This copy of the famous catalog of UFO sightings made by Guy Quincy (1929-1998) was obtained from Francine Fouéré (1927-2018), former secretary of GEPA, the Groupe d’Etudes des Phenomènes aériens, founded in 1962 in France.

Guy Quincy was the Director of the Archives départementales of the Corrèze département located in Tulle in the Center of France (France is divided in regions and each region is divided in several départements. We can compare the French département to the county in each US State). I met Guy Quincy several times when I was living in Brive in 1979- 1982. He had a serious interest in UFOs but there were very few people interested in this subject in Corrèze. He had a collection of at least two UFO magazines, Phénomènes spatiaux of GEPA and Lumières dans la Nuit, and he had included them in the public collections of the Archives départementales. There is a rumor that says that when Guy Quincy died, the people of the Archives didn’t keep these collections of UFO journals and only kept issues that contained local UFO sightings. I haven’t checked the authenticity of this story.

The Archives départementales are public services in charge of the local archives of public and historical interest (historical documents, copies of local newspapers, etc). There is one Archives départementales office in each département of France.

From my understanding, Guy Quincy started to collect these sightings when he was living in North Africa in the end of the 1950s. After his PhD obtained at the Ecole des Chartes in 1954, he became conservateur (curator?) at the Archives départementales in Constantine in French Algeria on 1rst July 1955 (Algeria was then a French département).

Unfortunately at that time, Guy Quincy didn’t had the idea of mentioning the exact bibliographical reference of each sighting. I think he made this catalog for his personal use and it is through his contacts with people who belonged to the very first UFO groups that he made copies of the catalog for other persons.

At that time people interested in UFOs but who didn’t have access to printing press, communicated via documents that were typed in several copies thanks to carbon paper. They could reproduce up to five or six copies and had to type the document again to make more copies. When Xerox copy machines became more available, they made copies of the documents thanks to these Xerox machines but at that time these copy machines were thermal photocopiers and the quality didn’t last because of heat, humidity and other local conditions.

Francine Fouéré has several copies of this catalog. I made a scan of the copy that had the best quality. It was of the size of half legal size paper (A5 in France). The sightings were divided in two volumes. Francine’s copy was made on an old thermal copy machine and its quality has been altered because of time.

Guy Quincy had also written a paper about UFOs that was a general introduction to the phenomenon and its characteristics. This paper was published in one issue of the local Historical and Archeological Society.

(Note: biographical informations on Guy Quincy come from the article written on him by Hélène Say and published in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, Vol. 157, No 2, 1999, p. 679-680).