothers and later as one of the BUFORA research directors. From 2010 he is chief editor of a new British magazine, UFO Matrix, where our own Clas Svahn is one of the columnists. (In the first column Clas writes about AFU and our work, for an English audience.)

When Clas and Håkan Ekstrand visited some ten researchers in the UK, at the turn of April/May this year, they also paid a visit to Philip and got (yet another) batch of very interesting materials for the AFU inventory - some of the new things can be seen below. There were also huge heaps of magazines, which will be credited to Philip in an upcoming acquisition listing, to be published later this year. This will be combined list of every new magazine from the UK and Luis Schoenherr collections. Cataloguing takes time!

From Ole Jonny Braenne, Oslo, July 2010. Some new phenomena-related Norwegian books in this the latest parcel from Ole Jonny, plus some very old Swedish materials, including a number of Swedish prints connected to ball lightning research. Ole Jonny's parcels are always a joy and will keep our librarian (and some others of us) busy for a few hours. I discovered that issues 14 of the Anomalist (right lower corner of picture below) was credited with Ian Simmons as the editor. Creates a problem for us who have catalogued previous issues in the book collection under the authorship of Huyghe and Stacy. Well, minor problem to be solved!

From Hilary Evans, London, May 2010 On the sorting table, below, the first of a number of important collections brought from the UK now in May. This part comes from author Hilary Evans who is still writing books, fighting with his diminishing eyesight. As you can see there are big heaps of the Spanish Stendek (some of them in bound volumes) and Cuaderno de Ufologia but also American publications like Contactee and Gray Barker publications. Hilary's contributions of rare magazines to AFU are always a delight for the man who has the favor of doing the cataloguing and thumbing through it all...

From Clas Svahn, Stockholm, April 2010. UFO-Sweden's chairman is probably the most energetic of all our donors/contributors! Sorry all you other kind people! :-)  In the most recent car load of materials from his own library & archive (in the cellar of his villa) we must point to the Gösta Carlsson collection of interviews on audio and video tapes. These will be perfect objects for our ongoing digitizing project.

Gösta Carlsson's close encounter with what he claimed was the crew of a landed saucer happened right at the inception of the 'ghost rocket' wave, in May 1946. Clas interviewed Carlsson - famous as 'the Pollen king' in Sweden - and investigated the case for many years. The final result was the co-written book Mötet i gläntan (The meeting in the glade), published in 1995, more than ten years after the investigation had started. Clas has now deposited his interview tapes with AFU. A few of them are in the picture to the left. They came as part of a larger collection of recent & old interview

   

From Frances Copeland, Oxford, UK, early 2010. Frances Copeland, who works for the Contact International UFO Research as secretary and editor, sent Clas Svahn volumes 17-21 of the organization's The UFO Register - Data Research magazine. The booklets cover the years 1982, 1983, 1984-1989, 1990 and 1991-1992, respectively. Clas visited Fran during his UK tour in early May and picked up a large number of new materials in boxes, some of it to be scanned by AFU.

 
From David Norman, Ipsach, Switzerland, May 2010. David recently moved and discovered a batch of BUFORA magazines that he didn't need any more. He asked BUFORA chairman Matt Lyons who sent him over to AFU. We are happy to accept the magazines as donations and have paid David for his shipping costs.

 
From Warren Aston, New Zealand, April 2010. This is probably a rather rare UFO book from New Zealand. It was recently received as a donation by AFU board member Håkan Blomqvist from his NZ contact, UFO researcher Warren Aston. The book Strangers in our skies by Mervyn Dykes was published in 1981 and is a nice new addition to our reference library (the 'OZ' shelf according to our Ufocode classification). Found a site with some other NZ phenomena books that we never heard about, here. 

 
From Martin Schönherr, Innsbruck, Austria, April 2010. Luis Schönherr was an internationally known 'UFO philosopher' who left this world plane on October 7, 2009. He had been interested in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena ever since the big European wave of UFO-humaniod sightings in 1954 and had collected a vast library of carefully selected, serious literature. His articles and thoughtful letters-to-the-editors appeared in many UFO periodicals across the world.

This winter his son Martin made contact with the J. Allen Hynek Center of UFO Studies, where Luis had been an associate for decades, to ask them recommend a site for preservation of his father's collection. Mark Rodeghier recommended AFU and this is why we were contacted by e-mail on March 15 and soon agreed upon a transfer of the material to Sweden. The material is a donation from Martin Schoenherr while AFU has paid for packing and shipping to Sweden. The Schenker lorry with 492 kilos on two pallets arrived outside AFU on April 30.

Håkan Blomqvist and I spent four hours that evening unpacking the 17 heavy boxes. The collection now covers five shelf sections in our 'C' facility (picture below) where it will be sorted, catalogued and added to different parts of our collections. The more personal papers, including Mr. Schönherr's correspondence binders and papers connected to his own-developed computer files of international cases will form a basic Schoenherr archive. The donation to AFU also includes computer tapes and punchcard systems, many volumes of professionally bound magazines (like FSR and UFOP-Nachrichten since the very start) or magazines carefully protected in binders (like Pursuit). As work proceeds on the collection we will certainly come back with more detailed presentations.

Håkan Blomqvist is very happy with the new donation to AFU.

 
From A.G. Gevaerd, Campo Grande, Brazil, February 2010. For years we have planned an exchange with the glossy Brazilian publication UFO - Revista Brasilieira de Ufologia, published by the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas de Discos Voadores (CBPDV), one of the few lively more professional international UFO magazines still in print. Years ago I had correspondence with Mr. Gevaerd but, in the wealth of projects available to us all, the project fell, until revived by Clas Svahn, early this year.

We are very happy with a more complete collection of this major magazine in Portuguese. At the same time we are that most of us at AFU have to be content with looking at the pictures and the nice layout, but we are certain that in the future we will be able to help some researcher with research copies of articles from this source, too. In this case AFU paid for the shipping from Brazil to Sweden, while the magazines are a donation from CBPDV and Mr. Gevaerd. This is a model that we are happy to use in co-operation with any editor who would like to see one archives copy of their magazine be preserved.

From Didier Gomez, Gayo, France, February 2010.
Yet another ten kilos of materials from France. Many books that we now have two, three or even more copies of in the library, but also some items (picture, right) that might be new for our ur library catalogue

 

From Didier Gomez, Gayo, Lombardia, France, January 2010.
The annual package of French media from UFOmania editor Didier Gomez!! Nine kilos.

Some of the contents are known before and will make nice second copies in our library. Some - like La vie vient d'une intelligence supérieure. L'hypothese extraterrestre by Jean Sider are welcome newcomers.

 
   
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