In delving deeper into the NUFORC data, it has become useful to create a more interactive tool. As we believe in providing potentially dangerous knowledge to the woefully unprepared mind, the Weird Data Science laboratory trepidatiously unveils the Global UFO Inquirer.

You can visit the Global UFO Inquirer directly here.

This is a Leaflet-based map, built on R and Shiny. The map can be explored at will, restricted to any range of dates, with each data point from the NUFORC dataset labelled. Clicking on the icon for a report will unveil the location, date, and details of that report.

This has highlighted that our initial dataset is sadly incomplete. Firstly, NUFORC reports are frequently updated and the dataset we have ends in 2014. Of greater importance, however, is that the dataset to which we have access contains only the summary details of each report, which is restricted to the first line of text. The NUFORC website contains the full details, but these are not currently in our dataset.

We will therefore be developing a scraper to extract the full data from the NUFORC website as it is updated and feed it into the Inquirer. There is existing code floating around the net to carry out part of this task, but more work is needed. As an initial step we will link each report in the Global UFO Inquirer to the full online NUFORC report, but full data in the tool is the ultimate goal.

You can keep up to date with our latest collating of statistical horror on Twitter at @WeirdDataSci.

Every day, the horror deepens.

The interactive plot below shows all sightings for a given year. We can clearly see that the number of reported UFO sightings greatly increases from the middle of the 1960s onward.

You can visit this map directly here.

You can keep up to date with our latest presentations of the beyond on Twitter at @WeirdDataSci.

Happy hunting.