Best UFO Info and Research Resources

[Uncle Stoney]

Summary: Civilian UFO organizations have nearly always operated on a shoestring budget, essentially volunteer organizations. Still many of them managed to do remarkable work over the past 50yr, investigating and documenting UFO sighting reports. Overall, perhaps about a thousand (1000) UFO organizations have been created all over the globe since the 1950s, but only a handful of them became large (NICAP's membership peaked at about 15,000 during the early and mid 1960s; APRO's membership peaked in 1967 with 1500 members). Many investigative organizations have closed down over the years (e.g. NICAP, APRO, UFORIC). Some of the few surviving ones had to down-size considerably since the mid-1990s, perhaps tied to the Internet era (e.g. CUFOS in USA, MUFON-CES in Germany, SOBEPS->COBEPS in Belgium). UFO historian J.Clark remarked that there has been a breakdown of morale in the field of UFO research, as the substantial efforts in UFO case investigations of the 1960s and 1970s failed to attract mainstream attention. In the 1980s the focus of UFO organizations was aimed towards the Roswell NM 1947 incident (alleged UFO crash), the MJ12 papers controversy (ostensibly "leaked" Top Secret documents revealing a covert involvement of US military and government with UFOs), government coverups and the so-called "alien abduction" phenomenon. In the 1990s and 2000s several advocacy and "disclosure" groups were formed, to petition for renewed government-sponsored UFO studies and transparency. Some old-timers are "deeply pessimistic" about Ufology, concluding that the UFO field is all but paralyzed by infighting, a lack of funding, cooperation and standardization, and dubious claims.





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