ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jim Giglio
NCAS Working Group Coordinator


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1. Brief History of the NCAS Project

This project began when I carried out a series of web searches for an on-line copy of the Condon report during 1996. I had read the report when it was first published commercially, and considering the amount of UFO material on the net, I was confident that it would be easy to locate. It was not. In fact, it was simply nowhere to be found. A visit to a used book dealer, who searched for three months, finally turned up a copy of the Bantam paperback for $35.

Reading the Condon report again after nearly three decades convinced me of two things: (1) that I should have held on to my copy from 1969, as it would have been an excellent investment, and (2) that it deserved to be more readily available. Accordingly, I wrote to the Regents of the University of Colorado (the copyright holder) and requested permission to place the report on the web. The regents granted the request in short order.

The next step was to find a group of volunteers to do the actual work, which would include scanning, spell-checking/proofing, and HTML coding. That's where NCAS came in. I had been recently elected to the NCAS board, so I suggested that NCAS make this an official organizational project. The board accepted that suggestion and quickly assembled the volunteer group. Actual work started in October of 1997, and this version of the report was ready for public release in January of 1999, following a review by the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

2. Acknowledgements

Bob Keefer, PhD, of the Psychology Department at Mount St Mary's College, Emmitsburg, MD, obtained a copy of the report as submitted to the Air Force from the University of Colorado Library. He then coordinated the work of photocopying the text and getting it processed by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software into electronic form.

Gloria Balsley, Secretary to the Mount St Mary's Psychology Department at the time, supervised the work of student aides in carrying out the mechanics of photocopying and OCR scanning.

Melinda Hatcher and Joanne Moses were the Mount St Marys students who assisted Ms Balsley with copying and scanning.

These NCAS members proofread and spell-checked the electronic text, comparing it with the photocopied pages. Each processed about 150 pages of material, adding internal flags to items that needed attention when the HTML coding started. Several members of this group also did the HTML coding of their own sections, and/or assisted in coding particularly troublesome segments of other sections:

Mike Koller joined the group after work was underway; he helped with scanning of the photographic plates, and with re-scanning pages that had been skipped the first time around.

Marvin Zelkowitz oversees the NCAS web page, and made sure that the files were uploaded properly.

Grace Denman was president of NCAS when the project got underway; both Grace and her successor, Paul Jaffe have supported the work enthusiastically.

I did the spell-checking and proofing of the report's index, and carried out the final round of HTML coding on all sections. The final design implemented in that code owes much to the suggestions of Bob Keefer, Jonathan Boswell, and John Pezzullo.

Jim Giglio, January 1999
jgiglio@nova.umuc.edu

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