The website of UFO Research Queensland Incorporated

Dear readers,

I am running a couple of days late with this post, due to illness in the family. This week I am continuing my look at the websites of Australia's major UFO groups. Last time it was UFO Research (New South Wales) Incorporated and the UFO & Paranormal Research Society of Australia. Today it is the website of UFO Research Queensland Incorporated. 

UFORQ for short, states on its website that it was established in 1956 and is Australia's oldest UFO Association. There are seven tabs on the home page, namely 'About Us;' 'Sightings;' 'Meetings;' 'Resources;' 'Shop;' 'Blog' and 'Join UFORQ.'

I started off by reading the history of the group under 'About Us.' I should say histories, as there is a short section titled 'History' and a much longer section titled 'A brief history.' I think someone needs to edit this section of the website.

Here we also find out some of the motivation of the group. '...we want to be there when the great body of hidden information is finally brought into the public domain...' Unfortunately, there is no definition provided of what exactly this 'hidden information' might be (I suppose its hidden after all!) Nor is there any indication of who the group thinks might hold this knowledge. It all reeks of conspiracy theory.

My main  interest is not in the body running a website, but in the quality (or otherwise) of the data on it. So I next took a look at the 'Sightings' tab. Here you can either report a sighting or take a look at sighting reports post 1997. This is disappointing as the groups' excellent research works of the 1950's and 1960's - the heyday for unknown Australian sightings, is not available to us here.

As with the sightings area for the websites of the previous two groups, there appears little to no analysis of the sightings. No attempt to provide mundane explanations for the 95% of UFO reports which are universally recognised to be explainable. This is a great disappointment to me.

As you would expect, the 'Meetings' area provides details of the group's regular public meetings. There seems a good spread of topics covered in these talks, including some overseas speakers, who do the Australian circuit of Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. 

The 'Blog' section which I hoped would be full of analytical debate and discussion, was nothing but advertising each of the monthly meetings. Again a definite disappointment.

All in all, I would rate this website as lower in standard than that of both UFOR(NSW) Incorporated and the UFOPRSA.