Useless Fisualization Operation
💡 Click on a state, airport, or UFO to see more information.
Min: 9.03%
16.98%
Max: 24.93%
About
Project Description
Have you ever wondered about extraterrestial activity on earth? Or do you think it's all made up and imagined? Or are you still torn between the two? Either way, the Useless Fisualization Operation was made for you! Our objective was to allow exploring reports of UFO sightings in the USA and uncover underlying patterns.
With the help of our interactive map you can investigate the locations of UFO sightings, filter them, and get detailed reports on demand as well as images if available. By including other data such as airport locations, you can decide for yourself if you think the two might be correlated. Relationships with further datasets can be explored via a scatterplot, where you can filter by years, in case you want to match the time frames of the two datasets.
To further incorporate the temporal dimension of the data, we have a heatmap showing the frequency of UFO sightings per date. Come see for yourself, we hope your time here is out of this world.
Please note that we make no claims on the validity of the reports or the relationships with other data, we merely wanted to create a framework for easy and fun exploration.
Team
Albin Kempe
Front-End Developer
UX/UI Designer
Annika Oehri
Data Engineer
Front-End Developer
Frawa Vetterli
Data Engineer
Front-End Developer
UX/UI Designer
Jonathan Cilli
Data Engineer
Front-End Developer
UX/UI Designer
Pedro Burgos
Front-End Developer
UX/UI Designer
Data
The main data on UFO sightings was scraped from the NATIONAL UFO Reporting Center Online Database NUFORC [1] on 3th February 2023. We took all fields except for the image links and the date of the sighting from the summary, whereas we accessed the report itself to get the image and the complete date. We geolocated our datapoints and discarded all sightings whose location we could not pinpoint. For the scatter plot and the heatmap, all dates not following the month/day/year convention were discarded.
A paper by Plaza del Olmo [2] states that their is a sublineal relationship between UFO sightings and population density. Based on that, we decided to incorporate absolute population and population density data from the United Sates Census Bureau [3] into our visualization. The data includes a time dimension with steps of decades, going from 1910 to 2020. It was preprocessed by deleting all "regions" datapoints (e.g. midwest) and only keeping columns "state", "resident population" and "population density" where the latter is given as number of residents per square mile. For the scatterplot, the average between all decades was taken. For calculating the number of UFO sightings per person, state and year, we used the interpolated values for years originally not in the dataset.
Furthermore, a paper by Irwin [4] describes that their might be some relationship between UFO sightings and religiosity, although not a proportional one. Therefore, we chose to include a dataset on religiosity from 2014 [5] which contains the percentage of people that find religion very important, somewhat important, not too important, not at all important and don't know how important. Preprocessing was done by changing < 1% to 0 and changing percentages to proportions in general (eg. 77% to 0.77).
During discussions with other students, they said that they would also be interested in a visualization of the relationship between UFO sightings and drug use which is why different drug use metrics are also included from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from 2021 [6]. The metrics include Illicit Drug Use in the Past Month, Marijuana Use in the Past Month, Illicit Drug Use Other Than Marijuana in the Past Month, Binge Alcohol Use in the Past Month, Illicit Drug Use Disorder in the Past Year, Serious Mental Illness in the Past Year and Any Mental Illness in the Past Year. All data is from people of age 18 or older and show the proportion of people which the specific metric holds for.
For all these datasets additional to the UFO dataset, we changed state names to state abbreviations to create consistent keys.
Because planes are listed as often confused with UFOs [7], we chose to include airport locations, too. Our US-airport data [8] comes from October 2020. This dataset was preprocessed by simply keeping the columns name, type, latitude_deg, longitude_deg and state, where state was derived from the column iso_region. We deleted obvious duplicate datapoints and datapoints where the latitude or longitude were obviously outside of US territory, e.g. 0.
Learning Goals
The source code and the used datasets can be found on GitHub [9]. In this project, we learnt to collaborate with each other and discuss our thoughts and improvements suggestions on our visualization. The presentations in the class taught us how to defend and justify our design choices and helped us get valuable feedback to improve our work further. The user study helped us see the perspective of people without computer science or visualization background.
[1] https://nuforc.org/databank/
[2] Plaza del Olmo, Julio. (2015). A Review on the Relation between Population Density and UFO Sightings. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 425-448. https://www.scientificexploration.org/docs/29/jse_29_3_PlazadelOlmo.pdf
[3] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/density-data-text.html
[4] Irwin, Harvey. (1993). Belief in the Paranormal: A Review of the Empirical Literature. Journal of American Society for Psychical Research. 87. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239592095_Belief_in_the_Paranormal_A_Review_of_the_Empirical_Literature
[6] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2021-nsduh-state-prevalence-estimates
[7] https://www.livescience.com/32849-7-ways-to-generate-a-great-space-hoax.html
[8] https://data.world/ourairports/989444cc-447b-4030-a866-57fcd6c2d3ee
Relationship with Other Attributes on State Level
Hover over a dot in the scatterplot to see which state it corresponds to!
Aggregated UFO sightings from year to
First Attribute (X axis):
Second Attribute (Y axis):