Most UFO books published in the last 70 or so years have now been scanned, as have most UFO magazines/journals/newsletters - at least in relation to material in English. Huge quantities of English-language official documents from various countries and newspaper cuttings about UFOs have also been digitised.
Many of the main foreign-language UFO magazines have also now been scanned. However, this material is less readily assimilated by many UFO researchers (including myself) that are limited to fluency solely in English.
As some of you know, during the last few years I have been experimenting with using artificial intelligence software for various purposes in relation to UFO material (e.g. creating a UFO investigator chatbot, automating the creating of transcripts of 50,000 UFO podcasts and analysing a UFO database). The pace of this work is somewhat slowed by the fact that I'm a just a lawyer with an interest in some technical/logic issues rather than an IT professional...
I'm currently exploring the use of artificial intelligence tools to - among other things - create automated translations of scanned foreign-language UFO books and magazines. (Not all of us have the resources of a Robert Bigelow, able to hire people to translate foreign material for us or to write summaries of European/Russian cases and studies).
Anyway, a German skeptic kindly agreed to make his book on Roswell available online.
Danny Ammon, a knowledgeable German UFO researcher, has described Uli Thieme's "Roswell - Ein UFO Mythos sturzt ab" ["Roswell : A UFO Myth Crashes"] as "the best source on all things Roswell in German".
First published in 1997, more recently Uli Thieme gave permission for a second edition of his book to appear on the German "UFO Info" website. I have now kindly been given permission by Uli Thieme to make the book available on the AFU's website as well (with many thanks to Danny Ammon for his passing on the relevant permission).
Since my German is, well, rather limited I thought I'd include this book in my current experiments with automated translations and make it available online with the German original.
I'd welcome any comments on the (imperfect...) translation and, in particular, any pointers to any existing tools for large-scale automated translations of foreign material that could be used to translate a further sample of, say, 10,000 or 100,000 pages of foreign UFO documents/magazines.
(Personally, as with the couple of million pages of automated transcriptions of UFO podcasts and UFO documentaries that I've previously shared, I think that the results of the automated translation are useful mainly as an additional aid to locating relevant material).
Click on the image below for a link to the German original and the automated English translation of Uli Thieme's book "Roswell - Ein UFO Mythos sturzt ab" ["Roswell : A UFO Myth Crashes"]
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