Labs

UFO sightings by state 1900 – 2010.

This is a visualisation of some of the publicly available data recently released by the US National Reporting Center. The base data has over 60,000 sightings of UFOs with their locations (primarily in the US but also in other countries), sighting and reporting dates, and a detailed free text description of the sighting.

The example report we’re showing is an aggregated view of the number of reported sightings by year, month, and US state. As time progresses the shading in the states grows deeper in proportion to the number of sightings. Hover over the state codes in the table to see the state outlined on the map.

No prizes for which state ends up with the highest number of sightings but it’s worth waiting to see how much deeper the shaded red is at the end of the run!

The data was extracted and processed using open source tools and then displayed using standard browser technologies. This gives a powerful and compelling visualisation that greatly simplifies the data at a low-cost and quick to implement solution. If you’d like to talk to us about how we did this and how we could help you then contact us at data@truenorth.gb.com.