DECLASSIFIED

Play this while you read → The X-Files Theme · Mark Snow

An interactive 3D visualization of 158 declassified UAP files released by the Pentagon at war.gov/ufo. The user is the investigator. The site boots up like a 1970s government terminal, then drops them onto a pulsing globe of sightings to explore, declassify, and connect.

What it does

• Cinematic boot — terminal-style reveal: INITIATING ARCHIVE… / ACCESSING 158 FILES… / CASE #YYYY-XX-NNNN / ESTABLISHING CONNECTION… / ACCESS GRANTED. Skippable, suppressed for the rest of the session.
• 3D globe — react-globe.gl with a dark-Earth texture, cyan graticule, atmosphere rim. Each sighting pulses in its strangeness color: phosphor (routine), amber (unresolved), red-alert (high strangeness). Marker size encodes duration, glow encodes confidence.
• Dossier panel — slide-in on click. Typewriter reveal of the report with inline [REDACTED] bars that tear open on click and flash phosphor as the text underneath fades in. Per-sighting hooks for the iconic cases.
• Timeline 1947 → 2026 — year-bucketed histogram + draggable playhead + PLAY mode that scrubs cinematically at 7 years/sec. Markers appear and fade as you cross their dates.
• Audio (off by default) — synthesized WebAudio: hover pings on markers, typewriter clacks on dossier reveal, ambient noise bed, low-A drone that rises when the timeline plays.
• Your Local Anomaly — one-time geolocation request, finds the nearest case, generates a shareable preview card with optional investigator credit + a per-case /sighting/[id] URL backed by next/og (1200×630) for X / Reddit share previews.
• AI Analyst — Claude (sonnet-4-6) returns a 5-bucket plausibility breakdown + a neutral one-line quote, via tool_use for strict JSON. Top-3 similar cases pulled from a precomputed similarity matrix. BYO-key panel stores your Anthropic key in localStorage so you can run the analyst without us shipping a server key.
• Connections mode — cyan arcs glow between cases with similar descriptions. Composes with the timeline scrubber: connections thin out as the playhead moves back. Click any case in the dossier's Connections section to walk the graph.
• Filter rail — left-edge slide-in, multi-axis filtering by agency / sensor / strangeness. Live N / total count, composes with timeline and Connections.
• User submissions — submit a sighting → Claude moderation → if approved, lands on the globe with a [USER-SUBMITTED] tag. Stored only in your browser.

What's actually in this dataset

This is the real Pentagon release: 158 records from the May 8 2026 batch at war.gov/ufo. Descriptions, agencies, dates, and PDF links are pulled verbatim from the source CSV — no paraphrasing. Six worth opening first:

Case	Year	Agency	Why it lands
DC-2024-0064	2024	DoD / CENTCOM	The top-strangeness real case. A Mission Report (MISREP) on a UAP encounter in Iraq, score 7.
DC-2025-0100	2025	FBI	An FBI 302 interview with a senior US intelligence official giving a firsthand UAP encounter account.
DC-2026-0102	1947–68	FBI	Case file 62-HQ-83894 — investigative records, eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence from Oak Ridge, and technical proposals on propulsion.
DC-1969-0013	1969	NASA	Apollo 12. The fourth crewed mission to the Moon.
DC-1965-0011	1965	NASA	Gemini 7 air-to-ground transcript. Borman & Lovell, in low Earth orbit.
DC-1985-0025	1985	State	Diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, to USCINCPAC.

Every case is rendered server-side at /sighting/[id] with a next/og share card. The PNGs above are produced live by the same route. Each record also keeps the actual war.gov PDF URL on mediaUrl so future versions can link straight to the source document.

Tech

Next.js 14 (App Router) · TypeScript · Tailwind · react-globe.gl · Framer Motion · Zustand · WebAudio (synthesized in-browser, no audio files) · @anthropic-ai/sdk (Claude sonnet-4-6 via tool_use) · next/og (1200×630 share cards).

The shipped dataset is now live — 158 real records from the May 8 2026 release, ingested via the pipeline below. The UI shows DATASET · LIVE. The hand-curated mock used during development is still available via npm run data:mock.

Pipeline (scripts/):

npm run data:scrape   # crawl an index page, download artifacts → data/raw/
npm run data:extract  # ask Claude to extract Sighting records from each file
npm run data:geocode  # resolve approximate locations via Nominatim
npm run data:embed    # cosine similarity — Voyage AI if VOYAGE_API_KEY set, else TF-IDF
npm run data:build    # all four stages in sequence

Default source is the inline CSV at https://www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-csv.csv (linked from war.gov/ufo). Scrape falls back to the Wayback Machine snapshot of that URL when the live origin returns Akamai 403 (which it currently does for non-browser clients). Override with DECLASSIFIED_SOURCE_URL=… for any future re-release. Records' real PDF URLs from the source CSV are preserved on each sighting's mediaUrl field.

Run locally

npm install
npm run data:mock   # generates data/sightings.json + similarities.json deterministically
npm run dev
# http://localhost:3000

To run the AI Analyst and user submissions flows, supply an Anthropic API key one of two ways:

• BYO-key (default): in the browser, open any dossier → AI Analyst → ▸ bring your own anthropic key. Stored only in localStorage. Sent to /api/analyze as X-Anthropic-Key. Never logged.
• Server-side: drop ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-… into .env.local. The route prefers the server key; per-IP rate limiting (20/hr) is applied in that mode.

Build + deploy

npm run build       # production build — verifies types, generates routes
npm start           # serves the production build locally

Deploys cleanly to Vercel — the OG image route runs on the Node runtime (runtime = "nodejs"); set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY as an environment variable if you want server-side analysis.

Tone + scope

• No claims about what anything is. The AI Analyst is constrained at the system-prompt level to avoid the words alien, extraterrestrial, spacecraft, or any origin claim.
• The [REDACTED] bars are a visualization device. Source files were not redacted in this specific way — the dossier footer says so explicitly.
• Audio is opt-in. Never auto-plays.
• No backend, no signup. Submissions are local to your browser. Investigator name is local to your browser.

Build order (commit log)

The repo's history is the build order — one commit per step:

1. bootstrap — Next 14 + TS + Tailwind + fonts + color tokens
2. data pipeline + mock dataset — 162 deterministic sightings + similarity matrix
3. 3D globe with pulsing markers
4. dossier panel + redaction reveal
5. timeline scrubber 1947→2026
6. boot sequence + synthesized audio
7. real scrape pipeline — scrape.ts (cheerio), extract.ts (Claude PDF/image extraction with tool_use), geocode.ts (Nominatim, 1 req/sec), embed.ts (Voyage AI or TF-IDF fallback). Source URL pluggable via DECLASSIFIED_SOURCE_URL.
8. local anomaly + OG share cards
9. AI analyst with BYO-key fallback
10. connections mode — glowing arcs between similar cases
11. filter rail + user submissions + moderation
12. polish + README + deploy prep

Contributing

Open an issue or PR. Style is hand-rolled — no shadcn/ui defaults. Components live in components/, accessor and pipeline code in lib/ and scripts/. Run npm run typecheck before pushing.

License

MIT.

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DATA SOURCE: war.gov/ufo · THIS IS A FAN PROJECT, NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY GOVERNMENT.