Quest Publications - Collection of booklets of UFO documents
Quest Publications (founded by Graham W Birdsall and his brother Mark Birdsall) produced a considerable number of collections of UFO documents, collating "intelligence documents", documents from the CIA, documents about Rendlesham and other material.
Graham Birdsall died in 2003 and Quest Publications subsequently folded.
After recently checking with Russel Callaghan (a member of the Birdsall family and the last editor appointed by Quest Publications), I arranged for a number of the relevant collections of documents to be scanned by our helpful friends in the AFU in Sweden.
So far, nearly 30 booklets collating material have been scanned.
You can download the collection of searchable PDFs from this temporary link for the next week:
https://we.tl/Qaxs1FjXtF
After the next week, or if you only want a specific booklet, you can find the collection of searchable PDFs on the AFU's website at:
http://www.afu.se/Downloads/Books_an..._Publications/
The quality and significance of the documents in the various collections varies significantly. Provenance is also an issue in relation to any collections of documents published by non-governmental entities (and I note that the Quest Publications booklets contain some of the infamous MJ-12 documents and material relating to the Kalahari Desert hoax).
However, I nonetheless thought it worth getting these booklets shared since:
(1) I thought some of you may, like me, find it a tad frustrating when a UFO book cites a document in a document collection (whether published by Quest Publications or otherwise) without being able to quickly locate the relevant document.
(2) A surprising amount of the relevant correspondence and other documents with various agencies (particularly in relation to NASA) does not appear to be currently available online, whether on government websites or elsewhere.
(3) Some of the booklets helpfully pull together several of the official documents on relevant incidents together with press articles.
(4) Sometimes the documents released by government agencies in response to Freedom Of Information Act requests a decade or two ago were actually of a better quality than the current images on various government websites. For example, the best quality copy of a key CIA document that I’ve seen is actually in the files scanned by MUFON as part of MUFON’s Pandora Project – which is one of the reasons why I regard it as, well, disappointing that MUFON hasn’t made more of those scans freely available online.
(5) Sometimes the documents released by government agencies in response to Freedom Of Information Act requests a decade or two ago contained less extensive redactions than the current images on various government websites.
(6) Sharing such previous collections may reduce the number of stories by some UFO “researchers” people in which they breathlessly claim to have obtained new leaked documents, when in fact the relevant documents have been made available by others years before.
