UFO sailboats for sale

Buying a used UFO: know which UFO you're looking at first

Before evaluating condition or price, a UFO buyer has to answer a more basic question: which UFO is this? At least three unrelated builders used the name independently — a British firm behind 1970s offshore keelboats, an Italian yard building modern trailerable sportboats, and a Dutch design that's barely documented at all — and nothing about the listing itself will tell you which lineage you're looking at beyond the boat's own model number and construction. Treat any two "UFO" listings as unrelated boats until proven otherwise.

Which era to target

A UFO 34 (or its smaller siblings, the 27 and 31) points to the British line: Holman & Pye's original design was launched at 32 feet and, once in production as the UFO 34, well over a hundred were built, mostly in the UK with a few in Australia — a 1970s offshore-keelboat era. A UFO carrying a Felci Yacht Design credit, by contrast, is the newer Italian sportboat, built from PVC foam and biaxial fabrics with a removable lead-ballasted keel and unbolting deck wings meant for trailering to and from racing — a different design era built around a different kind of sailing entirely. A UFO 6m, credited in catalog records to Dutch designer Sierp de Vries, is documented too thinly to place with confidence in either era.

What to inspect across the range

For the British-line boats — the UFO 34 and its 27/31 siblings — yachtdatabase.com's reviews flag that these hulls were also sold to be home-completed, meaning the quality of any individual boat can vary well beyond what the factory specification would suggest; an inspection should weigh the finishing work as carefully as the hull and rig themselves. That caveat is specific to the British line and shouldn't be assumed to carry over to the Italian sportboats, whose factory-built construction and trailering hardware raise a different set of questions entirely.

Navigating the lineup

Because the British, Italian, and Dutch UFOs share nothing but a name, the first navigation decision is which lineage to shop, not which model within it — the full model directory on this page separates them by builder and design year to make that call easier.