Fund for UFO Research

History

The Fund for UFO Research was incorporated in 1979 in Mount Rainier, Maryland, one block outside the District of Columbia boundary. The location was not incidental. FUFOR's founders understood that proximity to Washington mattered: the agencies they would be pressuring for documents were across the river, the media they needed to engage was based there, and the political credibility that came with a D.C.-area address helped legitimise an organisation studying a topic most institutions would not touch.

The structural model was borrowed from academic research foundations rather than UFO organisations. FUFOR would not conduct its own investigations. Instead, it would evaluate research proposals, award grants, and require accountability reports. This gave it something no other civilian UFO group possessed: the ability to direct resources to wherever the most promising evidence was emerging, without being locked into a single investigative programme or geographic region.

Bruce Maccabee chaired the Executive Committee. Maccabee was an optical physicist at the Naval Surface Weapons Center (later NSWC Dahlgren) who had been analysing UFO photographs and film with professional-grade equipment since the early 1970s. Fred Whiting served as Secretary-Treasurer. Don Berliner, an aviation journalist and former NICAP member, handled communications. Richard Hall, who had compiled The UFO Evidence as NICAP's assistant director in the 1960s, brought three decades of institutional memory.

The Quarterly Reports that form the bulk of this collection served as accountability documents. Each issue reported: what grants had been approved, how much money was disbursed, what research those grants produced, and what new proposals the Executive Committee was evaluating. The transparency was deliberate. FUFOR needed donors to trust that their money was reaching legitimate research, and the quarterly reporting cycle proved it.

Major Research Programmes

FUFOR's earliest grants supported document retrieval. By the end of 1982, over 250 sets of declassified government UFO documents had been mailed to subscribers. The Fund distributed these as a public education tool: the actual CIA, FBI, DIA, and military base files, unredacted where possible, with analysis. A mid-1982 survey of recipients showed overwhelming support for continuing this work, with crash/retrieval research as the second-highest priority.

That priority produced immediate results. The Fund provided Bill Moore (co-author of The Roswell Incident) with investigation funding and organised the November 1982 Washington meeting where Moore, Leonard Stringfield, and Stanton Friedman compared crash/retrieval evidence. The assessment was more positive than expected. Crash/retrieval research continued to receive FUFOR funding through the decade, culminating in a $16,000 grant to Friedman for MJ-12 document verification in 1988 to 1989.

Abduction research became the Fund's second major funding stream. FUFOR supported the psychological testing of abductees (a battery of standardised tests that found no psychological deficit explaining their accounts), funded Budd Hopkins's case documentation work after the December 1987 OMNI magazine article generated over 2,000 letters from potential experiencers, and evaluated proposals from Dr. Richard Haines (educational videotape for abduction researchers), Dr. Rima Laibow (abduction crisis centre with hotline), and conference proposals bringing together clinical psychologists and psychiatrists to review the phenomenon's connection to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Maccabee himself contributed original research papers through FUFOR channels, including a technical analysis of Project Blue Book Special Report #14, the complete report on the Japan Air Lines 1628 sighting (November 1986), and an analysis of an anomalous image in a DMSP weather satellite photograph from October 1978. These were professional-grade scientific papers that no conventional journal would publish because of their subject matter.

By Q4 1988, the Fund's television profile had expanded. Maccabee appeared on "Unsolved Mysteries" (NBC) and "UFO Coverup? ... Live" (produced within a block of the White House, seen by an estimated 40 million viewers and generating over 75,000 phone calls). The Fund also initiated a project to collect signatures from scientists endorsing further UFO research, coordinated by Fund Associate Howard Hoffman as a joint effort with CUFOS and MUFON.