The British National Archives has released a large number of files relating to UFO sightings between 1994 and 2000. These previous classified documents detail (often amusingly or excruciatingly) the reports made by members of the public to the MoD regarding the sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). As a geographer and a user of GIS, one of the overriding beliefs is that there exists an abundance of location information stored in documents waiting to be captured and analysed spatially. The records concerning UFO sightings are one such example, hundreds of reports of sightings that all give a location in addition to a lot of other information including numerous drawings of the ‘craft’ that were seen. Because I was interested in testing out the new “Unlock” geocoding service available though Edina Digimap for academic subscribers I decided to extract some of the place information from the first UFO file and use unlock to geocode the sightings.

For those who need clarification,geocoding refers to the process whereby a textual reference to a location, such as a place name, an address, a postcode etc. is given a spatial reference, i.e. a pair of coordinates that can be represented on a map. What “Unlock” does is take a given placename, look for it in a gazetteer – a dictionary of all known places- and when it finds it, returns the coordinate inforamtion associated with that placename in the gazeteer. The Unlock service can be found at: http://digimap.edina.ac.uk/unlock/

Using this service allowed me to create the following map:

I decided to classify the sightings fairly crudely by season as the impression I got from the data was that there were very few sighting in the summer, and more in the autumn and winter. These sightings are mostly from 1994, part of the earliest tranche of sightings released and are to be found in the first file released by the National Archive. As a result this only accounts for about a quarter of all sightings in this year. The MoD also like to make maps, however their techniques aren’t quite so well defined as we can now achieve with GIS and geocoding technologies:

Nevertheless the map is quite illustrative of the major patterns in UFO reporting (as this may be different from raw sightings).

The only downside to this whole process is that “Unlock” the site I used to geocode some of the data is actually quite poor. The site looks nice and the data is undoubtedly very strong, however it is a terrible user experience, there didn’t seem to be any accessible intructions on how to use the site and when I copied from the examples given to try and geocode my 50 places as a batch the output seemed to randomly drop some places in favour of several options for others, in spite of this individual searches showed that the dropped places did exist. An assessment of the sites usability is required – I can’t imagine it being used currently by anyone beyond real specialists, certainly no one will be unlocking much data unless they have a good familiarity with a number of web protocols and data structures. Hopefully in time though it will become more friendly.