Well, it was inevitable....
More ring binders and plastic document sleeves are ordered as the CE3K/AE archives grows even more. Existing folders are going to need to be divided; the 1960s for the United States was in one folder but it is bursting open so it looks as though it will be split into two: 1960-1964 and 1965-1969.
Today alone I copied off another 100+pp and that took two ink refills (glad I bought the three pack cartridge ink bottles because the cartridges new would have cost over £100 ($100) for the last month.
In fact, tolling it all up the last two months the archives have meant my spends over £500/$500 and that now makes me officially broke for the next few months.
Someone asked (again) why I am photocopying original source pages and not scanning them. Well, again, I have no scanner and a dilapidated PC that will not accept the A4 scanner I have so I have to work with what I have. The important thing is to get all the data together so that it will be a solid data base for the future.
The other question is regarding why I do not simply type up all the material from the sources? Firstly, it is so that there can be no quibbling over hat an original source stated and rather than have someone say "Well, that's what you say the source tells us" it is there in hard copy.
Also, I cannot even estimated how many pages there are in the archive. If the estimate was 3+ years to scan everything I can assure you that without a team of typists working 8 hours a day it would take me (and my arthritic hands) far more than 3 years to type up and I want to do some other than this with the rest of my life! Well, the first 50 years was enough!
What am I going to do with all this material? Well, some of it sneaked into Some Things Strange & Sinister as well as Some More Things Strange & Sinister before the 500+pp of UFO Contact? and the three follow-up books. The AFU in Sweden and Center for UFO Studies in the US have been told that they can pass any queries re. reports on to me to see whether I can come up with something. However, I have given myself to 1st January, 2023 to finish up the cataloguing and then....
And then I will be working on a new book analysing the reports. That's all I am going to write on that here.
In the meantime, before that, I intend to dust off the 1982 UFO Report which, I notice, includes discoveries about UFOs that after 40 years "scientific Ufology" has failed to and that includes defining the UFO phenomena. It is going to be the Report (aka "The Hooper Report") as it was written at that time so it is a historical record of UFO knowledge from that time but also shows how Ufology simply stagnated.
I ought to point out the original report was over 1000+pp and was whittled down to over 500pp. It's big.
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