Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR)

History

The Fund for UFO Research was incorporated in 1979 with a specific mission: provide financial support for scientific UFO research at a time when no government funding existed and academic careers were destroyed by association with the subject. The fund's quarterly reports, published from 1982 to 2001, documented nearly two decades of privately funded investigation into cases that official channels refused to touch.

FUFOR's board drew from the upper tier of UFO research: Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist at the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center who specialised in photographic analysis; Don Berliner, an aviation journalist and NICAP veteran; Richard Hall, the former NICAP assistant director who had compiled The UFO Evidence; and Rob Swiatek, a patent examiner with deep knowledge of government classification systems. These were not hobbyists. They understood both the scientific standards required and the institutional resistance they faced.

The fund directed its limited resources strategically. It funded the medical investigation of Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum after their 1980 encounter near Huffman, Texas left them with radiation-like injuries. It supported Stanton Friedman's early Roswell research, including document retrieval and witness interviews that built the evidentiary foundation for the case. It paid for laboratory analysis of physical evidence, photographic enhancement, and expert consultations that individual researchers could not afford.

The quarterly reports tracked every dollar spent: which cases received funding, what the investigators found, what further work was needed. They provide a uniquely transparent record of how the civilian research community allocated its scarce resources, and which lines of inquiry were judged most promising by the field's leading figures.