9 May 2010

OUR FRIENDS FROM THE NORTH

It was a pleasure last week to meet Clas Svahn and Hakon Blomqvist from the Swedish AFU organisation, on their latest trip to England collecting donations for their important UFO and fortean archive in Stockholm.

This is probably the largest and best organised collection of such material in the world, and amazingly it is partly subsidised by the Swedish government, who pay for three people to help organise the collection as part of the government's 'Phase Three' programme which provides paid staff for voluntary community and cultural organisations in a 'workfare' scheme. Maybe someone should suggest this to our new government (whoever they may be)!
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The Magonia Collective was able to provide a fair number of magazines and books for this worthwhile cause and, until there is something of the same size and quality in the UK, I would urge readers who may be discarding items from the collections to contact Clas and his colleagues at afu@ufo.se

Clas and Hakon also brought the latest copy of the Swedish magazine UFO Aktuelt, which has now merged with the Norwegian UFO magazine. The two magazines are printed back-to-back, with a different front cover at each end! As the Swedish and Norwegian languages are mutually understandable, Scandinavian readers have no problems with this.

The Swedish end of the magazine contains one of the most amazing IFO cases I have ever come across. A UFO was filmed near Gothenburg; a strange shaped object with two accompanying discs flying at high speed. It seemed to be leaving a trail of some smokey substance.

When investigator Anders Persson examined the case he found that it was the result of a local radio station which was holding a competition to see how far a garden barbeque could be catapulted through the air from a medieval-style trebuchet! The main object was the barbeque itself, trailing charcoal ash, with two circular sausage grills flying alongside it!

It certainly makes a change from Chinese lanterns!

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