Archive of APRO bulletins Online!

[uforadio]

Dear colleagues.

During years, I was able to locate and get few APRO bulletins myself (issues from 1971 to 1973 plus APRO Handbook), but this achievement is simply AMAZING. What a great news for every archivist and researcher. Open Minds Production has just posted big portion of APRO bulletins online.

You can download them here:
APRO Bulletins | UFO Files | UFO News | Openminds.tv

Also check up the article itself about this release:
Open Minds posts extensive APRO Bulletin collection | Openminds.tv

Also check up here the whole problem behind the APRO archives that is bothering researchers for years:
Unique UFO Archive Hidden in Warehouse (APRO Archives and Files) - UFO Evidence

Best Wishes and happy downloading

 

[Sean Elifritz]

That is AWESOME! How did they get a hold of them? I heard the APRO stuff was locked up in some guy's garage.

 

[Double Nought Spy]

Yes, that is very cool. It's fun to look at what was going on when I landed on Earth. Sputnik still had shorts tied in knots by the millions but there was plenty of other fascinating stuff happening.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

OK, read your link. So they got them from Wendell Steven's collection then. APRO was around until the late 80s so there should still be quite a few of them coming in the future.

 

[uforadio]

That is AWESOME! How did they get a hold of them? I heard the APRO stuff was locked up in some guy's garage.

I also sent them yesterday my collection to speed up the process so they will also post it in the future too.
About garage affair check up last link in my original post.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

The one thing I noticed right away is that the file sizes of these are outrageously large for PDFs that most of the time are only 8 pages long and which bear text quality that is only moderate (And a few of them are unreadable). Had the creator started with high quality scans (Should never be less than 300 dpi) and then finished with ClearScan OCR rendered to 300 dpi the text quality could have been fantastic and the file sizes much, much smaller. For an explanation of how ClearScan works check out this.

I batched these files into Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert them to ClearScan OCR. The result is smaller file sizes and in some instances sharper text quality (While many sport better looking text than the originals despite smaller file sizes the few that were totally unreadable remain so. ClearScan is at its best when converting mid to high quality scans into high quality, small, and searchable PDF files. It can't accomplish much with source material that is unreadable). The higher quality the original files were the greater the reduction in file size and the boost to text clarity. The ones that are still quite large are so because the originals were so poor there wasn't much ClearScan could do with them (And/Or because there were a lot of pictures in the file. ClearScan only effects text). So the smallest files (Some are now just a few hundred kbs where the originals were several megs) tend to be the best looking ones. Additionally, some of the originals had pages that were very crooked and those have been straightened out. Not all of them are perfectly straight (Though many are) but there is certainly a big improvement. All in all the original 93 files totaled 785 megs and these new versions total 161 megs when unpacked. For anyone interested I put all 93 (As of the time of this post that is all that has been made available so far) of these new versions into a rar archive and uploaded it to Megaupload.:

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

If in the future somebody tries to download this and it isn't there that will be because Megaupload deletes files after they go 21 consecutive days without a download.

 

[uforadio]

Great Wickerman...fantastic work, they are OCR'ed. You saved me a lot of work because I also wanted to OCR them for the archive. I also suggested to Alejandro three days ago to make them searchable in the future. He told me at the time that they are currently working on the issues from 1970's.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Great Wickerman...fantastic work, they are OCR'ed. You saved me a lot of work because I also wanted to OCR them for the archive. I also suggested to Alejandro three days ago to make them searchable in the future. He told me at the time that they are currently working on the issues from 1970's.

Actually they already were searchable but they picked an antiquated OCR technique that resulted in bloated file sizes and sharpness of text that wasn't as good as it could/should have been (I don't know for certain but I'm assuming that they fudged during the scanning process to prevent the files from being even larger than they already are. But when you use ClearScan you can work with large, high quality scans and still end up with small PDF files). Seriously, had I done the scanning they would have been razor-sharp and small (Not that I'm volunteering cuz' I ain't got the time, ha ha. But offering some advice). Scan at 300 dpi (600 dpi is overkill. If your documents are nice and flat you can end up with a very sharp product at 300 dpi but should never use any number smaller than that) and if there are any problems with the scans run them in something like Scan Tailor to touch them up. Then output with Adobe Acrobat Pro to PDF using ClearScan OCR set to 300 dpi (Or something else that can do the same thing). Well, the first two steps were out of my hands and nothing can be done about it now but I was able to get them a little better with step 3.

 

[uforadio]

Actually they already were searchable but they picked an antiquated OCR technique that resulted in bloated file sizes and sharpness of text that wasn't as good as it could/should have been (I don't know for certain but I'm assuming that they fudged during the scanning process to prevent the files from being even larger than they already are. But when you use ClearScan you can work with large, high quality scans and still end up with small PDF files). Seriously, had I done the scanning they would have been razor-sharp and small (Not that I'm volunteering cuz' I ain't got the time, ha ha. But offering some advice). Scan at 300 dpi (600 dpi is overkill. If your documents are nice and flat you can end up with a very sharp product at 300 dpi but should never use any number smaller than that) and if there are any problems with the scans run them in something like Scan Tailor to touch them up. Then output with Adobe Acrobat Pro to PDF using ClearScan OCR set to 300 dpi (Or something else that can do the same thing). Well, the first two steps were out of my hands and nothing can be done about it now but I was able to get them a little better with step 3.

Yes you are right, just checked. They were searchable in the first place (I have obviously tried with wrong words as OCR is not always perfect for every section of the text).

Maybe you could give your suggesttions and advices to Open Minds so they can do it right from the step 1. They are just working on the new issues from 1970's. If you don't have Alejandro's email address and if you are interested let me know and will send ya over PM.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Yes you are right, just checked. They were searchable in the first place (I have obviously tried with wrong words as OCR is not always perfect for every section of the text).

Maybe you could give your suggesttions and advices to Open Minds so they can do it right from the step 1. They are just working on the new issues from 1970's. If you don't have Alejandro's email address and if you are interested let me know and will send ya over PM.

Well, I don't want to bother him with it. But the thread is here if you want to show it to him. I think that after doing the ClearScan about half of them look pretty good. Take one of the better looking ones and blow it up to like 400% zoom and you'll see that the text is clear even at that magnification which is one of the cool things about ClearScan. But some of the other ones just weren't scanned well so there really isn't anything that can help them. I just wanted to point out that if you finish the process with ClearScan OCR you don't have to worry about the file size of your scans when doing the scanning. You can focus instead on the quality. It doesn't matter if the sizes of them are kinda' big because that size will get stripped down when doing the ClearScan OCR anyway. And if it's still a little big because it has a lot of pictures in it you can then save it as an optimized PDF with Adobe Acrobat Pro at default settings and that will compress the pics down to more appropriate sizes.

I'll give an example: Several years ago I found a couple scanned issues of Flying Saucer Review from 1987 on usenet. The scans were of very high quality and the creator chose the typical searchable image OCR technique. The result was PDFs that looked good but were very big, 60 megs and 46 megs. I took them and simply re-OCRed them with ClearScan in AAP and got them down to like 2 megs each and they look every bit as good if not better than the originals. The point being that you can start off with very large, very sharp scans and if you OCR with ClearScan you can end up with small PDF files without losing any quality.

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

 

[Sean Elifritz]

They've added 11 more.

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

Edit: These ones all look pretty good. No unreadable parts. Most of the unreadable ones were very old issues. For all I know the ink might be wore off the pages rather than them having been scanned at a low resolution. Most of them look fine. As he posts searchable image versions I'll post ClearScan versions for whomever might want them (I convert every scanned PDF in searchable image OCR I download to ClearScan anyway so it's no sweat off my back to merely provide a download link afterward).

 

[uforadio]

They've added 11 more.

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

Edit: These ones all look pretty good. No unreadable parts. Most of the unreadable ones were very old issues. For all I know the ink might be wore off the pages rather than them having been scanned at a low resolution. Most of them look fine. As he posts searchable image versions I'll post ClearScan versions for whomever might want them (I convert every scanned PDF in searchable image OCR I download to ClearScan anyway so it's no sweat off my back to merely provide a download link afterward).

By the way, based on your comments here (and on one other place) I just now figured out that you are one of the strong uploaders (on that other place of the classic material

Keep up with the great work Your page on that other place is placed on my favorites for some time now

---------- Post added at 11:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:42 PM ----------

They've added 11 more.

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

Edit: These ones all look pretty good. No unreadable parts. Most of the unreadable ones were very old issues. For all I know the ink might be wore off the pages rather than them having been scanned at a low resolution. Most of them look fine. As he posts searchable image versions I'll post ClearScan versions for whomever might want them (I convert every scanned PDF in searchable image OCR I download to ClearScan anyway so it's no sweat off my back to merely provide a download link afterward).

Yap, some of those new ones are from my side (I also sent them Handbook - it is now on the top of the page). I didn't scan that small archive of 1970s but was able to locate them accidentaly some time in the past. Even tried to contact original source-uploader at the time to find out are there any new bulletins in his archives, but unfortunately he never replied.

By the way I think that Richard Dolan has a complete set of APRO bulletins. He received them also from one archivist after he died.

 

[IsaacKoi]

The team at the OpenMinds.TV website (particularly Richard Heiden and Alejandro Rojas) have just made available a large further batch of APRO Bulletins - including most of the issues from 1975 to 1987. See the issues listed in the bottom half of the following webpage:
APRO Bulletins collection | Aerial Phenomena Research Organization

As with the previous collection of issues up to 1975, there are a number of issues missing from the new collection - so it would be great if the AFU in Sweden (or others) are able/willing to fill in some of the gaps.