Section / Sky Over America

Eighty-two years of documented sightings, in one image.

Each dot is a declassified file. The horizontal axis is the year the event occurred, the dot size is the page count of the file, and the color is the agency that released it. The shape that emerges isn't a continuous record — it's a pair of crests. A flurry of Air Force and FBI memos from the post-war years, then a thirty-year valley, then the modern AARO/NASA era arriving like a second front. The valley is not silence. It is classification.

Y-axis shared across all tiles · peak 2 docs in one state-year

By releasing agency

• USAF

  8568

• FAA

  575

• DoD

  160

• FBI

  86

• NASA

  34

• CIA

  19

• State

  6

• DNI

  5

• DOE

  3

• NRC

  3

• USN

  1

• NARA

  1

• ICA

  1

• USG

  1

Note · undated records aren't placed on the swarm. They live in /timeline's "Date unknown" bucket. The archive grows; this page rebuilds when it does.