Monday, October 24, 2016

Field investigator seminar 2016

During the weekend October 22-23 UFO-Sweden arranged the annual weekend seminar with the object of educating and training both new and old field investigators. As this event is also an important social gathering most participants arrived already on Friday 21 for a relaxed get together, welcomed by the gracious staff at Föllingen Hotel.

The nice and friendly staff at Föllingen Hotel

The program was as usual a mixture of theory and exercises: UFO-Sweden ideology and policy, basic training in field investigation techniques, witness psychology, misidentifications and the popular group exercise in trying to solve a complicated UFO case.

Some of the 44 participants listening to Clas Svahn

Carl-Anton Mattsson at the impressive book table.

Special guest this year was journalist Jack Werner who lectured on the problem of checking information on the Internet and the unreliability of social media. This is a complicated issue for all new ufologists and a completely new situation compared to ufology in the 1970s, when I started field investigation.

Jack Werner

Jack also helped us with the tricky problem of getting a good photograph of all seminar participants, in spite of the rainy weather. The ladder he climbed could be somewhat slippery but with the help of Clas Svahn all went well and they succeeded in getting all the group together in one picture.

Clas and Jack arranging for photographs

All the seminar participants

After an excellent dinner and lottery it was time for demonstration of how drones and Chinese lanterns appeared in the dark night. In spite of the rain we succeeded in getting one lanters to a lift off. 

UFO-Sweden chairman Anders Berglund was quite successsful at the lottery

Watching the drone


Johan Gustavsson trying hard to get the lanter lifting

Lift off

On Sunday four unsolved UFO cases were presented by me, Johan Gustavsson, Anders Berglund and Clas Svahn. Very much appreciated was the lecture by Göran Lengqvist on how he after months of detective work could prove that the UFO film, called Orsa-filmen, was a clever fake. 

Göran Lengqvist