The UFO-Sweden national report centre at Uppsala recorded 468 new and retrospective reports in 1994. This is probably the largest number of reports in a single year since the organization was formed in 1970. A large number of 1994 cases are still under investigation & evaluation and a reliable number of "true UFOs" vs. "IFOs" cannot be given at this point in time. By comparison, UFO-Sweden recorded 142 reports in 1992, and 245 in 1993. So far, only six reports received in 1993 have been assessed as "true UFOs".
Reports are received on the report centre's 24-hours-a-day phone, by UFO-Sweden's twenty-two local groups and by UFO-Sweden's field investigators and contacts throughout the country. Reports are also routinely submitted to UFO-Sweden by Arne Gjärdman of the Research Institute of Defence (FOA), who manages the military UFO
report line on 10 % of his working time. In the 1990's a close co-operation has developed between FOA and UFO-Sweden.
Promising reports are referred to - and investigated by - one of UFO-Sweden's more than 70 accredited field investigators, spread all over the country. Field investigators are trained - since the mid- 1970's - at annual training courses. UFO-Sweden has developed it's own eight-page questionnaire, one of the most detailed and investigativedriven report forms in the world.
Each report is assessed by one out of three assessment groups. These three groups are small, five-headed committees formed by experienced field investigators. Each member of the assessment group has one vote. A report can only be judged as a "true UFO" if a majority of the five members are in agreement. The work of the three assessment groups are ruled by a set of guide-lines.
Many cases are ruled as "hard-to-judge", most often because there are pieces missing in the investigation. One common reason is that the report was too old for a reliable investigation.
Summaries of all reports are published in a special (Swedish) newsletter, Rapport-nytt, and important cases are reviewed in detail in the glossy magazine UFO-Aktuellt, published 4 times/year.
All case files are permanently filed with Archives for UFO research (AFU). Here the researcher can thumb though all cases investigated by ufologists, by the military, or reported to the media. The more than 12.000 reports are sorted by date and time-of-the-day. A new database will make it possible to search the files by many factors.
Database of 12.000 Scandinavian cases
Since 1989 AFU and UFO-Sweden has developed a chronological report file of more than 12.000 cases. The chronological file comprises all Swedish cases reported to civilian and military sources during this century, and before.
Starting two years ago, Swedish cases have been entered into a dBase IV database. This enormous task was made possible by:
1) engaging people who are out-of-work in a so called ALU project and,
2) a grant from a private sponsor - for buying "old-age" 286 second-hand computors.
"ALU" is a Swedish government scheme to keep out-of-work people active by engaging them in "projects that would not normally be done", i.e. non-commerical projects. ALU employees get their normal compensation from the employment bureau. AFU has had twenty people employed for 4- to 7- months periods. So far, eleven of them have been involved with the computing project.
The computer file records all known Swedish reports. Each case is assigned a simple index, from 1 to 5, depending on the quality of data and investigation so that - in the future - the wheat may be sorted from the chaff. The overall objective has been to create a database that represents the sociological, Swedish UFO phenomenon as a whole, whether IFOs, fantasies or "true UFOs". We estimate that less than 10 % of the cases
have been assigned the index 3 or 4 (good quality cases) while the majority is indexed as 1 and 2 (low quality cases). So far, no case has met our criteria for index 5.
The computer file includes a phenomenological classification for each report, date and time (even cases with vague date/time estimates are entered), place name, county, map reference, duration, number of witnesses, a short desciption, source references, etc. Further, the database includes almost 100 detail codes similar to those used by Willy Smith's UNICAT project. Codes are assigned to each case where appropriate. Categories of cases (i.e. photos, EM interferences or high-altitude sightings) may be extracted from the file.
We view the database as an "intelligence file" and therefore it also includes submarine/USO reports, fortean incidents, ghost fliers and missile sightings, more of which will be coded in the coming phases of the project. We have also started to code Norwegian reports into the file. All Swedish airports/airstrips have been coded as
geographical "markers" if UFO reports should occur in the vicinity. Coding of other interesting geographical sites/objects is expected (mines, radio/TV towers, power stations, etc).
The file will be used by UFO-Sweden's field investigators, for instance in tracking the UFO/phenomenological history of a particular locality. It is also expected, of course, that we will be able to produce basic statistics from the file.