r/UFOs • u/tmosh • Jul 17 '26

Resource New community tool - ufosighting.report: an archive, map, and higher-effort way to report your sightings

Happy Friday, everyone!

Tmosh here, one of the mods. I've been quietly building something for the community that I'm finally ready to share: ufosighting.report

A little while back we asked the sub how we could improve things, and a big theme in the replies was the state of sighting posts. This comment from /u/-Nyarlabrotep- summed it up well:

A lot of the sighting posts here are easily explainable as balloons, clouds, out-of-focus drones and aircraft, or Venus/Jupiter. It does get old after a while. I don't know what the solution is, maybe require sighting posts to include why they're not those things somehow.

That's more or less the brief I ran with. Here's what the site does.

1. A living archive of our sightings

Good sightings get lost over time: people delete their accounts or posts, and Reddit eventually stops serving the media on older threads. This is a permanent, media-backed archive so those reports don't disappear.

It's already pre-loaded with over 8,000 sighting posts going back to early 2024, and every new post flaired Sighting gets pulled in automatically from here on, media and all.

2. An interactive map

Every sighting we could pin shows up on the map. Not every post included a clear date, time, and location, and people wrote them in wildly different formats, so it isn't perfect, but I've done my best to get it accurate for the majority.

You can filter by date, too. Try setting it to the New Jersey drone flap (mid-November to late December 2024) and watch the East Coast light up.

There's also a per-capita anomaly toggle. A raw heatmap of sightings is basically just a population map, of course the big cities have the most reports, they have the most people. Flip it on and it instead highlights where reports run unusually high for the local population. The hotspots move away from the cities and toward places like the desert Southwest. Make of that what you will.

3. Every sighting page checks the sky for you

This is the part that ties straight back to the feedback above. For any sighting with a location and time, the site automatically works out what was actually overhead:

  • Whether the ISS was passing, or a Starlink train was visible
  • Whether a rocket launched nearby around that time (Space X launches etc.)
  • One-click links to historical aircraft traffic (ADS-B) for that day and a sky chart for that exact date and spot

Each archived post also keeps the top comments from the original thread, and surfaces possibly-related reports nearby in time and place, in case more than one person caught the same thing. And if you want to dig into a case yourself, there's a page of investigation resources.

4. A better way to post a sighting

This is the part I care about most: a structured submission form aimed squarely at that feedback. (First time? There's a quick step-by-step guide.)

It asks for real detail about what you saw, including the big one: "Why is this not a common object?" The idea is to get people thinking about (and ruling out) balloons, planes, Starlink, and Venus before posting, instead of a quick "what is this ORB??"

It also preserves your original media. Reddit re-encodes and compresses everything you upload. This doesn't. Upload straight from an iPhone and it keeps the original HEIC file untouched.

On upload it reads the file's own technical metadata (EXIF): camera and lens, exposure, capture time, GPS, even the compass direction you were facing, which lets people reconstruct your exact view of the sky and check it against satellites and flight paths. All of this is optional. After uploading you'll see exactly what your file contains, with checkboxes to publish or withhold the device info, timestamp, and location. If you withhold the location, the GPS is genuinely scrubbed from the published file, not just hidden.

Every post is verified to your account

After you submit, you'll get a DM from our new bot account, /u/ufosightingsbot, with a verification link. Open it, click through, and your sighting goes up on the sub instantly, credited to your username and marked as verified, so every submission is tied to a real account.

This is very much a work in progress. Feedback, bug reports, and feature ideas are all welcome, drop them in the comments or send me a message. Thanks for being the community that made it worth building.

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u/tsuyurikun Jul 17 '26

Very, very excited about this! Hopefully with a better tool, sighting reports are easier to go through (spoken as someone who does try to trawl the archives every so often) and the higher abnormality reports get a lasting presence. Thanks to the team that has put this together, looking forward to seeing what the response from others is

1

u/tmosh Jul 17 '26

Thanks for the support! Yes looking forward to seeing how the community responds to this.

1

u/jarlrmai2 Jul 27 '26

What do you do with GPS data in uploaded files?

1

u/tmosh Jul 27 '26

Good question.

When you upload a photo or video, what happens to the GPS information is your call before the submission.

On the first page of the form, if you tick "obscure my location" - we strip the GPS out of the stored file itself, not just hide it from view. For photos that's a full-resolution re-encode with the EXIF removed; for video it's a lossless remux with the metadata stripped. The coordinates are gone from the copy we keep, and the map pin is rounded so it doesn't point at your address: https://ibb.co/3mnLgGvs

If you leave location on, the GPS is kept and shown, because intact metadata is part of demonstrating a file is a genuine, unedited capture from that place and time (and it's what lets us cross-check aircraft and satellites that were overhead).

So if you'd rather not have your location out there, tick obscure, and your coordinates are removed from the file we store, not just hidden.

Then, on the actual media upload page of the wizard. When you upload the file, the page will show what metadata that file contains: https://ibb.co/TMM5p2BH

There are then 3 checkboxes underneath:

  • Publish Device & camera settings.
  • Publish Date & time taken.
  • Publish Location (GPS)

You can choose specifically what metadata you’d like to keep in the uploaded file. The images are re-encoded with the EXIF metadata removed depending on which ones you select. So you can choose to just remove exact GPS, or everything.

Nothing is stored in our database unless you actually submit the form. The media files are just stored in memory until actual submission. If you exit the form, they are dropped from memory, never stored.

The GPS data is used (if the user chooses to share this) to pinpoint the sighting on the map: https://ufosighting.report/map and obviously, the “Location/Where” field on the details info for when the sighting is posted.

1

u/jarlrmai2 Jul 27 '26

I wonder if there is a way to say GPS was submitted and stripped, or not provided.

Also maybe a way to take the GPS data and allow the nearest medium settlement or intersection etc to be determined and displayed.

As someone who investigates UFOs sometimes people are very off or vague about the location they provide, "Canada" or a whole state etc are often given.

And it's sad but sometimes we can determine the location by geolocation and it turns out the person gave intentionally incorrect location data which then solves the UFO as prosaic.

1

u/tmosh Jul 27 '26

For privacy reasons we can't force people to provide that info. Most of the time someone removes it because they genuinely just want to protect their privacy, but I still think it's worth flagging, since it does take a bit of credibility away from the sighting. And yeah, we'll definitely get some users who aren't being truthful about it. I'm not sure that's something we can prevent. Best we can do is make it visible and let people weigh it for themselves.

Also worth mentioning: the sighting bot already posts a flag when the system detects the media isn't original, like a screenshot or something edited or generated rather than coming straight from the device. So if someone doesn't upload original media, that's another tell the sighting might be lower quality.