Classifying the Unknown: A Taxonomy of UFO Sightings

I built a classification system based on 152,000 UFO reports. In this article I've included a curated sightings index so you can explore the data yourself.

Here's the premise: Imagine you're a Victorian naturalist in 1859, venturing out to study wildlife. You wouldn't just observe animals one at a time and hope for a flash of insight. You would instead group the specimens into species, families, and genera. You would note the distinguishing characteristics. Maybe beak shape. Plumage color. Habitat preference. Are the birds nocturnal or diurnal?

This grouping or classification system itself was the tool that made the patterns visible. This is because it provided a standardized way to cluster wildlife by commonalities and it provided a common language or taxonomy to use when describing what was seen.

I've been thinking about UFO research the same way. We have over 150,000 firsthand sighting reports in the NUFORC database alone. Each one is a specimen. But without a shared vocabulary for describing what was observed, we're stuck reading accounts one at a time, hoping something stands out.

This is why we need a taxonomy.

In my previous articles, I shared what trends emerged when I applied a custom taxonomy to 152,000 sighting reports: Triangles are nocturnal. Disks are five times more likely to involve entity encounters than spheres. Shadow beings are frightening; light beings inspire awe. These were surprising patterns.

But patterns are just statistics. And behind every stat is a set of actual sighting reports. Real people describing real experiences.

This article is about giving you access to the mappings so that further research can be done.

Below, I'm sharing a curated set of NUFORC sighting IDs organized by classification. These aren't all 152,000 records. They're selected examples filtered for report quality and organized around the patterns I highlighted in my previous articles. It's like a field guide "sampler". You can take any ID, enter it into the NUFORC searchable database, and read the original narrative yourself. You don't have to take my word for any of it. You can do your own fact checking or even improve on the research!

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