Context Extraterrestrials, visitors, little green men, UFOs, swap gas. What do they want? Where do they come from? Do they like cheeseburgers? This dataset will likely not help you answer these questions. It does contain over 80,000 records of UFO sightings dating back as far as 1949. With the latitude and longitude data it is possible to assess the global distribution of UFO sightings (patterns could aid in planetary defence if invasion proves to be imminent). The dates and times, along with the duration of the UFO's stay and description of the craft also lend themselves to predictions. Can we find patterns in their arrival times and durations? Do aliens work on weekends? Help defend the planet and learn about your fellow earthlings (and when they are most likely to see ET). Content Date_time - standardized date and time of sighting city - location of UFO sighting state/province - the US state or Canadian province, appears blank for other locations country - Country of UFO sighting UFO_shape - a one word description of the "spacecraft" length_of_encounter_seconds - standardized to seconds, length of the observation of the UFO described_duration _of_encounter - raw description of the length of the encounter (shows uncertainty to previous column) description - text description of the UFO encounter. Warning column is messy, with some curation it could lend itself to some natural language processing and sentiment analysis. date_documented - when was the UFO sighting reported latitude - latitude longitude - longitude Note there are missing data in the columns. I've left it as is because depending on what the user is interested in the missing values in any one column may or may not matter. Acknowledgements I found these data here: https://github.com/planetsig/ufo-reports Full credit to them for the curation, I added some column headers and just described what I've seen Inspiration Some great ways to use these data would be: 1. A global plot of the locations of recorded UFO sightings. 2. Can the duration of the UFO visit be predicted from the other data? 3. Is there a pattern to the appearances? At certain times of day, on certain days of the week or days of the year? (i.e. are people on their way home from the pub more likely to see little green men?) 4. Are certain shapes of UFO more likely to be seen in different geographical regions.