NUFORC Sighting Reports

The Nationa UFO Research Center (NUFORC) maintains an online database of over 100,000 UFO sightings including city, shape, and a text description. This project contains the code necessary to collect the data in the database, perform some standardization and cleaning, and geocode the sightings at the city/state level.

Warning The NUFORC site's terms of service explicitly forbid both scraping and distributing the data. The data can be requested directly from them by emailing their CTO. This repository will stay up for historical and experimental purposes, but will not be used to update the dataset on data.world any more. The maintainer and contributors are not responsible for usage of this code that violates the ToS.

Quickstart

NOTE Requires the Anaconda python distribution.

NOTE Requires the Maxmind GeoLite2, which is free, but requires an account. Download the zip file to data/external.

To get started, cd into the project root and run

conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate nuforc
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Takes a very long time - about 3-4 hours.
dvc repro

This downloads two datasets: the raw reports as line delimited JSON and a CSV file that contains refined fields (i.e. standardized / corrected states, cities, shapes, etc) as well as additional fields for the latitude and longitude of the sighting at the city level for most of the sightings.

Raw Reports

The raw reports are pulled into data/raw/nuforc_reports.json as line delimited JSON. The reports take a long time to download because there are a lot of them and because the scraper is throttled so as not to hit the NUFORC server very hard. Also, the target doesn't simply pull the data, it also merges it with any past data. That way if any reports are removed from the NUFORC site (it's happened in the past), they will persist as long as they were pulled at some point. Each record has the following schema:

{
    // Full text of the report.
    "text": string,

    // Summary stats as a string.
    "stats": string, 
    
    // The date-time as it appears in the report (M/DD/YY HH:MM).
    "date_time": string, 

    // URL to the original report.
    "report_link": string, 

    // City name.
    "city": string,

    // State as 2 character code.
    "state": string,

    // The shape of the object.
    "shape": string,

    // The duration of the sighting in no particular format.
    "duration": string,

    // A summary of the sighting. Seems to be just the first few sentences of 
    // the full report.
    "summary": string,

    // The date the sighting was posted to the NUFORC site as M/DD/YY.
    "posted": string
}

In this file all fields are as they appear on the site. The scraper does no parsing except on the HTML elements to extract the content text.

Enhanced Reports

The enhanced reports in CSV format are stored in data/processed/nuforc_reports.csv. The data standardizations are as follows:

• Parse and standardize date-time values to ISO 8601 where possible (null when not possible).
• Standardize shape captilization plus a few minor merges (circular -> circle, etc).
• Standardize the state codes to capital case and fix obvious defects and misprints.
• Standardize the cities (i.e. Ft -> Fort, St -> Saint, etc) and remove irrelevant characters like parentheses.

All of the data cleaning code can be found in scripts/process_report_data.py. The code is straightforward and pretty well commented.

In addition to the standardization, the reports are also geocoded where possible. Most of the reports (~90k out of ~110k) were able to find a match by the geocoder, which uses the MaxMind GeoLite2 database as a lookup mechanism for lat/lon. Since there's no country information, pretty much all of the geocoded reports are in US and Canada. Most of the "leftovers" are either outside US/Canada or pretty much impossible to geocode accurately (i.e. "rural, CA" or "Unknown location (military video)").

Here's the schema for the file:

column name	description
summary	The summary of the report (usually first couple of sentences).
city	The city where the sighting occurred.
state	The 2 character state code where the sighting occurred.
date_time	The date / time of the sighting in ISO 8601.
shape	The shape of the object.
duration	The duration of the sighting in no particular format.
stats	Key stats about the report.
report_link	Link to the original report on the NUFORC site.
text	The full text of the report.
posted	The date the sighting was posted in ISO 8601.
city_latitude	The latitude of the city of the sighting.
city_longitude	The longitude of the city of the sighting.

Other Notes

This product uses GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com.