August Blog

This month for my research project was extremely boring and tedious. I spent the entire month digging through digital archives of various works I have access to, looking for anything and everything that might be relevant to my project. I logged those cases into a notebook -- denoting the type of case or information, where it came from, date if relevant, place if relevant, and page numbers -- and just kept going. Before this month I had logged a total of 1,520 cases. In the end, I had logged 2,448 cases at the time of writing. That's an increase of 928 cases or a 61% increase. I think I did a pretty good job. Most of the month was spent delving into Albert Rosales's wonderful Humanoid Database. Albert is a ufologist who was born in Cuba and later moved to Florida. He spent dozens of years collecting UFO reports and other strange stories that involve encounters with a humanoid entity. A few years ago, he had his entire database available online in the form of PDFs. I quickly snapped it up knowing that it would be infinitely useful. It certainly was. He organized the cases chronologically and had a different PDF for each year, and the database covered from 1850-2015. 165 years! I didn't finish going through his database because it became too time-consuming. I decided somewhere in the 1970s to move on to the various books and papers I was sent PDFs of from my advisor (thanks again Joshua!). I also looked for some other books and resources that I figured would be useful in PDF form. My month was boring but also very busy.

For what I have been doing, showing initiative isn't the easiest thing to do. Or at least extra initiative. I found a few websites that work like digital libraries which I've been using for resource searching so I don't have to bug Joshua all the time for certain leads. I guess that counts.

Probably the biggest highlight of this month was finding a PDF copy of an incredibly rare UFO book. The book is UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference by Mark Rodeghier. It was only published once and had a very limited print run. I was lucky that the organization that funded the book, the Center for UFO Studies, had a PDF copy available on the website because the book itself is easily worth over $300 and that is a little above my budget!

The biggest thing I learned was different styles for searching through databases and the internet. I know it was something that was touched upon on in my Freshman year of Bio-Med, but we never did anything in-depth concerning the different strategies. Instead, I ended up doing a lot of trial and error searches around various sites such as archives.org and other paranormally themed databases. I think it was good practice for my future and is definitely a good tool to have for the project itself. I also learned about a few interesting cases that are fairly well known that I was previously unfamiliar with. A good example of this was the infamous Soccoro, New Mexico UFO Landing. A police officer was in the middle of a high-speed chase when he saw the UFO land not to far away. He actually went to investigate and thus began an extremely complex and fascinating case that I am certainly including in my book.

I think the biggest challenge that I encountered during this month concerning my project was tackling the repetition and inherent dullness of this stage of the project. I enjoy researching when I can bounce around to different sources and compare and really dig into something interesting. I couldn't really do a lot of that this month and that made it infinitely harder to motivate myself to work. What I ended up doing was effectively shutting myself off from the world when it was time to work. I would put my headphones on with really loud music, make sure I was alone while working, make sure my phone and other devices were hidden, muted, and out of reach, and I turned off the internet for my computer so I couldn't just Google whatever popped into my head. It was difficult and stressed me out quite a bit, but it was worth it to get my work done.

The thing I am most looking forward to next month is finishing my wide dive into the literature and to begin to organize my thoughts and the information I have collected. Also next month, I will be speaking about the topic I am covering for my book at the Mothman Festival. I am planning on using the response I get from the presentation and the whole process of the presentation to affect how I organize and set up my outline for my book in November.

Here is a picture of the notebooks I've been working with. It's pretty repetitive work.