How it works, and how to catch us out · ANOMALY<br>Skip to the content<br>An open record of things people cannot explain

How it works, and how to catch us out<br>We do not tell you what happened to you. We tell you who else said something like it, and exactly why we put those accounts together. This page is the whole method, including where it fails.<br>The test we set ourselves<br>Anyone can build something that finds patterns. The hard part is proving it finds real ones. So we handed the engine 43,684 accounts stripped of any labels, told it nothing about history, and asked a simple question: would it find the famous nights on its own?<br>9 of 10<br>famous mass sightings reconstructed from scratch. 5 of them landed in its top 7 out of 263 candidate nights.

the nightwhere it rankedfoundTinley Park, Halloween225 accountsTinley Park, third night313 accountsTinley Park, first night416 accountsThe Phoenix Lights522 accountsTinley Park, fourth night611 accountsRockford, Illinois1512 accountsSouthern Illinois, police witnesses664 accountsO'Hare Airport853 accountsStephenville, Texas2554 accountsYukon, Canadanot foundsee below<br>The point of that test is not the nine. It is that the same engine also flags nights nobody has ever heard of, and finding the famous ones is what earns the right to take those seriously. There are 24 of them, checked against the ordinary record and still standing.<br>Where it failed<br>It missed the Yukon entirely. Not because the engine is blind, but because the archives we started with are heavily American and barely record where Canadian accounts came from. That is a gap in the record, not a mystery, and we are filling it. We would rather show you the miss than a table of nine wins.<br>How two accounts get connected<br>Three things, all of them visible to you on every match.<br>Does it read the same?<br>Your words are compared against every account in the record. Not keyword search, meaning. Someone writing “a tall dark shape crossed the road” and someone writing “a big black figure walked in front of my car” are saying the same thing.<br>Did you both notice something unusual?<br>Sharing something rare counts far more than sharing something common. Half the record mentions lights. Almost nobody mentions wood knocking. If you both mention wood knocking, that matters.<br>How far apart were you?<br>Closer counts for more, but distance never rules a match out. Some of the strangest connections in the record are between people on opposite sides of a continent.<br>Under the hood, for people who want it<br>This section is more technical than the rest of the page. Skip it if you would rather just read the accounts.<br>Finding candidates is the hard part, not ranking them<br>The obvious way to build this is to search for accounts that read like yours and put the best ones first. We measured that approach against a set of accounts we already knew belonged together, and it found a genuine match only 20% of the time. Worse, no amount of adjusting how results were ranked moved that number, because ranking cannot promote something the search never returned.<br>So the engine gathers candidates two ways at once. One is meaning: accounts that describe the same thing in different words. The other is structure: accounts from the same region, the same period, or sharing a characteristic rare enough to be worth noticing on its own. The two pools are combined before anything is scored. On the same measurement, that took the hit rate from 20% to 100%.<br>The record answers backwards<br>Adding a report to an ordinary database does nothing to the reports already in it. They sit where they were. Here, every account that arrives is compared against the whole archive, so a new one can answer an old one, and the record gets better in both directions.<br>That is measurable rather than a claim, so we measured it. Of the 2,890 published accounts that have both a date and a closest match, 1,462 found that match in an account written later than their own. That is 51%. The median gap was 10 years, 746 waited a decade or more, and the longest wait in the record is 88 years.<br>Which means roughly half the people here were answered by somebody who had not written their account yet when they wrote theirs. It is also the honest reason to write yours down even if nothing matches today. The measurement is retrospective and we say so: it runs the same comparison over history that the engine runs on arrivals, using seed/measure_compounding.py, which is deterministic and which we will hand to anybody who wants to disagree with it.<br>Measuring strangeness instead of assigning it<br>The idea we are leaning on is not ours and it is not new. J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer the US Air Force hired to explain its UFO reports away, ended up proposing that every case be rated on two separate axes: how credible the witnesses were, and how strange the account was, meaning how much of it survives after every ordinary explanation has been applied. High strangeness is the phrase that came out of that, and it is a better...