Find material across the Isaac Koi archive

About the Isaac Koi archive

The Isaac Koi archive is a long-running personal research collection built up over decades of interest in the UFO subject and related anomalous phenomena. It brings together government documents, periodicals, newsletters, books, press clippings, and reference material that would otherwise be scattered across libraries, private holdings, and out-of-print publications. Isaac Koi has worked to digitise and share substantial parts of this material so that researchers, journalists, and interested readers can consult primary and secondary sources directly rather than relying on second-hand summaries.

The files published online are hosted by Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), a Swedish archive foundation in Norrköping dedicated to preserving collections on UFOs, forteana, and allied subjects. AFU stores and serves the digitised documents and the generated search data; this page is only the Isaac Koi-branded doorway into that hosted material. The collection keeps growing as new scans and indexes are prepared, so the searchable set is best understood as a snapshot of work in progress rather than a finished catalogue of everything the physical archive holds.

What the search covers

The embedded interface searches a generated index over the archive's online file set — the documents and PDFs published under files.afu.se. Typing a name, date, place, case title, or keyword returns the indexed material that matches, which makes it practical to trace a sighting report across several sources or to check how a topic was described in newsletters from different decades. Because the search reads a machine-built index, results reflect what has been digitised and indexed so far; an empty result means the text is not in the online set, not necessarily that the archive lacks the material.

The index favours recall over polish. Older scans are often the product of optical character recognition on aged paper, so spelling variations, hyphenation, and the occasional recognition error are expected inside document text. Trying a few spellings of a surname or place, or searching on a distinctive phrase from a cited source, usually surfaces material that a single exact query would miss.

What kind of material is included

The collection spans several kinds of source. Government and official material — released files, correspondence, and policy documents — sits alongside the literature of the subject itself: UFO periodicals and newsletters, books and booklets, conference proceedings, and society publications, many of them long out of print. Press coverage is represented through clippings and compiled news archives, and reference material such as catalogues, bibliographies, and chronologies helps tie the rest together. Because Isaac Koi has also contributed articles and reviews to the field over the years, the archive doubles as a record of how ufology has discussed its own history, including debates about methodology, hoaxes, and the reliability of famous cases.

Coverage is international rather than limited to one country's experience. Material touches on cases and publications from Britain, the United States, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, and the hosting arrangement with AFU reflects that international character: the physical preservation work sits with a specialist Swedish archive while the online access layer is open to anyone with a browser.

Three ways to use this page

The quickest route is the embedded search above, which loads the working interface from files.afu.se inside this page. If you prefer a full-window view — for example when scanning long result lists or reading a document side by side with notes — the "Open AFU-hosted search directly" button opens the same interface in its own tab. Both routes reach identical data; the only difference is the surrounding frame.

The "Run CORS diagnostic" link opens a small technical page that checks whether a browser can read the AFU-hosted index files directly. Direct JavaScript reads across origins require the file server to emit cross-origin headers; while those headers are not being sent, this shell embeds the AFU-hosted package in a frame instead of fetching the data itself. The diagnostic exists so the limitation can be re-tested cheaply whenever the hosting configuration changes — if the headers are ever enabled, the same page can switch to a fully integrated search without moving any files.

Scope and interpretation

The archive is a research collection, not an endorsement engine. Documents reflect the claims, conventions, and editorial standards of their original authors and publishers, which range from official government releases to enthusiast newsletters and sensational press coverage. Material is preserved and indexed because it is part of the documented history of the subject, not because every statement in it has been verified. Readers are encouraged to weigh sources against one another and to prefer dated, attributed documents over unattributed retellings.

New material is added in batches as scanning and indexing complete, so a search that comes up empty today may succeed after the next batch lands. Where the same document exists in more than one format or edition, each version is indexed separately; small differences between them — a revised introduction, an added appendix, a cleaner scan — are part of the record rather than noise to be cleaned away.

Questions about the archive's contents belong with Isaac Koi; questions about the hosting, bandwidth, or file organisation belong with AFU. This entry point is maintained as a convenience so that the search has a stable, memorable address on the isaackoi.com domain while the underlying files continue to live on the AFU server.