home
esoterica
Feature Articles by binnallFeature Articles by binnall
Original binnallofamerica.com Audio
the United States of Esoterica
merchandise
contact

Lesley

Grey Matter

12.5.6

The Language of Ufology

When Paola Harris was on BoA audio, she made a big point of saying that ufology was different in Italy than in the US. It also was clear to me that except for a hand full of English ufologists, Paola and a few others we really know nothing about the ufologists in the rest of the world. There really are ufologists all over the world, but we know nothing about them or their research.

Thinking about this a while, I decided that I should set up a link page to non-English ufo websites. . There are problems with this, the first being that while google language tools work well enough to get a basic understanding of sites, they are not yet set up to translate all languages. Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese are no problem, but other languages are still in beta stage like Chinese and Japanese. Russian, Polish, Dutch and so on are nonexistent right now. Still, I decided that a link page with all ufology considered would be a good idea and with fingers crossed, google may eventually have translation tools for more languages.

As it turned out this was harder than I had realized, first I don’t know the search terms to use for certain languages and if they are not translatable, I don’t know if a ufo was merely mentioned or if it is really a site about ufo research. I had almost given up on the idea when the first of two strange coincidences (if you believe in such a thing) happened. I received an email from Scott Corrales. It was an email thanking me for writing nice things on my blog about his BoA interview. I was thinking about emailing Scott to ask for help with Spanish links when the second coincidence happened, I received an email from French Ufologist Christian Mace, he was thanking me for linking to one of his articles. Both those events seemed like too much of a coincidence and so I emailed both and asked for their help with links of good ufo websites in their languages. They both were super nice and helped me out.

I had always know that Spanish speaking countries seemed to have a great interest in ufology, but I was really shocked by all the French sites that Christian Mace emailed me. There turned out to be a lot more than I had expected and the French even have their own c2c like radio show with a website and streaming. Some day when my French greatly improves I may try listening.

All that was splendid, but I wanted Eastern Europe too. I have always heard and been fascinated by the many Russian ufo stories I have heard. I had no clue how to search for such sites, my keyboard does not even speak in Russian letters so far as I know. I did manage to find one Russian site that was both in Russian and English, which is awesome, but I had to find a few more. So I turned to Piotr Cielebias, of the Eastern European UFO Journal. I have been a follower of that blog for quite sometime, it is in English, but I knew he had to know of a few good Polish and Russian sites. Of course, he did and also explained to me about the languages that are spoken in Eastern Europe, which was something that I totally didn’t understand as far as what was spoken where.

Germany and Italy were fairly easy to do on my own. I do not speak a great amount of either language, but enough to figure out where some sites were and translate them to make sure they were what I was looking for. I tried that with Spanish and didn’t come out with nearly as many as Scott Corrales so I am sure there are a lot of good German and Italian sites I missed.

Last is Asia and the mid east, I haven’t a clue about how to find those sites. I suppose I will keep putting up the occasional notice on my blog and hope that someone will send me some links. I tried the beta google for Japanese translation and it really didn’t work for me at all.

So what I have now is a good amount of non-English links and with them, where available, are the links to the English translation.

I am pretty proud of what I have so far, but I also hope that it will continue to grow and that google will continue to add to the languages that they translate.

So will my international links bring world peace, or even better understanding of ufology around the world? Probably not, but it does give everyone some new ufo websites with hopefully some different and new stuff to check out. You can check it out at www.thedebrisfield.net/international.

Oh yeah and if you know of any sites I have missed, email me!

  • Contact Lesley
  • Check out Lesley's Blog HERE
  • Discuss "Grey Matters" @ theusofe HERE