Director's

MARRS, or the MUFON Anomaly Research and Reporting System, is the culmination of several years of trying to find the best online database to store MUFON’s half-century of case reports and paper files. It was demonstrated live last month to the State Directors at the MUFON Symposium in Las Vegas, NV. There are several criteria that needed to be satisfied before finding the perfect computer software that would become MARRS.

These capabilities include the need to be content searchable on keywords and phrases to allow easy retrieval of all documents pertaining to a given search parameter. It also needed to be easy to use with a friendly user interface similar to Windows and the Windows file structure that most everyone knows. Finally, it had to have the capability for someone to be able to download and print any document that had been retrieved. These criteria were used to search hundreds of options, including developing the system ourselves, before we ultimately landed on just the right software fit for MARRS.

Now that the online repository has been selected, the hard part begins:  pouring in 9,000 Pandora files, 85,000 Case Management System (CMS) files, and many, many more that exist at MUFON headquarters in both digitized and paper form. A team of volunteers is at this moment working very hard to enter, clean-up, and redact sensitive witness information in our Pandora files before making them available for MUFON researchers worldwide. This will be the first time they have been made available on a widespread basis since we began collecting UFO information in 1969.
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If you have an interest in participating in this project, please contact Ken St. John at dot@mufon.com. We are looking for volunteers who have a background and experience as an FI, are familiar with directories and computer file structures, and enjoy playing the role of an archivist.  The user interface for MARRS looks very similar to the Windows file structure most of us are familiar with. In addition, there is a need at MUFON headquarters for a volunteer or two who would like to scan documents using OCR into the new database. We have many boxes and file cabinets full of UFO information we’d like to see digitized and made available to our MUFON members. Again, please let us know if you’re interested!

Last month we talked about the ebb and flow of UFOs and the fact that there is a repeating cycle of UFO reports that occurs every year. The peak of this flow is in the summer months of June, July and August and the low point is always in the winter months of January, February and March. The other consistent thing we have seen is that we get between 6,000 and 8,000 cases reported to us each year that have happened in the same year they were reported. We also get a lot of historical cases from prior years which can skew the number of cases reported in a given year. This equates to between 500 and 1,000 UFO reports monthly.
We also mentioned that of these cases reported 30 percent remain unexplained after being investigated, and these are the reports we call “Unknowns.” The search for answers does not end there, however, but continues with the Top 10 Committee which reviews each month’s “Unknown” cases looking for the truly unusual ones that may just be extraterrestrial craft. The purpose of this team is to find our very best cases for inclusion in our annual report for that year. The team is headed by our Director of Research, Robert Powell, along with several volunteers who help dig through the data looking for the best of the best.  Each case that has been closed out as an unknown is scrutinized based on multiple criteria, including, but not limited to;
 

1. Close encounters – Structured craft less than 500 feet
2. Multiple credible witness accounts of a given sighting
3. Unusual, abrupt, or extremely fast movement of the craft observed
4. Quality of the investigation report completed

 
Cases that match these criteria are then put into a Cases of Interest file to be reviewed by the team mentioned above. Each month after carefully reviewing each case, the very best from this list are moved to the Top 10 file. At the end of the year, the Top 10 file is provided to the Science Review Board for a final determination of the very best cases to be included in the MUFON Annual Report. It is a very time consuming process, but one that ultimately results in MUFON being able to put its best foot forward.
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One may see our past annual reports on our website at MUFON.com. Click on the RESEARCH Tab and then select ANNUAL REPORTS. The more exciting news is that, in this issue, as a MUFON member, one is getting to see the Best cases of 2016 before the list is released to the general public and the news media. Please make sure to check out our lead story in this issue of The MUFON Journal. 

MUFON has been collecting UFO reports for some 48 years now, but only in the last 14 or 15 years have we been collecting the data electronically via the Internet. The last 10 of those years through the Case Management System, or CMS. One of the interesting things to note is that, just like throughout history, the number of UFOs being reported has a kind of ebb and flow to it. Looking at the graph of UFOs reported to us from 2008 through 2016, one can see the rhythmic peaks and valleys of the incoming UFO sighting reports. From a low of 325 in March 2008 to a peak of 1,402 in June of 2015.

The second thing to note is that UFO reports peak in the summer months June thro­­­ugh­­­­ August and wane in the winter and early spring months, of January thru April, which would make sense as good weather brings people outdoors where they are more likely to see a UFO and stormy weather keeps them inside safe and warm. A third item to note is that the number of UFO reports peaked in 2015 at nearly 11,000 cases, primarily on the popularity of the “Hangar 1” TV show that brought people out of their armchairs and onto the Internet to report sightings they had had both recently, as well as long ago. Lots of good historical data was gathered from the success of the “Hangar 1” TV show. 
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If one factors out historical cases and only looks at UFOs observed and reported in the same year, the numbers have been very consistent the last five years at 6 -8,000 cases per year, or around 500 to 700 cases a month. The trick of course is to figure out which of those cases are the real McCoy and that is the job of our Top Case team under the direction of Robert Powell, our Director of Research, who, with the help of the Science Review Board, will be publishing the very best cases of 2016 just in time for our July Symposium. We’ll be sure to share the results with you, our valued members, first. So, keep your eyes on the MUFON Journal and enjoy all the great NEW cases coming your way!

It was late February 1993 when a flyer arrived in my mailbox from the UCLA School of Engineering inviting me to a presentation by Ben Rich, the recently retired CEO and Chairman of the Lockheed Skunk Works. Ben, a UCLA Engineering alumni, would be sharing his 40 years at the Lockheed Skunk Works with fellow Engineering alumni at the Faculty Center on the UCLA campus on March 23, 1993. It was an offer I could not refuse, in fact it was so intriguing that I invited my good friend Tom Keller, also a UCLA Engineering alum to attend with me.

Arriving early, we took our seats in the front row eager to hear what Ben had to say to the 150 or so engineers gathered in attendance. His slideshow and talk did not disappoint starting with the U2 spy plane, then the SR-71, and a host of other projects Ben had personally worked on. It was a peek behind the curtain of the Skunk works and the marvelous job they do for the U.S. Air Force and CIA building top secret aircraft. The last aircraft Ben spoke about was the F117 which was built and tested in 1983 a full ten years before his talk. He even mentioned the fact that there was a ten-year gap between what he was showing us and where they were technologically joking that we should invite him back in ten years and he would be happy to tell us.

He was particularly concerned with the overbearing secrecy that he and his team had to endure while working on their projects at the Skunk works. Referencing the spooks in dark suits and sunglasses who would stand silently in the corners of the hangar and watch his team build an aircraft. His point was that this was 1993, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War and there was no reason for this level of secrecy in his mind. He then surprised all of us when he projected his last slide of a black disc zipping off into outer space and ended his talk by saying “we now have the technology to take ET home.” The entire room burst out laughing while Tom and I just starred at each other and in unison said, “Did he just say that?” We understood the magnitude of what he was trying to convey even if it came across as a joke to many of the others in the room.
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So how does this fit in with UFOs? Well every year we have 30% of our cases closed as unknowns. Could some of these “unknowns” be top secret aircraft or spacecraft built under Unacknowledged Special Access Projects (USAPs) by the likes of the Skunkworks? I think the short answer is Yes. After his talk when questioned Ben stated that “we have discovered an error in the equations and we now know how to travel to the stars and it won’t take us a lifetime to do it.” So how far have we gone? Are we currently traveling within our solar system or beyond with these technologies we’ve discovered? Interesting questions and one I hope to get answered at this year’s MUFON Symposium in Las Vegas. If these questions interest you, why not make plans now to join me at the 2017 MUFON Symposium and find out for yourself.

One of our goals in 2017 is to provide our Field Investigators and staff with the tools and resources they need to maintain the highest level of proficiency and professionalism in the UFO field. To this end, I am pleased to update you on three exciting projects now under active development in MUFON.

The first is the MUFON Anomaly Research and Reporting System (MARRS) which will soon begin archiving historical resources in preparation for beta testing with the plan to go live later this summer. This global database will provide users with unprecedented levels of access to historical resources such as documents, articles, witness reports, journals, media, etc. And will include reports from the very beginning of MUFON in 1969 when we were first founded, as well as other files MUFON has like the Leonard Stringfield (Redacted as appropriate) files and more. The plan will be for MARRS to become a valuable research tool for investigators, researchers, and the scientific community at large when it comes to studying and researching the UFO subject.

A second project is our Case Management System (CMS) which is the backbone of our UFO witness reporting system. CMS is now more than 10 years old, and running on software that is in need of major updating. The good news is that we have begun the redesign of CMS in order to improve usability, security, and integration with our other in-house systems such as MARRS and NEON, our new membership system. These improvements will be important to the future of UFO research and reporting. The plan is to model it on the current CMS system with lots of new software and usability updates.
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And finally, the plan is to put a new front-end on CMS and our Report a UFO (RaUFO) sighting form to address the need for a more user-friendly witness reporting submission process. This new Report a UFO responsive mobile app will simplify the reporting process, increase the number of witness reports by making it easier to report a sighting, and should reduce the time from sighting to reporting because of its ease of use. I have asked Ken St. John to be the project leader on these three initiatives and he has graciously agreed. If you’d like to help out, or learn more you may reach Ken at  dot@mufon.com.  ∆

Lots of exciting new things happening at MUFON these days and hopefully you’ve been a firsthand witness to them. First, we launched the new MUFON website with easier navigation and membership login on February 3rd. Then followed it up two weeks later with the launch of the 2017 MUFON Symposium website at MUFONSymposium.com. One may also access it from the main website MUFON.COM by clicking on the “Symposium 2017” tab. There is a lot of technology in all this with the integration of our Weebly.com website with the robust membership CRM system known as NEON. These two tools power the new MUFON that you are seeing and hopefully now using. 

Our attention now turns to providing lots of new content on the website, especially in the member only section. Plans include expanding the two-plus years of Journals to five years of back issues and possibly more; as well as adding a section for the last five years of Symposium proceedings. These may be downloaded to print or read on-line at one’s leisure. We’ll also be looking for more things from the MUFON files to post as well. In addition, with the new system, members will be able to see and manage their personal information, including store orders, past donations and many other items in your personal profile without having to pick up a phone and call MUFON headquarter; although we always enjoy hearing from you.

One of the new focus items of the Communications department will be a section called “Cases of Interest.” As you know, the current news feed is for cases coming into MUFON daily and is provided to give members and the public the latest information as it’s happening. Truth is that we know from experience that 70 percent of these cases will end up being closed out as IFOs, Information Only, Insufficient Data and even Hoaxes. The 30 percent left over, or the Unknowns, are the cases we are really interested in. The Communications department’s plan is to crawl through these closed cases and bring you the very best that you will be able to read about each month in the member only section. These will be good solid cases which we believe represent the best evidence we have for extraterrestrial life being here on our planet. 
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If you have other ideas on content you’d like to see on the website or in the Journal, please let us know. Your feedback is important to us as we move forward into the 21st Century and closer to finding the truth. 

Since its formation MUFON has been dedicated to finding the truth about UFOs through its mission of investigation, research, and education. There is one truth that is very clear from our excellent work over the past 48 years, and that is the government has successfully kept all aspects of their involvement with UFOs from the public: their intercept procedures, their recovery procedures, their use of unmarked military craft.

And their management procedures for controlling
these processes.

Why would the government keep these things secret? There are several possible reasons that come to mind, any one of which would be an excellent reason:

* They are unable to reliably control our airspace and knowledge of this would make citizens feel unsafe.

* UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors are real and they fear knowledge of this would have an adverse effect on our economy, world religions, or result in public panic.

* Treaties or alliances with one or more extraterrestrial civilizations have been signed without Congressional approval.

* We have successfully reverse engineered these craft years ago, discovering new principles in science and have created our own secret space program.

Happy New Year! I trust your holidays were as fun and exciting as mine were. I began the holiday season early December traveling to Brazil at the request of our National Director, A.J. Gevaerd, to speak at his “V UFOZ 2016” Conference in Iguassu Falls. It was a very successful conference with 20 speakers and more than 300 people in attendance over the four-day event. Most were from South America, including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay. Great people all, I just wish I knew more Portuguese and Spanish to be able to communicate more effectively with them, especially since all the lectures were in Portuguese!

A.J. and his team did an outstanding job running the conference as well as taking care of
his speakers putting us up at the Foz Presidente Hotel, the site of the conference itself. I was afforded the opportunity to present the MUFON story to a whole new set of International UFO researchers and interested parties. The information shared was well received and MUFON is seen as the gold standard of Ufology in South America and around the world. A number of people came up to me after my presentation asking how they could join MUFON. It’s easy, I told them, just go to our website and click on JOIN! Then get involved locally!

Last month I wrote to you about some exciting goals we have set for ourselves based on strategic planning we completed some months ago. The first goal from that planning meeting was to more than double our membership to 10,000 within the next 12 months. The second being to create underwriting opportunities to allow people to participate in funding projects that are important to MUFON and the UFO field in general, especially UFO Research.

As part of that process you are now beginning to see those changes take place before your very eyes. The first being a newer, cleaner looking, MUFON logo which is being previewed on the cover of the MUFON UFO Journal this month. The second being the evolution of the Journal itself beginning with this issue. We are reshaping and resizing the Journal to be more contemporary, easier to read, and oriented to a new generation of UFO researchers and investigators as well as newly acquired members whom we are actively recruiting.

I invited a team of people to headquarters recently for a strategic planning session on the future of MUFON and Ufology in general. Included were the MUFON Board, many of my direct reports (the people who help me run MUFON day-to-day), and some of our major benefactors who have invested time and money in our future. The meeting lasted two days and focused on our mission and goals as well as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that confront us as an organization doing the great work that we do.  You may be interested to know that our top threat, as well as our top weakness, was lack of funding overall, and more to the point a lack of funding for research.  

Our top opportunities after prioritizing were increasing membership and fundraising as well as international expansion as an organization. Every time we add a new member we increase our pool of funds to allow us to do important research and outreach to the media and public, not to mention influential people in government and industry who have a keen interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Based on our strategic plan we’ve set a goal for ourselves to grow membership in MUFON to 10,000 members in the next 12 months. An ambitious goal for sure, but one that with a solid plan is attainable.