2018 UFO reports in Europe rising again

Just as the  Italian Center for UFO Studies published its first data on the number of UFO sightings in 2018 from Italy (137), other European countries joined in.

In the last few years, national organizations within EuroUfo network have pooled their annual totals to get a general overview from the Old Continent.

The first coming forward was Jean-Marc Wattecamps for the COBEPS (Comité belge d’étude des phénomènes spatiaux) with data from Belgium French-speaking provinces (76 reports in 2018), soon echoed by Frederick Delaere (Belgisch UFO-meldpunt) to account for 179 sightings in the Flemish provinces, with a detailed report already available and downloadable, which bring the national total to 255 (a sharp increase over the previous year, which had instead seen a substantial decrease since 2016).

The number of reports collected by CENAP (Centrales Erforschungs-Netz außergewöhnlicher Himmels-Phänomene) from Germany is 326, as reported by Hansjürgen Kohler. A sharp rise as compared to 2017, but not yet returned to the level of previous years.

Björn Borg reported of 132 sightings collected in Finland by the Suomen Ufotutktijat (Finnish UFO Research Association), a middle ground between the 107 of the year 2017 and the 188 of 2015.

These are obviously provisional and partial data, and it is still early for a complete and detailed picture, which we will report as usual in the coming months. The summary for 2017 and previous years is available here.

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.