UFO Sightings Dashboard

STAR Summary

Situation

I wanted to explore geographic and time patterns in a historical archive of UFO reports while keeping the limits of report counts clear.

Task

Create a Tableau dashboard for exploring report volume by location, month, recorded hour, and reported shape.

Action

• Prepared a historical UFO report dataset with recorded sighting dates from 1906 through May 2014.
• Built geographic, time-based, and reported-shape comparisons in Tableau.
• Defined the default view as the contiguous U.S. in 2013 and documented coverage and interpretation limits.

Result

• The default 2013 view contains 6,334 report records across 48 states, with California contributing 653 (10.3%).
• July has the most reports in that view: 810, or 12.8% of the total.
• 71.9% of reports in that view have recorded times from 18:00 through 23:59.