Tag Archives: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos

International Survey of UFO Researchers

Posted on by

hourcade-book

Among the many UFO books published worldwide each year, few are those worthy reading, that will remain in the history of ufology. One just came out as the result of an unprecedented international collaboration, conceived and coordinated by Milton Hourcade.

hourcadeHourcade was the pioneer of Uruguayan ufology, a founder of the CIOVI (Center for Unidentified Flying Objects Investigation) in 1958, and has long been a technical-scientific journalist on printed press and on radio. Since 1989 he’s been living in the United States. In 2008, after CIOVI dissolution, he created the Unusual Aerial Phenomena Study Group (UAPSG). Winner of the Zurich International Prize (organized by Fundacion Anomalia) in 2006 for his book “OVNIs: La Agenda Secreta”, he is also the author of “OVNIs: Desafío a la Ciencia” (1978), “Elementos de Ovnilogía – Guía para Investigación” (1989), “In Search Of Real UFOs” (2011).

In the summer of 2018, Milton launched an unprecedented initiative, a survey among some international experts, who were asked to answer eight questions:

  • Do you use the acronym UFO or another designation, and if so, why?
  • Have your idea about UFOs changed along the time?
  • Should the UFO investigator become an expert in IFOs?
  • If there were still some unexplained phenomena, what could they be?
  • How do you consider this issue in general? What do you think about the whole subject?
  • Is it possible to do something effective to bring the truth to the public and to change the mind of those who still proclaim or believe that extraterrestrial beings are living with us on Earth?
  • Do you think SETI and similar searches are valid activities?
  • What is your idea about multiple universes?

As many as 22  ufologists and scholars of various scientific disciplines (astrophysics, anthropology, physics, history, psychology) answered from 12 different countries: Jan Aldrich (USA), Roberto Enrique Banchs (Argentina), Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos (Spain), Manuel Borraz Aymerich (Spain), Rodrigo Andrés Bravo Garrido (Chile), Ignacio Cabria (Spain), Jerome Clark (USA), George Eberhart (USA), Greg Eghigian (USA), Igor Kalytyuk (Ukraine), Martin Kottmeyer (USA), Rubén Lianza (Argentina), Claude Maugé (France), Hans-Werner Peiniger (Germany), Robert Powell (USA), Edoardo Russo (Italy), Salim Sigales Montes (Mexico), Clas Svahn (Sweden), Massimo Teodorani (Italy), Thomas Tulien (USA), Wim van Utrecht (Belgium), Leopoldo Zambrano Enríquez (Mexico), a considerable proportion of them also EuroUfo members.

After publishing their interventions on the UAPSG website, the project coordinator has now collected them in a book (“Aliens, Ships and Hoaxes – The First International Survey of the Top UFO Researchers in the World”), along with an introduction , a summary and evaluation chapter of the survey, and some appendices.

The volume, available both in electronic format and in paper edition, represents a precious opportunity to get an overview from different viewpoints of the current situation and perspectives of science-oriented ufology, and is destined to become a classic in UFO literature. We can’t but highly recommend reading it.

 

A Dark Red Sky: the Saucers Arrived (1947-1949)

Posted on by

by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos

stilo-1947-49-copertina
“A Dark Red Sky” (Un cielo rosso scuro) is the literary title of Giuseppe Stilo‘s new book (UPIAR publications, 2017) devoted to the arrival of flying saucers over Italy and the world, in 1947-1949. A thorough and well-documented 414-page volume which, once more, places Stilo in an authoritative position in the study of the UFO phenomenon.

This book inquiries into the initial period of the phenomenon, but this requires to be seen in the perspective provided by the author’s entire opus. It all began with “Operazione Origini” (Operation Origins), a CISU project started in 1984 to retrieve press cuttings for the early years (1946-1954) on which he embarked in 1988. He has since continued to produce a history of UFO reports in Italy and in the rest of the world. The encyclopedic erudition of Stilo in ufology has not many parallels. His work documenting what had happened, when and where is overpowering. Reading what is already a veritable library of books by him, might save a newcomer dozens of years’ worth of investigation and documentation.

Therefore, I will hardly touch this one volume that, naturally, wanders by the Italian panorama in 1947 and the birth of the flying saucer phenomenon, the 1947-48 wave, the “phantom airplanes” of 1948-49, the growth of the ETH during 1949 and the impact of foreign reports in the Italian media. The book makes a quantitative analysis of cases known in the 1947-1949 period in Italy and reviews the international panorama of the flying disk prodigy.

Giuseppe Stilo’s new book is the latest item of an indispensable collection, comprising the previous ones published by UPIAR publishing house in Turin:
“Scrutate I cieli!” (Watch the Skies!), UPIAR, 2000. 424 pages to document the 1950 wave.
“Ultimatum alla Terra” (The Day the Earth Stood Still), UPIAR, 2002. This large volume of 536 pages deals entirely with the 1952 UFO wave.
“L’alba di una nuova era” (Dawn of a New Age), UPIAR, 2004. The 1946 ghost rockets phenomenon is examined in this 228-page book,
“Il quinto cavaliere dell’Apocalisse – Vol. 1” (The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse – Vol. 1), UPIAR, 2006. This first volume, a mammoth tome of 680 sheets, covers the large wave of 1954 from January to October.
“Il quinto cavaliere dell’Apocalisse, Vol. 2” UPIAR, 2016. The second tome with 504 pages is devoted to the months of November and December 1954.

Belgium: All Photo Case Histories

Posted on by

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.