The archive

Tell us what you saw

Most of this site argues that Disclosure will land as a nothingburger. None of that argument runs through you.

The position here, stated plainly and held to: people who report these things are overwhelmingly not lying. Something happens to them. The interesting question has never been whether a witness is sincere — that one is close to settled, and the answer is dull — but what the experience actually is. You cannot ask that question without accounts, and accounts only exist because someone was willing to write one down for strangers.

So this page is where a stated ethic gets tested somewhere people can see it.

What happens to what you write

It goes onto this page immediately, under your first name and last initial, with no editor in between and no queue it sits in. It gets the ALLEGED label — the same label this site puts on sworn congressional testimony, because that is precisely what the label means: somebody said it, and it has not been independently checked. It is not a verdict on you. It is not a hedge. Every witness on this site carries it, including the ones who testified under oath in a hearing room.

What this site can honestly do with it

Publish it. Keep it intact. Leave it somewhere it can be read whole, and compared with others, by anyone who wants to.

What it cannot do. It cannot investigate. There is no field team, no radar pull, no follow-up call unless you ask for one. It cannot tell you what you saw, and it will not present your account as proof of anything beyond the fact that you reported it. If your entry contains an error, the site’s one editorial rule applies here as everywhere else: found an error, it gets fixed — including by you, about your own account, at any time.

The form asks for your account first, in your own words, before it asks you anything else. That order is deliberate. Every question below that box is a small suggestion, and suggestions are contagious. Please write the account before you read further down the page.

One form per person, per sighting. If someone was standing next to you, ask them to file their own — two accounts are worth far more than one account with two names on it.

Before you write anything

This is published. Right away. Not reviewed first.

When you press submit, your account appears on this page immediately, exactly as you typed it, under your first name and last initial — Marcus T., Elena R. Nobody reads it before the public does. There is no moderation queue, no approval, no delay in which to reconsider.

Your email address, if you give one, is never published and never shown to anyone.

Write it as though it is going up in front of strangers, because in about one second it will be. If you change your mind afterward, say so and it comes down the same day, no explanation needed.

Tell us what happened, in your own words. Please write this part before you read any further down the page.

Everything below this box is a question, and questions put ideas in people’s heads. This box doesn’t. Start wherever it starts and go to wherever it ends. Include what you were doing just before it began.

Write what you saw, not what you concluded — “a white light that stopped and then went the other way” is worth more than “a craft under intelligent control,” and the second can be built out of the first later by anyone. The first cannot be recovered once it’s gone.

Leave nothing out because it seems small, strange, or embarrassing, and don’t smooth over the parts you’re unsure of — just say you’re unsure of them. “I think there were three, but I might be adding one” is a better sentence than either “three” or nothing at all.

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When was this — date and time, as close as you can get — and how do you know the time?

“Late October 2011, around nine at night” is a real answer. So is “March 3rd, 8:47 p.m., my phone photo is timestamped.” How you know matters more than the precision. A guess that says it’s a guess is worth more than a confident number that isn’t one, because date and time is the one thing anyone can check against satellite passes, flight tracks, launches, and the Moon.

Where were you? A general area is enough — the town, or the nearest thing on a map. Please don’t give us your street address.

Then tell us where you were standing: indoors or out, which floor, whether you were looking through a window or a windshield, whether you were moving and how fast. And what was between your eye and the sky — nothing, glasses, binoculars, a phone screen, a camera, a dashcam, a telescope. A pane of double glazing and a moving car account for a startling number of otherwise unexplainable things, and this is the only field that can rule them out.

How long did it last, and how did it end?

If it happened in stages, give us each stage separately rather than one total — that produces a far more accurate number, and duration is the thing witnesses most reliably overestimate, especially when something has unsettled them. Tell us how you know the elapsed time, if you do. And the ending is not a formality: “it faded out,” “it went behind the treeline,” “it was still there when I went inside,” and “I looked away and lost it” are four entirely different events.

Where in the sky was it when you first saw it, and where when you last saw it?

Compass directions or local landmarks, whichever you actually know — a named water tower beats a wrong bearing. And how high up, treating the horizon as 0 and straight overhead as 90.

Hold your arm straight out. What would have just covered it — a grain of rice, a pea, a thumbnail, a fist?

This is the one size measure anyone can actually give. We deliberately don’t ask how many feet across it was or how far away: past about ten metres the eye cannot judge the distance of an unfamiliar thing, and a number with no information in it anchors everyone who reads the file afterwards. If it passed in front of or behind a cloud, a treeline, a building, or an aircraft, say so — that is the only real distance constraint there is.

Describe what you saw, the way you’d describe it to someone who wasn’t there.

Colour, brightness against something known — Venus, the Moon, a streetlight — whether there was a trail or a halo, and whether any of it changed. If you couldn’t make out a definite shape, say so. That’s a real answer, and we don’t offer a menu of shapes because a menu of shapes mostly teaches people which shapes are expected.

What did it do while you watched?

Did it hold still, drift, stop, change direction, speed up, go behind anything, split, or make a sound? Behaviour is where witnesses actually agree, and it is what decides which ordinary explanations are worth testing.

What were the conditions?

Sky, cloud, wind, the Moon and stars if you noticed them, any lights or noise around you, any aircraft. This is where most cases actually get resolved, it costs nothing to write down now, and it is impossible to recover later.

Was anyone else there? How many — and have you talked it through with them since?

Both halves matter. A co-witness makes an account far weightier. But two people who have spent a week comparing notes have one blended memory between them, not two independent ones, and we’d rather know that than not. If they’re willing, send them here to file their own rather than typing theirs into yours.

Roughly, what kind of sighting was this?

This sorts the page. It is not the record — your account above is the record. If nothing here fits, or nothing fits cleanly, pick the last one. It’s a real answer and it is the default for a reason.

Now that it’s written down — what do you think you saw?

Asked last, and only last, so it can’t shape anything above it. Tell us what you’ve already ruled out and why; the things a witness has personally eliminated are usually the most useful lines in the whole file. “I don’t know, and I’ve stopped trying to work it out” is a complete answer. If you’re willing: how much interest did you have in any of this before it happened?

First name

Last initial

Published as Marcus T. Nothing more than that.

An email address, if you’d like one on file. Never published.

Used for exactly two things: a follow-up question, if one comes up, and letting you take your account down later. Never shown on the page, never shared, never sold, never mailed to. There is no newsletter. There has never been a newsletter.

Stored: what you type, your email if you give one, and the time the form was submitted. Shown: your first name, your last initial, and the account fields. Never shown: your email address, ever, to anyone. No analytics, no cookies, no tracking pixel. Your address is not logged — it is hashed with a secret so that repeat submissions can be rate-limited and nothing else. Your account is not passed to any agency, database, researcher, or mailing list. It sits on this page, which is the entire point of it.

Want your account off the page? Email [email protected] with enough to identify it and it comes down the same day. You don’t have to explain, and you won’t be asked to. If an account names or identifies a third party who didn’t consent to being named, flag it the same way and it gets edited or pulled while it’s looked at — that one doesn’t wait. The rest of this site runs on found an error, it gets fixed; this page runs on the same rule, and here you are the one who decides what counts as an error in your own account.

The accounts

What people say they saw

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