Italy 2017: Less UFO Reports from Witnesses

by Giorgio Abraini

In line with the trend of the last few years, the number of UFO reports in Italy seems to fall further down, based on a first analysis of data collected for the year 2017 from the CISU (Italian Center for UFO Studies), which has been monitoring UFO sightings in Italy since 1985 (over 25,000 reports since 1945).

If it’s true that the 113 sighting questionnaire forms received directly from witnesses through CISU website in 2017 are slightly more numerous than the previous year, if considering also the third-party sources (websites, newspapers, other UFO organizations) it seems probable that the final result will be a further, marked decline in sightings, confirming the same trend already seen in previous years.

One year ago, in the early days of 2017, you could already count around 500 sightings for 2016, later increased up to the total of about 600 reports known as of today. According to the real-time catalog CisuCat coordinated by Pasquale Russo on the website UfoWeb, we can now count as little as 250 for 2017.

Of course this total is destined to rise as 2017 sightings continue to emerge during the current year. However, based on the data available so far it is possible to estimate a total not exceeding 450-500 sightings, i.e. a significant drop compared to the 600 reports known today for 2016.

Russian Pilot and Ufo Writer Marina Popovich R.I.P.

popovich1991
Soviet aviation veteran and UFO enthusiast Marina Popovich died in Krasnodar, Russia, on November 30th, 2017. She was 86 years old.

Marina Lavrentyevna Vasylieva decided to become a military pilot at 14 years old, when her family had to flee in front of the Nazi advance. The bureaucratic obstacles, her short stature and age prevented him from entering the academy at that time, but latershe became a legend as an aeronautics officer and test driver, driving experimental aircrafts, beating speed records and even entering the small group of cosmonaut women candidates to go into space.

Interested in UFOs after a personal sighting, she wrote a first book on the subject (“UFO Glasnost”, later translated into German) in 1991, claiming that the USA and USSR governments concealed evidence that UFOs were extraterrestrial crafts. She later wrote other books and participated in conferences and UFO events both in his country and abroad, the most famous of which in San Francisco, in 1991, claiming the space probe Phobos 2 had photographed a mysterious object near the satellite of Mars, before disappearing mysteriously.

Marina had long been married to cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, who had been deputy director of the UFO committee within the Soviet Academy of Sciences since 1984 and later became chairman of the Russian UFO Association SoyuzUfoTsentr.

Belgian Ufologist Franck Boitte has died

boitte
On December 11, 2017 Belgian ufologist Franck Boitte died in Challans, France.

Born in 1940, a flying saucer buff since his teen years, in 1972 he was among the first members of the SOBEPS (Société Belge d’Etudes sur les Phénomènes Spatiaux), for which in twenty years he made numerous field investigations, interviewing over 250 witnesses (many during the great Belgian wave of 1989) and writing dozens of articles in the group journal Inforespace .

A graduate in administrative engineering and computer science, in 1992 he moved to France. Since 2009 he has been part of the EuroUfo.net

Among his monographic publications, the catalog of sightings in the Belgian wave-UFO of 1954 (2005), the general index of the first 100 issues of “Inforespace”, the general catalog of cases with humanoids in Belgium (2010), a retrospective evaluation of the Belgian UFO wave 20 years later (2009).

Belgium: All Photo Case Histories

belgium-in-photographs

“Belgium in UFO Photographs – Volume 1” is the latest book from UPIAR Publications.

Authors are two veteran ufologists: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos from Spain and Wim van Utrecht from Belgium, who joined their experience not just to collect and present but – most important – to analyze carefully all UFO photographic cases (84 case histories) that took place in Belgium from 1950 to 1988, up to before the 1989 great wave of sightings in that country (which will make the main course of the forthcoming “second volume”).

For over fifteen years Ballester Olmos has focused himself on UFO photo reports, with a worldwide collection and cataloguing project called Fotocat, which has so far collected 12,200 cases and published seven monographs and numerous articles.

As he had previously done for Norway, Ballester Olmos was supported by local expert van Utrecht who shares the same scientific approach, as well as a participation in the EuroUfo.net collective.

The result of this trans-national collaboration is not a simple catalog, but a textbook example of how we can analyze UFO reports in a rational way, using different technical skills to extract useful data in order to look for an explanation, every time this is possible.

Like previous Fotocat Project publications, this amazing work is available for free in digital format on the Academia.edu platform, while collectors and libraries can obtain the paper edition (400 + XII pages in large color format, with 366 photos and illustrations, graphs and statistics, plus an accurate bibliography) ordering it from UPIAR Store online.

A University Thesis on the History of French Ufology

wiroth-1-750x410
European UFO historiography is enriched with an important piece.

After the first volume (of 513 pages) published in June, the second volume (209 pages) was published in October 2017 of the book “Ovnis sur la France, des années 1940 à nos jours” (Ufo on France, from the 40s to today”), which is a revised and abridged version of a dissertation in contemporary history.

The author is Manuel Wiroth, which graduated in October 2016 at the University of Lyon, France, with a thesis titled “History of ufology in France (from the first individual research on the discs flying to the constitution of UFO study networks, from the 40s to the present”), before a commission that included among others scientist-ufologist Jean-Pierre Rospars.

For years a UFO buff Wiroth was able to base upon the impressive documentary collection of the French archive UFO group SCEAU ( Sauvegarde et Conservation des Etudes et Archives Ufologiques), directed by Gilles Durand.

The big dimensions of the dissertation forced JMG publishing house to divide it into two volumes, the first dedicated to “Testimonies and private researchers”, the second to “The scientific and military investigation”.

[ETCAT] France/Germany/Italy/Netherlands, 20111224 UT around 1626 UT

Hi to all,

This is for ETCAT

Observations come from France, Germany, Italy and Netherlands of a bright
celestial phenomenon on December 24th:

[English]
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Dec-2011/0217.html
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Dec-2011/0218.html
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Dec-2011/0221.html

[German]
http://www.meteoros.de/php/viewtopic.php?t=9075
http://www.meteoros.de/php/viewtopic.php?t=9076

Probably 2011-078B (#38037) object, last stage of a Soyuz rocket

See Dr Marco Langbroek post in his blog for the identification.

Seasonal greetings,
Roberto Labanti

Welcome to the new web site

Welcome to EuroUFO.net portal! This is the revamped web site of the EuroUFO project, which was started as such during a meeting of about 20 european UFO researchers, in 2005.

The aim of this web site is to give an overview of people, research projects and ongoing activities by a selected community of European ufologists sharing a scientific-oriented approach and willing to cooperate.

This web site is a collaborative effort. That means the contents are managed by several researchers in different time. We are working to offer as much material as we can, but please consider that until we complete the migration from the old (badly hacked) site, some pages can be temporarily empty.