Statement of Competency: PLO F

Informatics PLO (core competency) F: Conduct informatics analysis and visualization applied to different real-world fields, such as health science and sports.

The goal of informatics analysis and visualization is to make data and information from various sources and systems available, understandable, and useful to stakeholders and consumers. My journey to competency in Informatics PLO F began in INFM 203: Big Data Analytics and Management, in which we were tasked in our final project with exploring various datasets within a field, manually analyzing the data and data structures, and developing and documenting a strategy for processing this data. As my field of research, I chose UFO sightings.

Regardless of your opinion on the legitimacy of UFO sightings, it cannot be denied that professional and amateur researchers—as well as the U.S. Government, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Navy—have devoted a great deal of time and effort to collecting, documenting, and trying to explain UFO sightings since the 1940s when the UFO craze really got going. Since then, many UFO sighting databases have sprung up, some better than others. My goal in my final project for INFM 203 was to perform a survey of UFO sighting data sources to find which contained the best, richest, most complete, and most credible data with which to create a map visualization of UFO sightings around the world over the past century. To achieve this goal, I went down the UFO rabbit hole and became an expert in the subject:

INFM 203 Final Presentation:

A Survey of UFO Sighting Data Sources

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1usa5v6AjnUwnIKKdzdywpmS0cNx8_lRmwngQJOWg5Xs/edit#slide=id.p1

At the conclusion of my presentation, I share what I consider to be the best UFO sighting dataset currently available: UFOCAT2019 from the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). I obtained this dataset by sending $40 via PayPal to CUFOS and—after a few weeks of eager hand wringing—a received it in the mail (yes, the mail) on a CD-ROM disk (yes, a CD-ROM disk). The data came in a standard relational database format and includes some 240,000 UFO sightings as catalogued by various, carefully cited sources including the U.S. Air Force’s Project Bluebook; various magazines, books, and newspapers; as well as various user-generated UFO sighting platforms such as MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center. The data itself included 60 possible fields, including notes, rigorous classification systems developed by J. Allen Hynek and Jacque Vallee, dates, sources, and location information such as latitude/longitude coordinates, making it ideal for these map visualizations which I created using Tableau:

Tableau visualizations

Heat Map of UFO Sightings in the U.S. and Canada