About
Anomaly Index is an interactive globe and map of documented UFO and UAP incidents from 1940 to the present, built for readers who want to examine the evidence rather than be told what to think about it.
What this is
Anomaly Index presents each incident as an evidence record: what was reported, what evidence is publicly available, what official investigators concluded, what explanations have been proposed, and why a case remains unresolved when no reliable identification is possible. It is documentary in tone rather than clinical or sensational, and it is built to be explored freely — by globe, by map, by timeline, by guided story, or one case dossier at a time.
Anomaly Index does not try to prove or disprove extraterrestrial visitation. It answers narrower, more answerable questions:
- What was reported?
- What evidence is publicly available?
- What did official investigators conclude?
- What explanations have been proposed?
- What remains unknown?
- Is the case unresolved because it is well documented and anomalous, or because the available data is inadequate?
That last question is the one most sites in this space skip. Anomaly Index treats it as central. A case that stays open because a video has no metadata is a fundamentally different situation from a case that stays open despite radar, multiple witnesses, and a formal investigation — and the site is built to keep those two situations visibly distinct rather than collapsing them into one undifferentiated "unexplained" label.
It does not carry a fixed position on what any of this means. It does not publish an alien-probability score, rank witnesses by an opaque credibility number, or accept public sighting submissions. What it publishes is the documented record, attributed and sourced, with official findings and editorial judgment kept visibly separate.
Who it's for
The primary reader is curious and undecided: someone who has heard of a few famous cases, doesn't already have a fixed position, and wants a visually engaging way to learn something rather than to read a raw archive front to back. A typical visit runs five to fifteen minutes of exploring; some visitors will go further and open a primary source.
The site is also built with a secondary audience in mind — students, journalists, researchers, aviation and national-security readers, and open-source contributors interested in the data itself. Both audiences are served by the same underlying record; the difference is depth, not content.
Editorial voice
Anomaly Index uses two related voices depending on where you are.
Case analysis — used in dossiers, the methodology, and anywhere a factual claim is being made — is restrained, precise, and attribution-heavy:
The available record does not permit a reliable identification.
Guided stories are more narrative and atmospheric, while staying inside the same factual boundaries:
Investigators never reached a reliable conclusion about what crossed the sky that night.
Neither voice uses unresolved as a stand-in for extraordinary, extraterrestrial, or nonhuman. Every unresolved case states plainly what unresolved actually means:
Unresolved means that the available evidence does not support a reliable identification. It does not imply extraterrestrial or nonhuman origin.
How it's maintained
Anomaly Index is an independently curated project. Corrections are made when necessary, and new records are added periodically. It does not run as a newsroom and makes no claim of continuous monitoring — there is no promise of same-day coverage when a new report breaks, and no implication that the map reflects this week's news. Every case shows a first-published date and a last-reviewed date, along with its official disposition history and editorial assessment history, so it's always clear how current a given record is and how its classification has changed over time.
Open source licensing, private source release
The website, editorial records, schemas, and build tools live in a private GitHub repository during the current release, and that repository, not a database behind the site, is the canonical source of the data. The public site renders every published record and the evidence behind its classification. Repository access will not be broadened until the data-rights and contribution policies are ready for public intake.
Licensing is layered to match what's actually being licensed:
- Site code is MIT licensed.
- Original editorial text and compiled structured data — the incident, source, story, and facility records, plus the summaries, dossier prose, and classification rationales — are licensed CC BY 4.0, with attribution to "Anomaly Index" and a link to the repository.
- Source documents and media — the government records, photographs, videos, and transcripts the records point to — retain their own original rights and provenance. Anomaly Index does not assume every government-hosted document can be freely redistributed; it hosts only material whose redistribution status has been checked, and links out to the rest.
The site uses no analytics and does not collect location data, notwithstanding that the product itself is built around a map. There are no accounts, comments, user profiles, or tracking scripts.