Given the recent news of an unusual radio signal from a star system 94 light years away, I thought it would be fun to look at some of the evidence we have on UFO sightings. Mapping Project Blue Book is a cartographic visualization of data from Project Blue Book.
Project Blue Book
Project Blue Book was a study of unidentified flying objects conducted by the United States Air Force from 1952 through 1969. The study collected 12,618 UFO reports and concluded that there were no indication that any UFO was a threat to national security. A small percentage of reports remained unexplained even after stringent analysis.
I found a list of the unknown, unexplained case files on The Black Vault, which has a lot of additional UFO and Project Blue Book documentation. After much data cleaning, I was able to get a list of geocoded places of the cases that I used to create this map.
You can hover over the places on the map to see the date, place, time (when recorded) and witness’ account of each report.
Map tools: Open Refine, Tableau Public, Mapbox Studio
