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:
https://files.afu.se/Downloads/Websites/Reddit/Koi%2C%20Isaac%20-%20Chronology%20of%20UFO%20posts%20on%20Reddit.pdf
Further details and links in my blog post:
https://uploads.isaackoi.com/2025/02/new-ufo-timeline-tool-80000-page.html
All the best,
Isaac