Sunday, August 28, 2011

Data : The National UFO Reporting Center


The national UFO reporting center was founded in 1974 by UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble. The organization receives ,records and documents individual reports of UFO-related events. The organization tries to corroborate these reports by contacting the reporting person, and collecting evidence if any are available. The main page of the website chronicles recent activities and highlights. Articles about the people involved with the center and prominent UFO historians and investigators are also posted.Obvious hoax reports are ignored.
In the beginning, the organization could be contacted only by a telephone hotline. The hotline is staffed 24 hours a day and receives thousands of calls. Nowadays reports can be submitted online. All data gathered by the center is made public in the website. The people reporting the actual incident can choose to remain anonymous.The site has a section called the "data bank" - an online data set which contains the following sections:
a) Report Database - A page which redirects you to a link where you can view UFO related events indexed by date,state,shape of UFO and date posted. All information in the database is presented in a tabular format. The columns of the table include : Date/Time,city,state,shape,duration,a brief user submitted summary of the incident, and date posted.
b)Case highlight list - A list documenting the most interesting, potentially UFO-related cases and sightings received by the center in a recent time frame. This list helps readers read across the potentially most interesting cases amongst 32000 odd cases available in the database.
c)Case briefs -Special detailed articles with detailed information of interesting cases heard first hand from the person making the report.
d)Interlink - A special section devoted to stories involving jet chase and aircraft reports.
e)Historical Report - A special "looking back" series that examines UFO activities over the early years of the organization's operation over the hotline.
f)An one hour video interview with the centre’s director Peter Davenport detailing the operations of the centre ,UFO sightings, audio recordings and pictures of UFO encounters is available for purchase.
The site can be accessed here .

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