Friday, February 28, 2025

New UFO timeline tool: 80,000 page chronological document and collection of 26,000 JSON files summarising posts on main UFO subreddits

As part of updating and expanding the 1,700 page UFO timeline I circulated in 2006 (created by cross-referencing material in about 900 UFO books that I read in 2004-2006), I recently shared online a 5,000 page timeline of UFO news articles from 2005 onwards.

Of course, media stories about UFOs only contain a fraction of the available information about UFOs and its weird and wonderful sub-culture (or rather sub-cultures, plural).

As the latest in a series of tools to help locate and assimilate relevant information about UFOs from other sources (ranging from UFO podcasts and UFO documentaries to PhD dissertations about UFO, academic journal articles about UFO and university archives among other material), I recently turned to Reddit.

I originally had in mind a short mini-project in relation solely in relation to posts on the largest UFO sub-reddit, r/UFOs (which currently has approximately 3.3 million members) at: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/

However, thanks to extremely useful technical tips from French researcher Laurent Chabin of the French UFO group SCEAU, I was able to speed up part of the relevant process significantly (about 100 times faster...).

So, of course, my immediate reaction was to expand the scope of the work I was doing. :)

After a bit more time and effort than I originally intended (and more than a little bit of mission-creep), I have used the techniques helpfully suggested by Laurent Chabin of SCEAU to generate:

(1) PDF documents setting out the posts on various UFO subreddits (listed below). These summary documents range from a few pages to a few tens of thousands of pages.

(2) A combined chronological document setting out the relevant posts. This one is about 80,000 pages long.

(3) A set of JSON files for anyone else interested in further work on this set of data (and potentially for use in my planned future UFO projects, since it should be fairly trivial for to combine this set of data with the data from the media sources - and other material as well...).


COMBINED DOCUMENT: 80,043 page chronology summary of UFO posts on Reddit at:

This includes a summary of many of the posts on most of the main UFO subreddits on Reddit, including those listed below.  Due to some technical issues and prohibitions by Reddit, it does not include all the posts on those groups (particularly the older ones) - but (as indicated by the page sizes involved) it does include quite a few!

Some of the data obtained on the Reddit posts is also incomplete or out of date, particularly the "score" (number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes) on each post and the number of replies to each post.  The problem largely seems to be that the numbers are based on when the Reddit post was archived, so I have added a prefix of "Old" to those columns e.g. "Old score".  (I did consider omitting those columns altogether, but during my use of these summary documents I found it useful to have an indication - even if incomplete or out of date - of at least some of the posts that had a relatively high score or high number of replies.  If anyone prefers to avoid out of date information, they can delete those columns - but simply keeping this point in mind should be a sufficient precaution). 



AcademicUAP subreddit at:
Approximate membership: 3,700 


Aliens subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aliens
Approximate membership: 1 million 


DisclosureParty subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DisclosureParty
Approximate membership: 23,000


Experiencers subreddit at:
Approximate membership: 87,000


Reddit_UAP_Database subreddit at:


SETI subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SETI
Approximate membership: 17,000


The_UFO_Phenomenon subreddit at:


UAP subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UAP
Approximate membership: 462


UFO subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFO
Approximate membership: 353,000


UFOB subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOB
Approximate membership: 190,000


UFObelievers subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFObelievers
Approximate membership: 127,000


UFOBookClub subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOBookClub
Approximate membership: 3,300


UFOdocumentaries subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOdocumentaries
Approximate membership: 87,000


UFOPilotReports subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOPilotReports
Approximate membership: 18,000


UFOs subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs
Approximate membership: 3.3 million


UFOscience subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOscience
Approximate membership: 135,000


UFOstudies subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOstudies
Approximate membership: 911


UFOtruth subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOtruth
Approximate membership: 17,000


USOs subreddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/USOs
Approximate membership: 3,700


There are, of course, posts about UFOs in numerous other subreddits on Reddit not focused on UFOs - ranging from wider paranormal groups, to groups touching on topics overlapping with areas of interest to UFO researchers and local groups which sometimes have a post about a UFO sighting in their own town/city/country.  I'll be posting some additional summary documents soon in relation to some of those other groups - but I think the list below includes the main groups focused on UFOs/UAP.  (I did ask on various social media platforms if I had missed any and added a few groups in the light of the helpful input I received).




The above graphic illustrates just some initial steps (and simplifies those steps a bit, for ease of illustration...).  Most of those steps are now complete, or at least reached the point of diminishing returns.   

I expect the next stages, which build on this new foundation, to focus on deeper dives on particular issues/cases and resolving some of the disputes that have arisen in relation to them i.e. a bit of fun.... 
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