Tech­ni­cal Focus
The tech­ni­cal focus of UFODAP is to app­ly cur­rent methods of sci­ence and tech­no­lo­gy to reco­gni­ze, track and record anoma­lous objects while simul­ta­neous­ly coll­ec­ting data from mul­ti­ple sen­sors. It is our goal to expand a gro­wing net­work of the­se sen­sor sys­tems to other hot spots around North Ame­ri­ca and then the world.
Histo­ry
Way­ne Hol­len­beck and Chris­to­pher O’Bri­en joi­n­ed forces in 2007 and crea­ted the UFO Came­ra Pro­ject. The UFODAP pro­ject is a result of a col­la­bo­ra­ti­on bet­ween the UFO Came­ra Pro­ject and the work of elec­tri­cal engineer/computer sci­en­tist Ron Olch. Mr. Olch had inde­pendent­ly pur­sued the appli­ca­ti­on of sci­ence and tech­no­lo­gy to ufo­lo­gy rese­arch. As a result, begin­ning in 2014, he deve­lo­ped the con­cept of a low-cost opti­cal track­ing sys­tem as his per­so­nal rese­arch pro­ject while a mem­ber of the Los Ange­les UFO Rese­arch Group. In 2016, Way­ne Hol­len­beck joi­n­ed the LA group and expres­sed inte­rest in the work Ron had accom­plished, which was direct­ly in line with the goals of the UFO Came­ra Pro­ject.
This col­la­bo­ra­ti­on beca­me the UFO Data Acqui­si­ti­on Pro­ject (UFODAP). The tech­ni­cal focus of the UFODAP is pro­vi­ding cost effec­ti­ve methods to reco­gni­ze, track and record anoma­lous objects while simul­ta­neous­ly coll­ec­ting data from mul­ti­ple sen­sors. While this sort of capa­bi­li­ty has been inves­ti­ga­ted and other sys­tems have been built, their design empha­sis has not been on lowe­ring cos­ts to make prac­ti­cal the deploy­ment of signi­fi­cant num­bers of data coll­ec­tion sites to have a prac­ti­cal impact on Ufo­lo­gy. By “low-cost” we assu­me a unit cost of per­haps $2500 or less. Thus, over the last four years signi­fi­cant pro­gress has been made on deve­lo­p­ment of Uniden­ti­fied Fly­ing Object Data Acqui­si­ti­on Sys­tem (UFODAS) com­pon­ents that are now available for use in fixed and mobi­le instal­la­ti­ons.
In 2020, UFODAP and the UFODATA orga­niza­ti­on for­med an alli­ance to fund UFODAS R&D and divi­de the work — UFODAP will pro­vi­de data coll­ec­tion hard­ware, soft­ware and sup­port while UFODATA will crea­te a cloud data­ba­se for upload and sub­se­quent ana­ly­sis of coll­ec­ted data. In addi­ti­on, the initi­al UFODAP came­ra site in the San Luis Val­ley, Colo­ra­do will be expan­ded with a second came­ra and a mul­ti-sen­sor data coll­ec­tion unit.