Before moving on to discuss various UFO databases (new and old), I'll just post one more item illustrating the PDF search tool that I've previously recommended which I frankly think is more useful than most of the UFO databases that I've collected. I'd like a few more UFO researchers to try briefly out this (free) tool by doing a quick direct comparison between using Google and this tool to search material on a couple of large UFO websites containing many pages of high quality research: the Project 1947 website and the NICAP.org website.
Some large UFO websites have grown organically and are not always easy to navigate. Some of them have limited, or no, search functions. Apart from enabling UFO websites to be preserved, converting websites to PDFs increases the options for searching their content.
Of course, it is possible to search a particular websites using Google. Google searches can be limited to a particular website by including before "site:" name, e.g. "site:https://www.project1947.com/". So, if you want to search the Project 1947 website for, say, pages containing the name "Hynek" you can do a Google search for "site:https://www.project1947.com/ Hynek".
But when you do a Google search for results using that method, it is still necessary to click on each result and wait for the page to load and then search the page for "Hynek" in order to see each search result in context.
At the cost of a limited amount of storage space, it is possible to store complete UFO websites as PDFs (whether as a single PDF for the entire website or a collection of many PDFs for each webpage on a website) and then search them as with any other single PDF or collection of PDFs. I've previously posted at some length about one free tool that I have used for the last decade or so: PDF Xchange Editor.
Personally (although I'd welcome views from others that do this suggested comparison), I think that it is far, far quicker to review the results of a search of a UFO website converted to PDFs (and the results are more comprehensive) than using Google. Okay, it is necessary to store the website as a PDF and this uses up some storage space, but hard drives and SSDs are now fairly cheap and some UFO websites are mainly text/images so are not huge.
In short, I think that this tool is better than Google when it comes to doing fast and comprehensive searches of large websites (particularly if the search generates numerous relevant results to be reviewed).
Taking two websites that I think contain a lot of high quality research as case studies - the Project 1947 website and the NICAP.org website - I have used Adobe Acrobat to convert them to PDFs. I have uploaded a single PDF for each website to the online archive I have been helping to develop. The PDFs produced by Adobe Acrobat include some duplication - which is a bit irritating - but this method of generating PDFs with working internal links is very quick and easy. Of course, if
The Project 1947 website is run by Jan Aldrich. The NICAP.org website is run by Francis Ridge. Both websites are fairly well known among the UFO community (but deserve to be better known) and contain many pages of UFO documents, catalogues, history and analysis. Both websites include material from various leading UFO researchers.
Both Jan and Fran have kindly given me permission to try out some archiving ideas. Jan also requested that I seek permission from a few other individuals involved in his website and I am pleased to say that all of them (i.e. John Stepkowski, Barry Greenwood, Keith Basterfield, Paul Dean) all helpfully responded that if Jan was happy then they were happy and that they viewed Jan's permission as sufficient to cover any material they had contributed to Jan's website.
It is possible to search either of these PDFs, or both of them at the same time, using this free tool. It is also possible to include these PDFs in a larger collection of PDFs (e.g. with some or many UFO books, UFO documents, PhD dissertations about UFOs etc etc) to do tailored searches.
Incidentally, the resulting PDFs include scans of a number of official UFO documents (which have also been rendered searchable as part of this process).
I have added these PDFs to a folder in relation to UFO websites.
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