Visitors and donations

As usual there is a steady stream of visitors to AFU. Guiding groups and presenting all our eleven premises takes quite some time so my collegue Anders Liljegren and I use to limit the presentation to four or five premises. This is more than enough for most visitors to get a good grasp of the staggering amount of books, magazines, clippings, correspondence and other archival records preserved at AFU. We don´t want interested beginners to develop mental exhaustion at their first visit to the archives.

On October 11 we were visited by Christian Forslind and Mattias Lövgren from the nearby city of Linköping. And on October 13, Anders and I guided a group of librarians with friends from Norrköping Public Library. It is always a pleasure to present the AFU collections to my librarian collegues as they of course are curious to enter and understand the literature of the strange underground world of ufology, Forteana and paranormal phenomena.

Librarians and friends from Norrköping Public Library

Librarian Tommy Jansson with alien

Anders Liljegren telling about Charles Fort

Our new visitors had a chance to peruse the impressive donations that recently arrived at AFU. 260 boxes of books, magazines etc from donors in England: Lional Beer, Bob Rickard, Omar Fowler, Busty Taylor, Bill Foley (Contact International), Peter Rogerson, Edwin Joyce (FSR), Bob Digby and the late Steve Moore. Especially fascinating was the large collection of books on the Kennedy assassination and related conspiracy theories from Peter Rogerson. There is also a small film clip from the C-archive on You Tube taken by Clas Svahn, which gives a good estimation of the size of the latest donation to AFU.

Recently donated books ready to be cataloged

Unpacking the boxes I always feel like a small boy on Christmas. So many new and interesting titles and so little time to read. Below some titles from the Peter Rogerson collection.

While perusing the shelves at AFU I become acutely aware of the heretic nature of our subjects and data. How distant we are from mainstream science and religion and the usual interests and hobbies of "normal" everyday people. Especially as we have the audacity to claim there are a vast array of phenomena out there that neither orthodox science nor religion understand or care to investigate. Those cultural and intellectual heretics who enter this world of Forbidden Science often becomes an embarrassment to mainstream society as they open a crack in the wall of materialist/reductionist science and philosophy. Serious ufologists, Forteans and paranormal investigators are the gnostics, cathars and hermeticists of today. Representatives of the third intellectual force in Western history. Allen Hynek understood this well when he named his group of investigators the Invisible College. An interesting comment on this was presented by Jacques Vallee in his foreword to the reprint of his 1975 book The Invisible College. You can read his new foreword in the 2014 edition at the Amazon site.