As you know, the Internet is a wild and woolly place. Everything can be found here because the "price of admission" is so low. This is good and bad.
It's good because nearly everyone gets to have his (or her) say. Too often, in the past, the little voices were not heard in our society, but they are today on the Internet. You can find it all on the Internet. There is less "filtering" of information than there ever has been in the history of civilization, probably.
It's bad because you yourself have to do the searching and filtering of the enormous amount of "unfiltered" information on the Internet. No longer do you have a "gatekeeper" big media organization doing the filtering and "sanctioning" of information. You are on your own. You get to have the information, but you've got to figure out what is good and what is bad for yourself.
To do the filtering of the information on the Internet, you've got to educate yourself. You need to educate yourself in the methods of scholars, scientists, and investigative reporters. You need to know something about how they sort out good and bad information.
But trying your best to be a good little scientist, scholar, or investigative reporter is always where the burden should be. You should never believe important things without trying your best to understand what the best to believe about them is. Just as you have a duty to be a responsible citizen, you have a duty to be a responsible believer. We should not hold our opinions about important things lightly.
There is a lot of good stuff about UFOs on the Internet. Just getting to it is a problem though. That's a big reason why we've put up Oregon MUFON's website. We try to get you accurate, reliable information here. See our mission statement.
Here are some links we trust to give you reasonably trustworthy to completely reliable and accurate information about UFOs. Be sure to read the qualifiers in the annotations, however. We think some sites are useful even if they are not completely reliable and accurate in all their information. (Remember, our government and establishment elites have let us down on the UFO and the world of paranormal phenomena so there are no ironclad guarantees of absolutely and completely accurate and reliable information. But when you come down to it, does this exist at anytime or anywhere for any subject? Not really. We are always on our own in whatever kind of knowledge we seek.)
General UFO Links
- The Coalition for Freedom of Information was formed from an initiative by the Sci Fi Channel to look into the Kecksburg, PA, crash/retrieval event of 1965. Here's their list of responsible UFO information sites. This site is no longer active.
- The UFO Evidence site does an admirable job of bringing together a large amount of pretty decent UFO information. It's worth going here first to check out a UFO-related event, development, case, etc.
- The Best UFO Resources site collects a lot of the best resources for reliable and accurate UFO information in one convenient place. Be sure to check it out sometime.
- Wikipedia ("the free encyclopedia anyone can edit") is also a reasonably good source of the basics on many UFO topics. However, heed this warning: Wikipedia is very well-known now on the Internet and has become a battle ground on topics that are controversial, and as such its treatment of these topics is compromised by the arguing and fighting that differing factions engage in. UFOs are controversial. So, even though Wikipedia is an "encyclopedia" and should be a reliable source of information, in fact, its articles are by design created and edited by anyone. You yourself (yes, you reading this now!) can write an article, but then anyone can come along later and change it. Caution is advised. And another caveat about wikipedia. There are about 2000 more or less self-appointed editor/monitors of wikipedia who exercise some editorial control over what gets published on wikipedia and what does not. Usually, their judgment is sound, but they are infected with that old prejudice against anything paranormal (that comes from the mainstream educational establishment), and this naturally affects wikipedia's editor/monitors. So paranormal-related articles do not get the same standards applied to them as "normal," mainstream subjects do. Paranormal stuff must pass muster at a "higher level" than "mainstream" subjects. Thus, they get rejected at a higher rate. Just be aware of this.
Pacific Northwest Organizations
- NUFORC. This excellent UFO reporting site (Northwest UFO Reporting Center) and database is run by Peter Davenport of Washington state. He has appeared on the radio and television numerous times over the years. Well worth a visit. Go here to check out a sighting if you have the date and place. He may have something on it. The database covers the U.S. and Canada quite well.
- UFOs Northwest. William Puckett is a top-notch independent UFO researcher who fields a small team of investigators with science and engineering backgrounds. You can report sightings and look through their investigated sightings database. Puckett and his team are in the Seattle Area.
- CUFON. Dale Goudie's Computer UFO Network is a great source of FOIA-released and other government and military information about UFOs. Goudie is based in the Seattle area.
- Oregon UFO Review. This site is no longer active. Eric Byler in the Salem, Oregon, area was the force behind Oregon UFO Review and has apparently taken this site down. It had lots of good information for Oregon.
- SMEI and ECETI. James Gilliland is director of the Self Mastery Earth Institute and Enlightened Contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence [organization] at Trout Lake, Washington. Gilliland has been very accommodating in the past to people who are sincerely looking to experience possible UFO activity, whether seeking to make contact with the (supposed) ETI or whether they are sincerely interested in the phenomena from a scientific or scholarly point of view. You can visit Gilliland's Sattva Sanctuary at Trout Lake and perhaps see UFO activity for yourself.
- RVML. The Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library and Event Center in Ashland, Oregon, is ably run by Jordan Pease. This organization has an extensive library of occult, metaphysical, and paranormal books and literature including some UFO books to loan.
- Exopolitics. Alfred Webre is a former Stanford Research Institute researcher who worked on the topic of extraterrestrial politics for the Carter administration. His story is an interesting one. For his ideas about exopolitics, read Exopolitics: Politics, Government, and Law in the Universe. Webre lives in British Columbia in Canada.
Abduction Research and Experiencer Websites
- AJ's Site. AJ (pseudonym) has published at least three valuable books about her abduction experiences, and she serves as a focal point for abductees and experiencers who need guidance and direction in how to understand their experiences. The road to understanding is usually an arduous one, and AJ has helped many by telling her own story and by providing important information on her website. She is perhaps the most prominent person of a growing number of abductee/experiencers who are getting their story out by publish books and websites. She performs an extremely valuable service for the abductee/experiencer community.
- Intruders Foundation. (This organization is no longer in operation due to Budd Hopkins' death in 2011.) Abduction researcher and author Budd Hopkins' site. Hopkins is an excellent researcher and was one of the first to bring the abduction phenomenon to the attention of the general public through his early books. Hopkins approaches the entire UFO and abduction phenomenon through the lens of ordinary academia in the sense that academia does not recognize the importance of paranormal world phenomena. Abduction researcher and history professor David Jacobs uses the same philosophical approach as Hopkins. Both are very good at showing us the basic parameters and details of the abduction phenomenon, but if the view that a transpersonal world really does exist is correct, then it looks like they are missing a big and important part of the whole picture.
- John E. Mack Institute. The late John Mack was a Harvard University professor of psychiatry who explored areas of transpersonal psychology and nearly lost his tenured position when he investigated the alien abduction phenomenon. Mack, correctly we think, put the UFO in the context of transpersonal psychology concepts, but he failed to properly document the scientific evidence of alien abduction in his work in this field. This was a strategic mistake on his part because his work is today (and was at the time) dismissed by mainstream academia since he did not try to convince them through the strict protocols of science and medicine. This site is valuable for putting the alien abduction phenomenon in its proper overall context, but we hope that the people behind Mack's institute today will do the strict medical examination, psychological testing, and scientific work that Mack did not.
Research Organizations and Sites
- Fund for UFO Research. Created in 1979, this nonprofit organization collects funds to support scientific and scholarly research through grants. FUFOR funded the research of ufologist Stanton Friedman, which proved that longtime UFO debunker Dr. Donald Menzel had an extensive history with U.S. government intelligence agencies. Makes you wonder why a prominent debunker had hidden ties to the U.S. intelligence establishment.
- J. Allen Hynek Center For UFO Studies. CUFOS was founded in 1973 by J. Allen Hynek, Professor in Astronomy at Northwestern University, to be a UFO research organization emphasizing especially the scientific aspects of UFOs. Hynek died in 1986 but CUFOS continues on with investigations and research, publishing much of this in an excellent newsletter/magazine called the International UFO Reporter.
- National Institute for Discovery Science. This site is no longer active and NIDS has ceased operation of any kind. NIDS was founded by Las Vegas land developer Robert Bigelow to conduct scientific research into UFOs and related phenomena. A number of excellent scholarly and scientific reports were produced during the 1990s and early 2000s. For a time, Bigelow paid real, "living wage" salaries to a small staff so that they could devote themselves full time to research, writing, administration, planning, etc., — all those things that organizations with normal amounts of funding can do. But there are no longterm, "normal" sources of funding for UFOs (and virtually the whole field of the paranormal) so it is always a struggle to do the research needed.
- Dr. Bruce Maccabee's Site. Maccabee is a longtime UFO researcher specializing in the physics and, especially, optical physics of UFOs. He is a MUFON consultant. If you want the hard science of UFOs, Maccabee is your man.
- BLT Research. This site is the place to go for scientific research findings about the crop formation phenomenon. A retired biological laboratory researcher, W. C. Levengood, did much good work on crop formation soil and crop analysis. See references to his work here.
- BUFORA. The British UFO Research Association is the primary investigative UFO organization in the U.K. They are the equivalent of MUFON in the U.S. Check out some of their writings about UFO research and case investigations.
- SOBEPS. This organization and website is no longer active. This Belgian UFO site of the Société Belge d'Étude des Phénomènes Spatiaux (Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena) is mostly in French, but there is some English. SOBEPS researchers wrote a 500 page book (unfortunately for English speakers still only in French) detailing the 1989-1991 Belgian UFO wave. The Belgian Air Force officially acknowledged some UFO/F-16 encounters and publicly released a report analyzing these encounters. (Imagine the U.S. Air Force ever doing this! Instead, we get lies and deception as with the Roswell Incident.)
- NARCAP. Richard Haines, a former NASA research scientist, has taken a special interest in sightings by pilots. He provides a wealth of information and a place for reluctant pilots and others connected with the aviation industry to report their sightings.
- Project 1947. Jan Aldrich is the Project 1947 coordinator. After he retired from the military, he decided to mount a research effort to thoroughly document the beginnings of the UFO. He has received extensive cooperation from many individuals and UFO research organizations to collect and organize newspaper stories, personal accounts, FOIA documents, etc. Also, included on this site are Roswell Incident information and Condon Committee information. Project 1947 has published Project 1947: A Preliminary Report available on their site.
- NICAP. Francis Ridge is the coordinator of this site that makes available many valuable resources gathered by the best of the U.S. UFO researchers of the past including those from one of the original U.S. UFO research organizations of the 1950s through to the mid-70s, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. You'll find lots of the best of the UFO research information here.
- Roswell Proof. Ufologist David Rudiak's site about Roswell Incident evidence, especially his decoding of the famous General Roger Ramey memo in the first Roswell debunking effort by the Air Force in Fort Worth, TX, in 1947. Much other valuable information here.
Government Organizations
There is no official, public federal, state, or local government entity in the United States that engages in investigation, research, promotion, funding, etc., of the UFO subject or any of its allied subjects. Ufologists believe, however, that the secret parts of our federal government (intelligence agencies, covert military operation entities, and deep black research organizational structures) do engage in UFO research ("reverse engineering" and crash/retrieval activities) and monitoring of the phenomenon and UFO subculture with occasional covert disinformational operations targetting the UFO subculture and possibly UFO abductees.
Here are a few official government sites with UFO information.
- National Security Agency. The NSA gave up some FOIA-requested documents in a 1980 lawsuit brought by the Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. Search for "UFO" here. There is actually quite a bit of stuff.
- Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has its fingers all over UFOs, which is amply documented in many UFO books, though it denies everything of substance about its involvement. Numerous UFO books include FOIA-released CIA documents. Included on the CIA site is an informative Hector Quintanilla general article about UFOs. Use keyword "Quintanilla" to search for it. He was the head of the Air Force's Project Blue Book for a while. Search for "UFO" on this site.
- U.S. Air Force. UFO investigators forced the hand of the U.S. Air Force in the middle 1990s when U.S. Congressman Steven Schiff started nosing around about the Roswell UFO incident in his state, New Mexico. But he soon got so disgusted at the lack of serious Air Force response that he asked the GAO to investigate. They did and eventually issued a report. But the public relations arm of the Air Force got in gear in a preemptive strike and issued a report of shoddy investigation to blunt Schiff's inquiry. As always with the gullible establishment news media, the ruse worked and the official Roswell investigation died in a flurry of Air Force disinformation. Not one, not two, but three different Air Force reports were issued, so worried were they that Schiff's investigation might actually go somewhere. Try searching for "UFO" and "Roswell" on this Air Force site.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI has been involved on the periphery of the UFO situation since the beginning in 1947. The military and defense-related intelligence agencies carry out the serious work when it comes to UFOs. The FBI was involved in investigation of the UFO-related cattle mutilations phenomenon in the late 1970s and 1980s when a call came from New Mexico Congressman Harrison Schmitt. As a result of the meeting at the Albuquerque Public Library, the FBI hired a retired FBI man, Ken Rommel, to head up an investigation. He issued yet another government-originated whitewash document about an issue taken seriously by the public.