I’ll be sure to write a few of my discoveries here before attempting to submit them to either the Paranormal Database or just adding em to the cryptid fandom wiki (or just making my own because fandom is absolutely terrible

The data for this was taken from the Paranormal Database, which is probably the best overall coverage of UK paranormal sightings and activity that exists — at least publicly. It was current at time of posting, and I don’t think the distributions are likely to have changed that much in the last few years!

I’ll say at this point that the owner of the Paranormal Database kindly agreed to share some data for analysis for future posts, and I feel bad that this post, and the previous one, was done by scraping the site directly. So, absolutely all credit to Darren Mann over at the Paranormal Database and thanks for being a great resource. At the same time, the Paranormal Database rightly points out that a lot of the sites listed there are private properties, so do take that into account when you’re plunging relentlessly into the darkness of our shared cultural psyche.

Good luck with the hunts! Happy to hear back anything you discover. I have a new series of blog posts, and another Halloween Lecture, in the process of being written up, as well as plans for the future, so hopefully Weird Data Science will become a little more active again in the near future.

Thank you!

If you look at the Global UFO Inquirer on a previous blog post: http://www.weirddatascience.net/blog/index.php/2018/02/22/unveiling-the-global-ufo-inquirer/ — direct link at http://laboratory.weirddatascience.net:3838/weirddatascience.net/global-ufo-inquirer — then that’s probably not dissimilar to what you’ve described there. Creating that sort of thing isn’t particularly hard once you’ve got the data.

The slight issue with the Paranormal Database data is that the location information is given as plain text. A good chunk of the work in producing this visualisation was plugging all of that into Google’s automatic location service and getting back latitudes and longitudes. That means that there’s almost certainly quite a few mislocated entries there. I don’t think it matters so much for the density heatmaps, but if I were to place each event on a map then there would be lots of inaccurate entries showing up. (The way to counter that would be to have a ‘report incorrect location’ link.)

Selection by type would be very easy once you had the basic map.

Timing is probably even more difficult. Again, the Paranormal Database lists times very informally: “unknown”, “some time in the 1800s”, “June 1937”, etc. That makes it difficult to create a time slider, as many events can’t be dated, and for others you would have to do a lot of work to turn it into computer-readable dates.

For the extra information, it’s very easy to link it to a popup like in the Global UFO Inquirer, if you have the data. You could start with the full entry on the Paranormal Database. I didn’t want to do it directly here, as that would effectively be duplicating the Paranormal Database, which felt rude. For linking to other sources, that would be a manual process. With over ten-thousand entries, that would be quite a task!

So, a lot of what you’re thinking is within the bounds of possibility. A location map with clickable events marked might happen in the future. For dates, and for other information sources, it would sadly require far more time than I have available!

I’m glad you like the maps, though. I’ll try to keep new and interesting things coming.

Anyway, nice work!

Best regards,

Thei

It has been updated, but may be cached in your browser — try a full refresh of the page.

I had my suspicions!

However, your first png is still not showing IOM.

Excellent! Thank you.

BTW, I live in the Isle of Man