UFO sailboats: one name, three unrelated builders
"UFO" is not a single boatbuilder's story — it is a name that at least three unrelated companies used independently, in three different countries, decades apart. A used listing under "UFO" could be a 1970s British offshore keelboat, a modern Italian carbon-and-lead sportboat, or a barely documented Dutch ultralight sloop, and nothing beyond the four letters connects them.
Origins and ownership
The British line began with Holman & Pye, whose UFO design was originally launched at 32 feet; the prototype won the RYS de Mass Cup at Cowes and many other races in 1974, and in its production form the boat became the UFO 34, with well over a hundred built, mostly in the UK and a few in Australia, per Oyster Yachts' heritage archive. Catalog records place two smaller siblings in the same line, the UFO 27 and UFO 31, also credited to Holman & Pye.
An unrelated Italian line carries the UFO Boat Srl name. Its sportboats come from the design studio of Umberto Felci, who brought extensive experience designing race boats for the Lake Garda races before working on the UFO. The partnership between the studio and the builder continued into later projects: the UFO XS, a small skiff built for two children aged 10 to 14 — fast enough to be fun, technical enough to teach sail-trimming skills — again pairs Felci Yacht Design as the design project with UFO Boat Srl as the builder.
A third UFO, sparsely documented, surfaces in catalog records as a Dutch UFO 6m produced roughly between 1980 and 1995 and credited to designer Sierp de Vries; no independent source could confirm further detail, and the design should be treated as the least-documented of the three.
Construction through the eras
The Italian UFO sportboats are built from PVC foam and biaxial fabrics laminated with epoxy resin, vacuum-bagged and then baked in an oven for post-curing. The keel is a box steel and composite fin carrying an 882-pound lead bulb that is removable for trailering, and the flared deck "wing" sections unbolt and remove for trailering as well — construction choices aimed squarely at a boat meant to leave the water between races.
Who UFO is for
A buyer chasing the British UFO 34 is really shopping a 1970s offshore-racing keelboat lineage with a competition pedigree at Cowes. A buyer drawn to the Italian UFO is after something else entirely: a trailerable, removable-keel sportboat built for Lake Garda-style racing. And a buyer who finds a Dutch UFO 6m is chasing a boat this record can barely confirm exists. Knowing which UFO is for sale — not just that it's a UFO — is the first step in evaluating any of them.
