Isaac Koi - New Uploads

4 years ago, I made scans of most issues of the _RARE_ Grand Rapids Flying Saucer Club's newsletter "UFORUM" (1950s, USA) freely available online - with thanks to Barry Greenwood for the scans.

At that time, Issues 1 to 3 were missing from the huge UFO archives of both the AFU and Barry Greenwood (and every other UFO archives with whom I cooperate...).

Today, Bradley W Plaisier (@bpleasies on Twitter) filled in those gaps after he stopped by the Grand Rapids public library while he was in town and using his mobile phone to take images of those issues.

I have now uploaded a new UFO timeline tool: a 5,000+ page chronological summary of online UFO news articles from 2005 onwards, with links to those articles.  (I have also uploaded some new related collections of thousands of files, as outlined briefly below).

This document is part of my recent effort to use AI tools to impose more order on my various collections of UFO material (and to help fill in some of the gaps in those collections).  I am also using this document as one of the tools for updating and revising my previous UFO Timeline that I shared online in 2006. 

I'm happy to make this new UFO timeline document freely available for anyone to download.

This new document seeks to collate information from Google News and to generate structured data based on it (in the form of a collection of about 7,000 JSON files, which I have now also shared online).  The JSON files are then used to generate a chronological table. 

I have also been experimenting with using the links in all of the JSON files to download all of these news articles and name them using a consistent filename format, but this last part in rather in a work in progress. I've shared a sample of about 1,000 PDFs to give a brief indication of the current state of this effort. (The current problems relate mainly to the scraping code I've generated using AI to properly handling cookie consent popups and related - hopefully minor - necessary improvements to my current  code before it is deployed on a much larger scale) 

(I've included links above to the 5,000 summary document, the 7,000 JSON files and the sample of 1,000 PDFs).

I'm planning on extending this project about online news articles during the next few days and then combining these relatively recent news articles with my existing collection of about 100,000 older scanned newspaper clippings about UFOs from the 1940s onwards (collated during the last couple of decades from working with over 100 different UFO groups/researchers and combining their collections). 

 

Back in 2006, I circulated among the UFO community a UFO timeline/chronology that I wrote by cross-referencing material in about 900 UFO books that I'd read in 2004-2006.

It was about 1,700 pages long (much of which was taken up with references).

That chronology gave the dates of various frequently discussed events, incidents, individuals and documents in the history of ufology and is cross-referenced to related material.

I  concentrated on references to discussions in UFO and SETI books. As part of the preparation of that document, I read a little over 1,000 such books noting relevant discussions.

Here's a link to a free PDF version of that timeline (and I have also made available a Microsoft Word copy for anyone wishing to edit/revise it):
https://files.afu.se/Downloads/Books/Other/Koi%2C%20Isaac%20-%20UFO%20Chronology%20%281877-2006%29.pdf


Back then, I was a bit naive and hoped that the UFO community could work together to develop the free resource that I shared. :)

Almost 20 years have passed since then.

I've recently been doing some work on a major update and revisions to the original timeline - this time assisted by AI/RAG tools which are making the work more effective and efficient...

I originally had in mind preparing a chronology about 20-30 pages long. The Chronology quickly became, um, considerably longer.

This chronology was intended to act as an efficient way of organising references and hyperlinks to relevant material, in the interests of more fully informed debate and reducing the amount of reinvention of the wheel.

Under the present civil litigation procedure in England in large commercial cases, the parties to litigation are expected to co- operate in various respects so as to make a case fit for trial in as efficient and fair a manner as possible. This commonly involves, at the most basic level, producing various agreed (and therefore non-contentiously drafted) documents so that the trial judge will be able to understand the nature of the dispute and the issues in dispute as efficiently as possible. These non- contentious documents typically include:

(1) a chronology (giving the dates of key events, a few words to identify the event and cross references to further material relied upon by both sides in relation to that event;

(2) a List of Issues (listing the main issues agreed and not agreed between the parties);

(3) a case memorandum (summarising the case in just a few pages);

(4) a dramatis personae (listing the names that the Judge will come across at trial, with a few words to identify them);

(5) a glossary (listing technical terms or terms of art that will arise during the trial, with an agreed definition of those terms);

(6) a reading list (of material to be read in advance of the trial).

I believe that ufology would greatly benefit from adopting some elements of this approach. All too often, the debates regarding UFO reports do not focus on the real issues (or even identify the issues which should be addressed).