ufo-reports.tsv
88,609 rows14.71 MB
Rowboat Guide
Ask deeper questions about your data.
Browsing 88,000 UFO sighting reports from
around the world, we can start outlining a
theory about why so many Americans spot
mysterious flying fireballs on July 4th.
Open in Rowboat
Ellory
Park Ranger, Area 51
Personally, when I consider the combination of (a) the United States of America and (b) shining objects in the sky, the Fourth of July immediately comes to mind.
For others, it’s aliens.
Let’s look at the evidence. Here we have a dataset containing 88,000 UFO reports from around the globe logged over the past century. At first glance, we can see that the majority of reports are in the United States, with a handful from Canada, Western Europe and Australia.
To filter down and see what’s happening on the Fourth of July across all years, we can select Find in the upper right corner and apply a filter for ‘7/4’ to the datetime_time column, which contains the date each sighting took place.
Once we apply that filter, nearly all the remaining reports on that date are located in North America.
We can also see that the top entries recorded for UFO shape on the Fourth of July are ‘light’ and ‘fireball’.
Let’s filter down shape to just ‘fireball’ sightings on the Fourth of July. Looking back to our country map, we can see that nearly all matching reports are in the United States.
Now we can have some fun looking at the comments submitted with each report.
Since each report is a unique text entry, our header summary chart defaults to showing sample values from the full list.
We can refresh the samples shown to get a quick look at the variety of entries in this column.
To look at this from a different angle, we can set the column’s header chart to Text Analysis mode to pull out common words and word pairings across all the reports remaining in our filtered dataset.
Given the filters we’ve applied, the results aren’t particularly surprising, but the colors ‘orange’ and ‘red’ now emerge as another common theme in the sightings. One might call those classic firework colors.
And then, of course, there’s joy in just scrolling through this file and pausing to read people’s comments—a mix of interesting and mildly terrifying anecdotes.
One of my favorite things about this dataset is how many of the commenters are actively attending firework shows, while insisting there’s something otherworldly in sight at the same time.
At the end of the day, I can neither confirm or deny a spike in extraterrestrial activity on the Fourth of July. In my opinion, aliens enjoy fireworks as much as we do—they even have front row seats.
ufo-reports.tsv
88,609 rows14.71 MB
Open in Rowboat