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UFOLOGY AND THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY OF THE
'90s
The early American UFO buffs of the late '40s thought to have
collected an outstanding amount of documentation when having a
bunch of newsclippings in their own hands. They could have hardly
imagined the huge quantity of material about their beloved topic
available from all over the world after nearly fifty years.
"Available" is not a correct word, as no present single researcher or private association has enough money and facilities to get and store a complete or really compehensive selection of international books, magazines, newsclippings, reports and whatever else published about the UFO argument. Even worse, the documentation managed by each single buff is so bulky that it is really difficult and costly to arrange an exchange of material with somebody else. Information transfer by using traditional media such as printed paper has become a problem since a lot of time: the situation will become more and more difficult in the near future, producing a huge bottleneck in the development of new well-documented research works.
A commonplace example: let's think to an American
researcher having a catalogue of close encounter cases and
willing to supply it to an European colleague under the form of a
collection of text documents and images. First of all, a lot of
time and money are necessary to copy all that stuff in a not too
good quality, then more time and money is requested to prepare a
parcel and mail it. The material will arrive at destination after
some time, yet when it will be in the hands of the researcher
there are other problems. The way to manage all that amount of
information will be quite limited and always very time-consuming:
actually, all operations aimed at extracting only some
information on the ground of search requests or alternative use
of the available documents will be limited by the paper nature of
information. Such a situation is one of the causes of the low
number of real well-documented research works carried out within
the UFO movement.
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