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Ghost flier mystery still unresolved In a series of eight articles, during the past ten years, Swedish aviation historians have contributed widely diverse views on the mystery of the 1930's ghost fliers over the Scandinavian Arctic. Their thoughts have been published as lengthy articles, and as letters to the editor, of Svensk Flyghistorisk Tidskrift (SFT), the lively journal of Svensk Flyghistorisk Förening, the Swedish Aviation Historical Society, an organisation with 13 regional groups and 5.000 members. There is no doubt that, within this society, there is a great interest in the phenomenon, which mystified a whole world, particularly during the winters 1933-34 and 1936-37, and which has not yet been explained. We will sum up the eight articles in the order as they were published: 1. Jan Waernberg has gone through the official ghost flier archives at the Military Record Office (Krigsarkivet) in Stockholm and published his results in a twelve pages article in SFT, issue 2/1992. During the winter of 1933/34 a total of 96 reports came from Sweden, 234 from Norway and 137 from Finland. (These official figures do not seem to represent the real number of sightings if one is to judge from reading the contemporary north-Swedish newspapers - AL). Waernberg gives details and illustrations, not of the sightings themselves, but of how the Swedish Air Force's hunt for the ghost fliers was organised, and the people who took part of it. In a first reconnaissance, two, later four, planes from the F4 wing at Östersund took part. Also the plane "Viking", owned by the Stockholms-Tidningen newspaper company joined the search, which was completely in vain. Later on, in January 1934 a few Air Force planes were moved from the F1 wing at Västerås to the neighbourhoods of Umeå and Holmsund (on the coast of the Baltic). As a reaction to new alarming reports of overflights from Boden (with one of the most important fortifications in Sweden) and from Finland, a ground-based reconnaissance of airspace was organised at the end of January from a chain of ground stations in the provinces of Norrbotten and Västerbotten. Four J-7 (Bristol Bulldog) planes from the Air Force were transferred from Västerås to Boden. Swedish planes that participated in the ghost flier hunt, from top to bottom: 1) Air Force S6H (Fokker C.VE) on skies, 2) The newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen's ASJA L1 Viking on skies, 3) Air Force S5A (Hansa), and 4) Air Force J7 (Bristol Bulldog). Sketches from Svensk Flyghistorisk Tidskrift, 2/1992. The hunt resulted in a total number of six crashes for the Swedish Air Force, while the aeroplanes they were hunting seemed to make it without any trouble - in the nights and in extreme cold and snow storms. "The ghost flights" were also a starting point for Swedish signal reconnaissance. Strange coded messages were found to have their origin in the Murmansk area, but their connection to the aerial sightings remain to be finally proven. 2. In SFT 3/1998 one of those who scouted for the ghost fliers from the backseat of a S6H (Fokker CV.E) reconnaissance aircraft tells his story. Eric Hemtke was suddenly recalled from his Christmas vacations. "Such a hurry as on this occasion I never experienced at any time, not even during WWII". The weather was bad with snow storms and -18 Centigrade. His plane crashed during the first mission and it was sheer wonder that he and the pilot survived. They were allotted another airplane but bad weather prevented any extensive reconnaissance tours. The fear of the ghost fliers was apparent in local villages: "One day as I and our chief officer landed on a lake, by a distant house, to ask where we were, they refused to open the door out of fear for the ghost flier, which they thought was us because of our heavy bearskin dresses, parachutes and face masks." The pilots from F4 mostly believed the ghost fliers were Soviet orientation flights. 3. Owe Bergfeldt, former employee of the Air Forces Material Command (Flygförvaltningen), thinks, in his letter to the editor, in SFT 5/1998, that the Soviets were innocent and that the planes were German. Germany "needed to develop and verify a long distance radio navigation system". A Heinkel He 59B on floats and with "open cockpits" (in -18 degree cold plus the speed of the wind?? - AL) was used, according to Bergfeldt, for flights up through the Baltic and the Gulf of Bothnia. According to Bergfeldt Swedish authorities cracked the mystery "but out of respect for a certain potentate on the rise in the south (Hitler) the matter was silenced." 4. Ingemar Strandberg writes in SFT 1/1999 that he is "probably one of few Swedes still alive who saw 'the ghost flier' in reality", over his home in Boden. "Six years old I was awaken, on a starry and moonlit night during the winter of 1934, by my father, who burst into the room and lifted me to the gable window with a view to the north. There was a terrible roar from several engines and straight over our house came an airplane on a northerly course. It wasn't the air ambulance - which we would have recognised. No, the plane was a huge four-engine monoplane, which seemed to emit two long, blue-white exhaust flames. It passed us at an estimated altitude of between 200 and 500 metres. My retorspective impression is that the plane looked like a Soviet TB-3." The Soviet-Russian TB-3 (Ant-6) four-engined bomber made it's maiden flights in early 1932 and was fully operational by the winter of 1933/34. Strandberg doesn't find any reason in Bergfeldt's German Heinkel theory. The flights happened in the middle of the cold winter without access to open waters in the Gulf of Bothnia for an airplane on floats. The planes must have had an enormous reserve of engine gas to accomplish the long flight from their base on the island of Rügen (on the south coast of the Baltic), or, as an alternative, mid-flight refuelling depots. Strandbergs father told him that "some time after the ghost flights had seized, the Soviet army paper Red Star published an article on a couple of crews from the heavy bomber wing in the Murmansk area, who had been appointed Heroes of the Soviet Union because of successful technical tests." 5. Lennart Andersson is one of the best connoisseurs of the Swedish Air Force, being the author of a book about the prop engine period of the force. In SFT 6/1998 he publishes his doubts about Bergfeldt's German theory. In January 1934 there were three prototypes of the Heinkel He 59 based in the northern part of Germany. "In theory there were He 59 planes, which could have been the culprits, but why wouldn't Germany have used the more reliable Dornier J II Wal, which had a much greater operation range?" "German development of the dive-bomber technique was in full swing in Sweden at this time - with German personnel and material, but in co-operation with the Swedish Air Force - so tests of this kind are very conceivable. As far as I know, however, no archival documents have been found that support such a theory." 6. Sven-Erik Ersbacken (in SFT 1/2001) quotes the former division head of FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt), the Defence Radio Institution, Sven Wäsström, who has written about the ghost fliers in connection with his research on early Swedish radio signal reconnaissance. Wäsström had found: 1) that Swedish and Norwegian military commanders were of the opinion that the planes had, at least temporarily, a mobile base to the west of Norway, 2) that the numerous number of reports from the Gulf of Bothnia pointed to bases in Finland, 3) that Finnish authorities didn't show any great enthusiasm for investigating the matter, 4) that the German Navy tested technical outfit for catapult starts, blind flying and darkness photography in the Atlantic, 5) that the chief of the German supreme command visited the Norwegian Atlantic area at the time in question, 6) that Germany had air-mail services to South America via catapult vessels in the South Atlantic and to North America via the North Atlantic, and 7) that Germany had reasons for certain experiments in the polar area as a replacement for areas of the Soviet Ukraine that Germany left in the summer of 1934. All of this points - according to Wäsström - to Germany as the real origin of the ghost fliers. 7. Ingemar Strandberg returns with another letter in the SFT 2/2001 issue. "I am still steadfastly convinced that the airplane my father and I saw a moonlit winter's night in 1934 was a large, low-winged, four-engine monoplane. Such did not exist in Germany at that time… I might add that my father got the outline of the airplane verified by other people who had also observed it." Strandberg thinks that the seven arguments from Wäsström prove nothing, and he points to a report by Lieutenant Colonel Wernstedt (written in the 1930's - AL) on the flights. Within the Swedish Military it was thought that the flights took off from airbases at Alexandrovsk and Kandalaksja in the Soviet Union. "The Norwegians also caught Soviet agents - Norwegians who had got their radio training in Soviet." 8. Finally, Jan Waernberg returns (SFT 2/2001), writing: "The theory that it was German Navy planes has been persistent, not the least since Hans Villius and Olle Häger fed the rumour in their television series of historically interesting black-and-white photos. Unfortunately they bring to court facts which were, so to say, "one year too late", and which concerned the summer of 1934 when the ghost flights had already seized for a while." - - - - - - - - - - - - I am sure debate will continue until someone may find, in an ex-Soviet (or ex-Nazi-German) archive, the actual planning and/or operation reports from the ghost flights, or when someone comes onto the public scene telling us that he sat as 'the ghost pilot' over the polar areas, ice-cold nights during the 1930's. Time is getting late for the latter to happen, however. For my own part I would put three marks out of four on the Soviet theory. For the one who wants to study the ghost fliers, on a deeper level, there are primarily some 1.700 pages of documents at the Military Records Office in Stockholm (AFU will be seeking a grant to make complete photo copies of these) and the Archives for UFO Research collection in Norrköping that includes Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish archive materials (on paper and microfilm) plus clippings from a large number of Scandinavian newspapers. Anders Liljegren Note: This text was originally published in Swedish by UFO-Sweden's UFO-Aktuellt, issue nr. 2/2001. French books by Jean Sider French author Jean Sider is one of many faithful supporters and exchange partners of the AFU archives. Sider first sent two of the most recent books by his pen, OVNIs: dossier secret (1994) and OVNIs: la solution du mystère (2001) - just off the presses this summer. The latter is a general review of the UFO mystery, from Roswell and Project Mogul to abductions and 'the Gaia hypothesis', brought up to date and carefully referenced. With appendices on astronomer UFO sightings (a catalogue of 60 such instances), transient lunar phenomena (TLP) and the Gallipoli 1915 hoax story of a disappearing British regiment, this book is very much a mixed bag. Mr Sider has, in a second exchange/donation agreement with AFU, sent us copies of his 1997 book Le dossier 1954 et l'imposture rationaliste, including case catalogues, and an appendix book, subtitled Cahier iconographique, of press clippings and articles, all related to the 1954 French wave. With our limited knowledge of French it seems this is a rebuttal of the negative conclusions on the French wave published by French skeptics of the Union Rationaliste. Mr Sider also donated copy of his three-part essay Alien-contacts and the diabolical connection, that argues for "UFO aliens" being connected to the age-old mythologies of demonic, spiritual entities. Hector Quintanilla on Blue Book One of the recent additions to AFU is the UFO memoirs of Lt. Col. Hector Quintanilla, who headed the US Air Force Project Blue Book between 1963 and 1969, when it closed down. The 114 page document was downloaded by Clas Svahn, in PDF format, from the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) website: http://www.nidsci.org/articles/articles1.html 'Understanding' and some notes on the early history of the AFU archives Understanding was the monthly, later bi-month-ly, newsletter of Understanding Inc., founded by American contactee Daniel W. Fry in 1956. This summer associate Per Schmeling donated some early 1970's copies of Understanding to AFU. This prompted us to do a little digging in the archives - back to the early days of Swedish ufology, or should we call it ifology ('ifo' for interplanetary flying objects)…? Daniel W. Fry was one of most wellknown personalities among early Swedish 'ifo' and New Age enthusiasts of the 1950's and 1960's. Perhaps Fry had his second-largest audience anywhere in the world, here in Sweden..? In early January 1958, Mrs. Edith Nicolaisen, New Age enthusiast, and the enthusiastic driving force behind the Swedish Parthenon book publishing company, wrote Fry, then living in California, asking to acquire the Swedish publicity rights for The White Sands Incident and Alan's Message to Men of Earth, both originally published in Los Angeles in 1954. Replying, a few weeks later, Fry offered Parthenon and Nicolaisen the rights to these texts for free, and also proposed that Edith should also take the more recent Steps to the stars (1956) into consideration. This started off a correspondence between Dan and Edith, and later also between Edith and Dan's wife Tahahlita. The contact never grew intense, in fact Edith complained several times about Daniel Fry not responding to her long letters with her typically detailed and demanding requests for information and photos to help boost the publication of Fry's books in Swedish (Resa med flygande tefat (1958), Budskapet från rymden (1960), and also the 2nd editions of these two in 1968-69). Parthenon and Nicolaisen had just published the Leslie-Adamski book in Swedish (1957) and was planning a whole series of books and booklets to "educate 'Swedish youth' about the reality of visitors from space". Fry's Understanding magazine became one of the models for Edith's own plans for a Swedish New Age-IFO journal, plans that never mate-rialised because book publishing was always the priority. However, Edith recommended Under-standing to her followers in Sweden and soon it was one of the most well-read saucer zines here. In 1964 there was even an attempt, by Sven-Erik and Ing-Marie Asklund, to publish a Swedish language edition of Understanding. As far as we know there were only three issues in Swedish, faithfully translated word-by-word from English. In this way, Understanding headquarters, now in Merlin, Oregon, got a number of connections in Sweden, including Sten Lindgren, a Swedish contactee who had founded a group with the prestigious name the Inter Galactical Federation (IGF), and who regularly reported sightings by himself and his friends in the pages of Understanding magazine. Most of the sightings could probably have been explained, had they only been investigated by someone outside of the inner nucleus of this New Age contactee group. One of the eager Understanding subscribers was Kjell Jonsson, a young ufologist interested particularly in the New Age side to UFOs. Interested in books & literature in general, Kjell became a student at the Swedish Library High School, planning a career as a librarian. With his ufologist friends Håkan Blomqvist (now secretary of the Swedish Humanist Society and still a member of the AFU board) and Göran Ebbesson (who later took the name Brusewitz, and who is now chairman of the largest Swedish parapsychological organisation), Kjell ran a local UFO group south of Stockholm. Reading back issues of Understanding Yearbook (paperbound editions of Understanding volumes) that Kjell had ordered, he noticed that Unit # 37 of Fry's organisation had founded a postal rental library of UFO and New Age books from out of Buffalo, New York. Books could be hired by paying 2 cents per day. Kjell's interest in this idea is apparent from his pencilled notes in the Understanding Yearbook volumes still in the AFU archives. Swedish ufologists, and Kjell in particular, also had an admiration for Danish librarian Willy Wegner who was attempting to build a reference book collection with his Danish UFO Center. Soon this all materialised into the plans for a Swedish reference & lending library under the aegis of the newly formed (1973) Arbetsgruppen för ufologi (AFU). The plans took definite shape in 1975, when Stockholm ufologist Lennart Johansson donated his collection of books and magazines. Starting off with a few book cases in Kjell's small apartment, the collection soon grew out of his modest home. Five years later, the library moved to new premises in Norrköping and the collection was formalised as the Archives for UFO Research foundation. Fry's Understanding organisation was immensely influential on Swedish New Age 'ifology'. Fry travelled to Gothenburg, Sweden in August 1970, just at a peak of Swedish interest in the subject. Invited by the Keiller family, wealthy people who sent him the air ticket in an envelope, they, and other Swedish ifologists, organised and paid for Fry's travels, media appearances and lectures throughout Sweden, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Finland and, finally, in London. The trip is described in detail by Fry in eight instalments, titled European pilgrimage, in the 1971 issues of Understanding. As a token of gratitude Daniel Fry appointed Mr Per Axel Atterbom and Edith Nicolaisen as "Honorary International Directors" of Understanding Inc. Fry's way of organising Understanding Inc. as local units (an idea he shared with NICAP, who had an intense dislike for Fry), also became a model for UFO-Sweden, the Swedish national group which was formed by Carl-Axel Jonzon just a few months before Fry came to Sweden. Jonzon met Fry with the Keiller family but obviously this meeting left a more distinct impression in Jonzon's memory than on Fry. UFO-Sweden was essentially a New Age group in the early years, before the organisation, particularly in the 1990's, and under Clas Svahn's chairmanship, matured into more serious and objective studies. 1970 must have been something like the peak year in Fry's UFO career. As he came to Sweden he had just inaugurated ('dedicated') his International Cultural Center in Merlin on grounds donated by Mrs. Wilma Thompson. The inauguration convention took three days (June 19-21) with talks by 'contactee' people like Marianne Francis and Gina Cerminara. AFU has a complete collection of the Understanding magazine, from 1957 up to the autumn of 1979, when Kjell Jonsson no longer paid for the subscription. Missing is the first (1956) volume and issues after Sept/Oct 1979. American sources (such as the Tom Lind catalogue), say that Understanding was disbanded in 1980 with plans to resume in 1982, or (the Eberhart bibliography) replaced by Understanding Newsletter in 1982. Being, primarily, a New Age item, but with lots of US and international UFO reporting, Understanding is obviously of little interest to serious American collectors of the UFO literature. Edith Nicolaisen and Kjell Jonsson both died in 1986 (Kjell at the young age of 34) and Daniel Fry in 1992. So, this is all but history, but sometimes we need history as a mirror to the future. Without an archive we would never know what ideas that floated through the brains of these early enthusiastic people.
68 meters of NEW shelves at AFU On July 10 the Swedish furniture group IKEA delivered 14 new sections of shelves to AFU, mostly intended for our "old" (or "B") archive. All in all, this represents 68 new meters of shelves, added to the previous 400+ meters in the two AFU repositories. AFU has generally invested in IKEA type shelves ("Billy" for our book collections, "Ivar" for our other archives). IKEA shelves are "standard" constructions, easy to build and move, have been in the market for decades, are relatively cheap, and there is even a second-hand market for them. The new shelves mean that we can make a real, structured archive out of our "B" locality. It's no longer "just a couple of rooms for storage". After an intense summer month the "B" archives now houses sorted and structured collections, such as: l Duplicates and surplus (sale or trade) copies of Swedish, Scandinavian, European and World-wide UFO-related journals and newsletters, sorted by country and by title. A number of exchange programs is under way with ufologists / archives in the US, Spain and Italy. l Our uncatalogued collections of science fiction, popular science, paranormal and occult prints (books, booklets, magazines). l The collection of topographical maps covering Sweden, and also a substantial holding of other maps. l Duplicates of newspaper & magazine articles, sorted chronologically into acid-free envelopes by year and month of publication. As new collections arrive they are checked against our master clippings file in the "A" archive and duplicate copies are then filed here. l Private and organisational files from Swedish UFO groups that do not "qualify" for the "A" archives, thus of less general interest - such as the bookkeeping from several organisations, manuscripts, print originals, computer diskettes. l Binders, books, index cards, and other archival objects from the Parthenon publishing company, the files of ufologists K. Gösta Rehn and Håkan Blomqvist, and from former sci-fi writer Henrik Nanne (to name a few). l Audio and video tapes collection, roughly 300 videos and 1.500 audio cassettes. Interviews, conference recordings, commercial films and media programs. The tapes emanate from about a dozen of retrospective donations to AFU. Much of this will eventually be catalogued and housed in a new shelf raised in the "A" archives. l A picture library sorted chronologically by report date and alphabetically by name / subject. The library holds several thousand photos and other illustrations, sorted into acid-free envelopes. l Storage of paraphernalia, including models, posters, stickers, advertisements and other such "museum" specimens. Not a very large collection, yet it's there to indicate our interest. There is also a large table area for effective sort-work on newly arrived files, a microfilm reader and an old IBM computer. This summer, a lot of surplus material, furniture and equipment has been disposed of, to make place for new things. This will be a continuing process as the work at the AFU centre evolves. Anders Liljegren The Bruno Ericsson collection The first part of the Bruno R Ericsson collection (see AFU Newsletter #40) was delivered by Clas Svahn on July 10. The delivery included: l One Thomson video recorder that combines the American NTSC television system with the European PAL standard. We are planning to buy a small TV set to be able to view the videos we have in our collection, at the archives, and to start catalogue work there. l More than 50 American, British and Swedish video cassettes, mostly commercial documen-taries on UFO's and related subjects. l More than 70 micro cards (5x7 = 35 pages on each card) totalling more than 2.000 pages of Bruno Ericssons private theories on UFOs and related subjects. Ericsson, before his death, spent about 8.000 Swedish kronor to secure his theories on micro cards for the future. Libraries in Sweden TLS, the Swedish Society for Technical Documentation, recently published the 4th edition of their directory of Swedish libraries. Archives for UFO Research is one of 806 publicly available libraries in the country. The TLS guide is available at AFU, as a book and also as a CD-ROM. With (conservatively) 4000 volumes of books and some 75 magazines (serials) arriving regularly at AFU, AFU is in the same league as the libraries of such institutions as the Institute for Futures Studies (2000 volumes / 25 serials), the Swedish Space Corporation (1800 / 45), the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (3000 / 170), the Telecommunications Museum in Stockholm (6500 / 56), the Customs Museum (5000 / 10), the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) (6700 / 150), the Swedish Transport and Communications Research Board (KFB) (5000 / 55), the Institute for Surface Chemistry (YKI) (3300 / 100) and the Swedish Agency for Emergency Planning (ÖCB) (5000 books and 200 serials received). Most of these institutions are governmental or industrial, built from tax payer's money, or by corporate money, while AFU is built from a meagre budget of only some 200 US dollars per month - entirely out of ufologists own pockets. The Royal (National) Library of Stockholm has 3,3 million books and 13.145 serials arriving, but then it costs the tax payers more than 20 million US dollars each year. One of the serials is AFU Newsletter - sent for free as required of all Swedish publishers of serials. Anders Liljegren AFU as a north European archive? Theo Paijmans, a Dutch ufologist and member of the Project 1947 mailing list, recently decided he would write a will of his UFO collection in favour of AFU in Sweden. In a posting to the mailing-list he stated that AFU has the best track record of keeping an open UFO collection and having it preserved for the future. Since AFU has materials donated from other countries in Europe, including the Scandinavian countries, England and Russia, this is but a natural development for us. We are planning to seek a grant to cover the costs of transporting collections to Sweden. Of course, the ideal is that collections remain with responsible institutions in their 'home' countries, but if no such exists, we are prepared. Recent visitors to AFU Ü On August 6, the archives was visited by Mats Nilsson and Gunnar Karlsson from Sala, where UFO-Sweden has its head office and mailing address. Mats was a ufologist way back in the 1960's and is an AFU sponsors. The two ufologists - on a summer vacation tour - primarely studied the organizational and private correspondence files in view of the local UFO society's, Enköping-Sala UFO-förening, 25th anniversary during 2001. Mats Nilsson was able to prove, in the Parthenon correspondence files, that he was the one who initiated the very first contact between UFO-Sweden and Parthenon, which eventually led to the deposition (in 1986) of the Parthenon library and files. Ü On August 29, we were visited by Dan Eklund from Växjö, an AFU member and regular borrower of books from the AFU postal lending library. Dan, a university student, used the book library and our complete back issues collection of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. He summed up his visit with the comment that he never could have imagined that the archive was so huge, and that he would have to return in the future to spend several days at the research centre. Ü On September 10, four members of the Söderköpings Arkivförening, a local archives group, visited AFU headed by Elisabeth Månsson, who is the archivist of the group. The same afternoon Clas Svahn and his wife Anneli made another delivery to the archives of materials from Gunnar Schelin, the Parthenon files, Carl-Anton Mattsson and also a large number of video tapes from AFU sponsor Jörgen Granlie, who tapes all UFO-related programs on Swedish television (public service television, commercial channels, Discovery, etc). Operation Dacapo Operation Dacapo was a joint project between the Swedish Customs [Authority] and Swedish Defence, investigating west-Swedish territorial violations, by air, throughout the 1970's. Small aeroplanes were seen by ground witnesses flying from, and into, Norway. It was speculated that the violations of the border were the result of drug smuggling. Anders Liljegren has visited the Customs archives in Karlstad and found some related documents. Clas Svahn has queried the Defence Authority's Security department and two memos were released, while other documents are still under the security lid. The documents found form the basis for a new reference file folder "Ghost fliers in Värmland. Operation Dacapo" now available at the AFU archives. Recent new exchanges u Skepsis, St.Olavsgt. 27, N-0166 Oslo, Norway. 2000, issues 1, 2, 3/4 and 2001, issue 1. Organ of the Norwegian Skepsis society, the counterpart of CSICOP in Norway. Editor: Arnfinn Pettersen. Skeptical material on many 'paranormal' and New Age themes. Interview with Erich von Däniken (issue 1/2000) who talked at Oslo UFO conference, folklorist Audhild Skoglund on the Star People tradition (2/2000), an interview with Mikael Rothstein, a Danish academic in the field of history of religion who has written on the UFO phenome-non (3-4/2000) and a lengthy review of 'astro-archaeologist' Graham Hancock's theories (3-4/2000 and continued in 1/2001). Plus a lot on chiropractic, witchcraft, creationism, and other skeptical stuff. Rothstein, in his interview, admits that it's not less irrational to study UFOs than to study God. Thank you for that revelation! u Folkvett, issue 3/2001, Organ of Vetenskap & Folkbildning (Science and Education), Box 185, 101 23 Stockholm. I am not quite sure whether this is an exchange magazine. I have paid for a subscription for many years to see to that this title really arrives on the AFU shelves. This title comes in pocket book format four times each year. In this particular issue a translated article by Peter Zegers on David Icke and conspiracies against the New Age. Swedish skeptics denied me membership because I "embrace supernatural beliefs". Well, if managing a folkloric, research archive on the UFO phenomenon is embracing something supernatural, so… Myself, I have my doubts about the attitudes of people who call their journal by the name of 'Manners' (which is the English translation of Folkvett). Obviously it is good 'manners' to be a full-blooded skeptic, but what about us others who prefer to look to all directions? In school I was taught 'manners', that is to respect and to bow to the village doctor, and to the priest, and the teacher… Is that what science is all about? They should change the name of their journal to something more appropriate! I really get an itch each time I see the stupid title of this mag. Anders Liljegren n The AFU Newsletter is published quarterly by AFU. Editor: Anders Liljegren. AFU was established in 1973 and the newsletter started in 1975. Copyright is not claimed unless explicitly stated. Reproduction is encouraged provided that "AFU Newsletter" is referenced as your source. n Archives for UFO Research is a non-profit, private foundation, aiming to build a Swedish-International UFO library and research archive; to support and encourage serious research; and to stimulate a critical, scientific discussion on UFO phenomena. n Membership in Sweden: by annual donation of 150 SEK each year to postal giro no 49 07 14-3, or by annual donation of materials for the archive equivalent to 150 SEK. n International exchanges: we are always interested in exchange deals with publishers of newsletters, journals, monographs or other media. The Newsletter is NOT available through subscription outside of Sweden. Materials you send us will always be catalogued and saved for posterity, and future research, at the archives. n Sponsorship: Sponsorship of the AFU foundation is most welcome, whether you live in Sweden, or in any other country. Minimum annual donation by sponsors is 600 SEK (or equal amount in any other currency), but more substantial monetary donations are, of course, welcome, as well as donations / depositions of records & materials related to the UFO subject (single pieces or collections of books, newsletters, magazines, reports, clippings, photos, audio & video recordings, microfilms, etc) |
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