outed as "the world's most comprehensive CD-ROM on the subject," the UFO Encyclopedia is a companion to the Sci-Fi Channel show Sightings, which looks at UFOs and other paranormal phenomena. The UFO Encyclopedia combines text, images, video, computer animation, voiceover narration and a searchable database of more than 1,000 brief articles on everything from the Bermuda Triangle to Zeta Reticuli.
The CD-ROM opens with computer animation that takes users from a generic desert into a fortress-like stronghold, then underground into an Area-51-like labyrinth. A slide-show introduction gives a very broad, very cursory overview of the UFO phenomenon. From there, viewers can use an attractive interface that will take them to the main subject areas of the CD-ROM, including Alien Life, Government, UFOs and Database.
The meat of the sections varies. Abduction stories are narrated with video inserts, drawings and clips of interviews with participants. A section on secret government bases is navigated through a game-like 3-D representation of the secret desert UFO installation. Documents in the database portion are simple hyperlinked text, sometimes accompanied by still images.
The searchable database allows users to look for documents on particular subjects. Type in "Tunguska," and the UFO Encyclopedia will return a brief article on that 1908 meteor explosion over Siberia. Type in "Unusual Aircraft" and it will return six (only six?) accounts of sightings from around the world. There's also a link to a searchable online database of updated documents, a bulletin board and a place to report UFO sightings.
Leave your skepticism at the door
The UFO Encyclopedia is like a film of black oil in an ice cave: slick and all over the place, but only about an inch thick. It hits many of the key touchstones of UFO lore, from the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961 to the appearance of lights in the night sky over Phoenix last year. There's talk of anal probes and black helicopters, men in black and aliens in gray.
But it doesn't linger very long in any place. True Ufologists seeking thoughtful analysis or a trove of real documents will be disappointed; the tone of the UFO Encyclopedia is very much like its TV show namesake--titillating, glib and credulous.
The opening slide shows appear aimed at a third-grade intellect, and make the Learning Channel look like PBS. Much of the overview information is questionable, more Chariots of the Gods than Project Blue Book. The tone carries over to the rest of the CD-ROM; the creators appear not to have taken their subject very seriously and make no distinctions between serious Ufology and tabloid stories of alien babies.
Where, for example, is any discussion of the Air Force's Roswell Report, supposedly debunking that famous 1947 incident? Where is the debate over the alleged alien autopsy film of a few years ago? Where's the bibliography?
There are a few things to like. Most impressive are the interviews with actual abductees, such as Travis Walton of Fire in the Sky fame (though from the UFO Encyclopedia you'd never know about that book or movie of the same name.) There's a snippet from the tape recording of the hypnotic regression of the four campers who say they were abducted in 1976 from a lake in northern Maine. And there are lots of photographs.
