> Now I've read that firebird does not support timezones?

Right.

> What timezone does the server parse times in?

No timezone support means that no particular timezone is used. That also
means that time passed from client is stored in the timezone of the
client, functions like NOW() use the server timezone.

It is hard to talk about "which timezone" if such concept is missing.
Time in Firebird is an 8-byte number without any particular
interpretation AFAIK and is stored as such. Time in Java is also a
number but zero is GMT-based.

> When transferring time information to the client, it is formatted as text.

If you do this explicitly in SQL statement - ok, that is true, otherwise
it is transferred as a 8-byte number, not as text.

> So what timezone does the client (jaybird) parse times in?

Driver does not apply any particular intelligence here. However, when it
converts the 8-byte number into Timestamp, it uses the default time
zone, if other is not specified.

> Is there any way to FORCE this to UTC, independent of the system
> environment?

See getTimestamp/setTimestamp methods of ResultSet that accept Calendar
as parameter. That might help you (or might not, depends on your case).

Roman