Introduction
I was recently out in the woods in upstate New York sitting by a fire when a green fireball went flying through the sky. Earlier that day I was collecting data and recording the electromagnetic field for a project I was working on. I thought this quite interesting as there are always reports of high radiation levels at the sites where unidentified objects have been encountered. This was not my first time seeing a UFO but it’s still so shocking and unbelievable each time. Each experience has only heightened my interest surrounding this phenomena so I decided to explore a few questions I had.
Background
There have been reports of unidentified flying objects since antiquity but the most recent sightings were recorded in 1639. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, wrote about a bright light that was seen in the sky for over three hours along with a possible abduction. There are a number of questions but the one I addressed in this visualization was the proximity of sightings in the U.S. to the military bases. Are there certain events that spark these occurrences, are these actually military trainings or are they clustered in a particular area? My first thought was looking into national parks, lakes and timelines but the bases made more sense to me because of recent sightings by the US air force. If we can eliminate the idea of government influence we may be able to start thinking about this in more metaphysical way.
There is also another side to this, what if the data shows correlation? What if majority of these occurrences are happening near military camps? Does that invalidate these reports or solidify them? Either way it’s time to stop shying away from this topic. Public data on military sites could be considered a national security risk so I don’t believe we’re getting the full story but still an interesting one. Recently the pentagon disclosed a history of data concerning UFOs reported by the military which sparked my interest.
Process
I utilized data from the National UFO Reporting Center which maintains an online database of over 100,000 reports. I brought it into Carto where I incorporated it with the military data. Alchemizing these two datasets was interesting, there were complex elements which couldn’t be expressed, more specifically couldn’t be visualized. I tried the buffer analysis along with intersect and aggregate but the radius scale started to feel arbitrary. These flying objects have been described as defying the laws of physics so there was no real way of measuring proximity or intersection of activity between the two. There were a number of variable shapes in the data that I defined by color and provided a legend for people interacting with the map.
I added four widgets, three for the NUFORC data and one for the military data which allows you to filter as you please. There is also an animation included so that we can see what sightings look like over a certain period of time, about 1968 to 2019. This timeline shows more than an increase in sightings in the early 2000s, it also represents the progression of telecommunications and the impact it had on archiving, recording and reporting. There is an ease or maybe an uneasiness in collecting data and constructing assumptions based around them in modernity. It’s all very fast and under an extreme amount of pressure that we rarely have time to process on a human level.
My process for this project and possibly most of my projects is more pataphysical as it asks you to consider what might be considered the absurd. There were 11 different descriptions under the category “shape” and I considered narrowing it down but “other” and “others” is different. Processing the semantics of the data is just as important as the information you’re trying to extract. Knowing when or how to clean qualitative data has a lot challenges when you’re trying to maintain the integrity of the collection. There were also a number of military bases listed without names which isn’t surprising as most military activity is kept classified from the general population. Why give the location but the name? Names have power.
Visualizations
In (figure 1) you’re able to use a slider to show the drastic change from only 10 years difference. I chose the dark matter style for the map because it was difficult to see the smaller military bases when using the zoom function on the others. It was also easier to see the different shapes and colors, overall it made the map less busy so we could try to focus on the different variables. I also made the choice to animate my map because I think it’s important to visualize time rather than conceptualize it.
In (figure 2) I was able to take a closer look at upstate New York to see all the different sightings reported. There have been a significant number of fireballs reported in the area I was staying. I’ve heard of West Point military academy but did not realize how large it was, the bases stretches from Woodbury all the way to Hudson River, over 16,000 acres of land. Another finding was a smaller military training base that I’d never heard of called Camp Smith located just outside of Peekskill and it sits on 1585 acres. The amount of land mass designated to the military makes me wonder how far underground they are running and if that square footage is being accounted for. Lastly, Stewart International Airport is also showing up on the map which I did not know was utilized by the military.
Further Work
The nature of this data makes it questionable but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth exploring in more depth. By that I mean humans have been questioning and processing extraterrestrial life through the lens of Hollywood and the smoke and mirrors of the government. So because of that the credibility of people who report these sightings is always in question. The data relies on ones memory or recollection, so not only is the observation the data but also the observer. I’d like to utilize this map with hydrography data as a lot of sightings have been reported around watersheds. It would also be interesting to analyze astronomical data with this dataset, you never know what’s happening in the night sky.
Resources
https://www.history.com/news/americas-first-ufo-sighting
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-videos-taken-by-navy-pilots.html