Roberto Farabone named CISU Honorary President

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On 20 October 2020 the CISU board of directors appointed Roberto Farabone as honorary president of the Italian Center for UFO Studies.
Born in Bologna in 1944, with a degree in physics, he  moved to Milan, where he spent his entire career as a computer scientist in a multinational company, writing several technical books and manuals.
Interested in UFOs since the mid-1960s, he joined the CUN, then assumed a leading role in the CNIFAA (Independent National Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena) and in 1976 became editor of UPIAR (UFO Phenomena International Annual Review), the first example of a refereed journal about UFOs.
In 1979 he was among the promoters of a request signed by over 30 scientists and academics, to ask the Italian Ministry of Defense a full  access to UFO data collected by the Italian military. The same year he was appointed coordinator of the scientific committee of Centro Ufologico Nazionale and later served on the editorial board of CUN internal magazine “Quaderni UFO”.
1987-06-20_to_farabonecabassimeluzziIn 1982 he was coordinator of the International Upiar Colloquium on Human Sciences and UFO Phenomena, held in Salzburg, also editing the congress proceedings. When the Cooperative Initiatives and Studies UPIAR was created, he was named board president and later a council member until 2005. A founding member of CISU, he held the position of president from 1988 to 1996.
In his long UFO activity he has carried out investigations, lectured, participated in conferences and written dozens of articles published, among other things, in “Notiziario Ufo”, “Ufologia”; “Ufo Forum”.
After retiring from active ufology, he donated his archives and UFO library to the Italian Center for UFO Studies.
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In the above photo: Roberto Farabone at the 4th National UFO Congress (Bologna, 13/10/1990)

In the photo below: Farabone with Renzo Cabassi and Alessandro Meluzzi at CISU International Congress (Turin, 20/06/1987)

UFOs above Parma: a new catalog

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On time for the 33rd National UFO Conference, held by CISU in Bologna on November 10th, the second edition of Cristian Vitali‘s “UFO su Parma” was published by UPIAR Publications.

The book, subtitled “Collection of UFO Reports in Parma province from 1947 to 2017” is the updated and enlarged version of the 2015 result of Vitali’s three years work at collecting, filing and cataloguing all UFO case histories from his province.

vitali2015Compared to the first edition, this one brings from 445 to 502 sightings in and around Parma, with 34 new cases from the 2015-2017 periods and other 23 cases from previous years but not in the old catalog. Revisions and updates of 37 events were also added, in the typical “CISU style” for which the publication does not mark a project arrival but also the starting point for further investigations, in a continuing work in progress.

In addition to detailed description of each sighting, the volume contains statistical analysis and some in-depth investigations by the author, for a total of 220 pages. It can be ordered from Upiar Store website.

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In the below photo: Cristian Vitali presenting his provincial catalogue at CISU 30th National UFO Congress (Torino, 2015)

Pre-UFOs over Italy: 3,400 Apparitions in Past Centuries

preufocat-2018PreUfoCat is the catalog of unusual aerial phenomena over the Italian peninsula all along the centuries before 1900, coordinated by Pietro Torre. Its third edition has just been published by Upiar Publications under the title “Strange Lights in Italian History”.

torrepietroThe first edition (November 2011) presented about a thousand case histories in 260 large-format pages. The second edition (exactly three years later) had doubled the total of cases collected and reported in full, with bibliographic sources and illustrations, coming to 684 pages for a  limited edition (for collectors only) on paper, while the catalogue went out in a digital DVD edition (with a 12-page introductory paper booklet).

This third edition, arriving almost four years after the second, has risen to over 3,400 case histories, so that the 1,010 paper pages have been broken into two volumes for the limited edition (once again for collectors only, in full color), paralleling the DVD edition.

Both versions (as well as previous editions) can be purchased as usual from the Upiar Store website.

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In the central picture: Pietro Torre presenting PreUfoCat first edition at the 26th CISU conference (Turin, 2011)
Below: comparing the three editions of PreUfoCat.

Belgium: All Photo Case Histories

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“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.