Huge APCIC archive of UFO newsclippings now online [taking the current total to several tens of thousands of UFO newspaper articles in the archive]

Prior to the Internet, newspaper articles about UFO sightings around the world were supplied to UFO researchers by several newsclipping services. The longest running UFO newsclipping services were the "UFO Newsclipping Service" founded by Rod Dyke (1969-2011) and a similar service offered by the Aerial Phenomenon Clipping Information Center ("APCIC") (1970s-1990). The latter is less well known within ufology.

I have now uploaded 164 of the APCIC newspaper clipping bulletins, with permission from two surviving leaders of APCIC - Ron and Richard Smotek (after somewhat protracted attempts to locate and contact them during the last few years).

My thanks once again to a Russian colleague, Mikhail Gershtein, for helpfully providing these scans of 164 issues of the APCIC bulletin. I am hoping to receive a few additional issues to fill in a gap at the beginning of the collection from a veteran researcher in the USA, Barry Greenwood. Ron Smotek himself has also kindly offered to try to help with any remaining gaps.

These 164 issues total (according to the TTFA PDF page counter) 4,835 pages. The number of clippings per page various between 1 and about 6 or 7. Taking a rough average of, say, 3 clippings per page then this is over 10,000 newsclippings.

These 164 issues of the APCIC clipping service join all 505 issues of the "UFO Newsclipping Service" which I have previously uploaded. Rod Dyke kindly gave his permission for me to upload his "UFO Newsclipping Service" bulletins after requests from me and related negotiations over a span of about, oh, 7 years or so. Sometimes patience is (eventually...) rewarded. :) Those 505 issues totalled (according to the TTFA PDF page counter) 9851 pages. Taking a rough average again of about 3 clippings per page then that's another few tens of thousands of UFO newspaper articles (which overlap with the APCIC collection, but to a surprisingly limited extent).

I have also previously uploaded a chronological list of about 30,000 other UFO newsclippings in my collection. I uploaded a sizeable sample of UFO clippings from the 1980s from that collection a few years ago. Both sets were part of a small demonstration of methods I had developed of quickly merging and assimilating different UFO collections into one searchable chronological set as a source for all of ufology. That formed part of my call for wider cooperation and coordination on making such UFO newspaper cuttings freely available online in a searchable and sortable format. There was, um, limited interest in any such collaborative exercise. Hey ho, what can you do... At least things are _slowly_ improving (although frankly I think we could move at several times the current speed with just a tiny bit more coordination).

Okay, these are relatively small numbers compared to the couple of million pages of transcripts of UFO podcasts/documentaries which I have uploaded, but newspaper articles are a significant part of the history of ufology and often provide details that are omitted from summaries in books or podcasts.

The organisers of APCIC included Harry Cohen, Ron Smotek and Richard Smotek. The former two are shown in the photo below. This week I was finally able to get in touch with Ron Smotek and he said that they had no objection to my making APCIC bulletins freely available online.

As usual, the material I have uploaded is searchable. I have previously written about some free PDF software that can search a directory (or full hard drive) of PDFs quickly and present the results in a format that can be reviewed extremely quickly. For example, the APCIC bulletins can quickly be search for - say - "triang" to find stories referring to triangle/triangular shaped UFOs - with some samples being included below.