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UFO-Aktuellt issue 1/2005
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The 100th issue of UFO-Aktuellt
reached it's readers in March 2005. English summary by Stefan
Isaksson.
Page 2: And
the answer is: a swimming pool!
In the last
issue of UFO Aktuellt (#4, 2004), a picture was published, depicting
a circle of sorts on the lawn in a house somewhere in Sweden. UFO-Aktuellt
asked its readers to come up with answers as to what had caused the
circle seen in the picture. And not one, but many came up with the
right answer, for instance CUFOS in Chicago and
polish ufologist Robert Lesniakiewicz. The correct answer was
a children's swimming pool, a common and much appreciated thing
during the summer months.
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Page 3: Editorial
Chairman Clas Svahn
devotes this issue's editorial to the awesome fact that this issue happens
to be the 100th! The magazine has changed quite drastically
since its beginning, and Svahn is keen to point out the fact that it is now a
scientific-minded investigative magazine, and not some New
Age inspired "search for aliens" mumbo jumbo. He offers a brief but informative
resume of the history of the magazine (explored further by C. Göran Norlén
at the end of this issue), and he has great hopes for the future of this,
the no.1 UFO magazine in Sweden.
Pages 4-5: He had to hit
the brakes
Article by Svahn, based
on an interview he did with Håkan Ekstrand during the summer
of 2004. During the summers of 2002 and 2004, UFO Sweden conducted a thorough
and quite widespread project in the northern and western parts of the province
of Värmland, where about 1.000 individuals have been interviewed about their
sightings there. Per-Eric Andersson is one of these
many witnesses, and sometime in the fall of 1977 he was in his car on his way
home when he had an observation of a cigar-shaped object moving slowly over the
trees. The sighting is interesting and Andersson is a reliable witness, but as
Svahn points out, it'll be difficult indeed finding an answer to what it was
Andersson witnessed since it has'’t been possible to verify the exact date of
the event.
Pages 6-10: The search
for other worlds
Now that UFO-Aktuellt
celebrates its one hundredth issue, three articles are published in the same
issue; articles dealing with the question of life in the universe. Not because
UFO Sweden consists of devoted believers (we sure don't), but simply because the
topic is worth discussing.
The first article is by
Andreas Ohlsson , historian and board member of UFO Sweden. The article
is accompanied by two photographs beautiful and awe-inspiring photographs by
NASA. Ohlsson offers a brief but informative history of the philosophical and
historical ideas of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe.
Aristotle’s ideas are mentioned, as well as the classic "wow-signal"
and Frank Drake and the Drake-equation. All in all a very
well-written article about a topic that never can be discusses enough.
Pages 10-15: Is life a
unique thing?
The second article in the
extraterrestrial life-debate in this issue is written by astrobiologist Tomas
Hode from the Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. Hode has
been featured in UFO-Aktuellt before, and it's always a welcome sight to see
respected scientists taking the UFO/ET debate seriously. The question addressed
by Hode in his article (as in Ohlsson's article accompanied by an image provided
by NASA), is: how difficult, or easy, is it for life to originate considered the
right conditions are there? Recent discoveries have shown that simple life can
and indeed does exist in extreme environments on Earth - such as deep inside the
planet or in highly volcanic environments - and since we know for sure that
places such as these exist or have existed in the known universe, does that mean
life exist there too? A good question. Hode's discussion is an interesting
addition to the debate.
Page 14: Advertisements
Various advertisements
for books sold by UFO Sweden.
Page 15: Bizarre martians
Short article by Svahn,
about the amusing - but at the time deadly serious - statement from the 1950s by
astronomy professor Gerard Kuiper from University of Chicago,
regarding the possible appearances of extraterrestrial entities. He thought it
was mostly likely to be insects or vegetables. According to Jerome Clark
, this prompted Gerald Heard into writing his book The
Riddle of the Flying Saucers (1950), where visiting Martians are in
fact a race of super bees.
The page also has a small
advertisement for the field investigator course held in August.
Pages 16-17: Mars equals
ice
UFO Sweden’s own
Mars-expert, Anders Persson , reports about the latest findings
from the Red Planet. Mars has never been as thoroughly investigated as it is at
the very moment, and one of the latest and most interesting findings are what
appear to be a giant frozen lake covered by dust. An image of the alleged lake
accompanies the article.
Page 17: SETI at home
Article by Svahn and
Ohlsson, about the program known as SETI@home, a program downloadable from the
internet and designed to enable ordinary citizens to join in the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. Anyone with a 32 megabyte RAM and a PC or Mac can
use the program, which works as a screen saver and analyzes incoming data while
the user is busy doing something else (for instance supporting UFO Sweden). The
use of computers in 226 different countries has made SETI@home the largest super
computer in the world.
Pages 18-20: Owlman and
friends
UFO Sweden's expert on
fortean phenomena, Richard Svensson , writes (and as always, draws
beautiful pictures) about bizarre things, not necessarily UFO related. This time
it's all about strange creatures - sometimes anthropomorphic - that have been
spotted sailing through our skies. The American Mothman is only mentioned
briefly, since UFO Sweden has written about him before (issue 4, 2000).
Svensson
pays more attention to the "Owlman" of Cornwall, England, and other beings
sighted all over the world. At the end of the article he touches upon the
concept of tulpas , or spirit manifestations brought to the physical
world by Buddhist monks. He's skeptical as always, and all in all the article is
as good as his other contributions to the magazine.
Page 21: Book reviews
Four books reviewed this
time, three of them by Clas Svahn, and one by Andreas Ohlsson. Usually the book
reviews are of book in English, but in this issue three of the four books are in
Swedish. They are all non-fiction.
Pages 22-23: Media watch
C Göran Norlén
gives a review of news clippings from Swedish media, this time from the middle
of October 2004 up until the middle of January 2005. As always, there have been
both very good and very bad things said in Swedish media about the UFO
phenomenon, and he's also confused as to why he after almost 20 years doing his
media watch has received so little feedback from readers over the years.
Page 24: Same UFO -
different day?
On the 24th
and 27th of January, 2005, two reports were received by UFO Sweden's
report central, and certain similarities can be found in them. Anders Persson
and Joakim Eriksson has written a short article detailing
their investigation, and it's accompanied by a photograph by one of the
witnesses, onto which an image of the UFO as it was seen has been superimposed.
The cases are not completely solved, but much indicates that they were both a
large meteor.
Page 25: Strange-looking
ice
Article by Svahn,
accompanied by three pictures and a drawn image, about how on the morning of 5
Mars, 2005, a strange circular formation was found in the ice in a Swedish
river. To the untrained eye the phenomenon looks strange, to say the least, but
it has perfectly normal causes has been dealt with in a previous issue (#1,
2001).
Pages 26-27:
International ufology
Stefan Roslund
has ten short news about the international UFO,
and forteana, scene. Among other things, Roslund mentions the fate of the ship
Mary Celeste, a creature sighting at Lake Champlain, an alleged extraterrestrial
skeleton in Brazil, and so on.
Pages 28-29: News from
the report centre
Strange things are indeed
taking place in the skies. The Report Centre run by UFO Sweden receives several
hundred reports annually, and in this issue of UFO Aktuellt Jenny Ståhl
presents three of them, one taking place in 2002, and the other two in 2004.
The article is also accompanied by four photographs of various phenomena (among
them two fake UFO pictures from Finland).
Pages 30-31: UFO
Aktuellt #100
Article by C. Göran
Norlén, where he discusses the changes that have occurred within UFO-Aktuellt
since it was founded 25 years ago. He also mentions some of the authors who have
contributed regularly over the years, and he's proud to say that while the prize
of the magazine has not increased over the years, the quality has kept
improving. That's a hard one to beat!
Back page: UFO Expo
Advertisement for the
next UFO Expo in Sweden, taking place way up north in Luleå on 28-29 March 2005.
The back page also has a
short article by Svahn about an object caught by a so-called "all sky" camera
over Haleakala, Hawaii on 17 December, 2004.