UFO_Tracker: Visualizing UFO sightings

Visualizing and analyzing geospatial and temporal observations are common tasks for many application domains. In this paper, we introduce UFO Tracker, a visual analytic tool for analyzing unidentified flying object sightings from the National UFO Reporting Center. The goal here is to give the user a higher level view of where different types of sightings occur, to investigate whether sightings are increasing or decreasing over time, to discover the connections between different events which might happen at different geographic areas, and to quickly identify typical incidents at a given period of time without reading the whole sightings through topic modelling. Multiple visualization and data mining techniques are combined to make sense the increasingly large UFO reports which get updated hourly. The usefulness of the application is evaluated through a case study where anon-expert in ufology can find some typical interesting sightings. Our application can also be able to detect some misleading events such as missile launch or fireworks on a specific day through keywords and topic extraction. One limitation of our application is the data which is not up-todate when new sightings are posted since the application pulled and processed data locally. Our initial application targets UFO sighting reports. However, we believe our approach has wider applications in other research domains, such as analyzing text corpus obtained from social media.