cjc0013/Ufo_data_clustered

UFO Sightings – Cleaned & Unified Dataset (~327k rows)

This dataset merges several publicly available UFO sighting datasets from Kaggle into one cleaned, standardized, and enriched file. The goal is simply to provide a consolidated dataset instead of many fragmented sources with inconsistent formatting.

This release contains a single JSONL file with approximately 327,000 records.

No private or identifying information was present in the original data.

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📦 Source

All entries originate from publicly available UFO sighting datasets on Kaggle. Each row corresponds to a single reported sighting. Source Files located in source folder

🧹 Cleaning / Normalization Performed

All rows in this unified file were standardized using the same basic rules:

• timestamps parsed and converted into a consistent t_utc (ISO-8601, UTC)
• city/state/country fields harmonized where possible
• latitude/longitude coerced to floats
• basic HTML/unicode cleanup in free-text descriptions (text)
• invalid or fully unparseable rows removed
• source field preserved as src

No interpretation or filtering based on content was performed.

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✨ Added Contextual Fields

A small number of lightweight “sidecar” fields were added based on timestamp + coordinates:

• moon_illum — moon illumination fraction
• moon_alt_deg — moon altitude in degrees
• nearest_airport_code — closest airport (ICAO)
• nearest_airport_km — distance to that airport in km
• wx_bucket — rough weather bucket (coarse category)

These values are approximate and should be treated as exploratory metadata only.

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🧩 Clustering Fields (Included in the File)

The dataset includes two fields that come from text-similarity grouping:

• cluster_id — numeric label
• prob — membership confidence

These reflect text similarity, not verified categories or event types. They are included because they were already part of the cleaned file.

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📝 Field Reference

Each row has the following structure (example):

{
  "uid": "scrubbed/row327047",
  "t_utc": "2013-09-09T09:51:00.000Z",
  "lat": 32.7152778,
  "lon": -117.1563889,
  "text": "2 white lights zig-zag over Qualcomm Stadium...",
  "src": "scrubbed",
  "city": "san diego",
  "state": "ca",
  "country": "US",

  "cluster_id": 725,
  "prob": 1.0,

  "moon_illum": 0.163603127,
  "moon_alt_deg": -67.0003509521,
  "nearest_airport_km": 3.7174715996,
  "nearest_airport_code": "KSAN",
  "reports_z": null,
  "wx_bucket": "unknown"
}

Field descriptions

Field	Type	Notes
uid	string	Stable row identifier
t_utc	string	Event timestamp, ISO-8601 UTC
lat, lon	float	Approximate coordinates
city, state, country	string	Cleaned location fields (best-effort)
text	string	Free-text sighting description
src	string	Original Kaggle dataset source
cluster_id	int	Text-similarity cluster (for research use only)
prob	float	Cluster membership probability
moon_illum	float	Moon illumination (0–1)
moon_alt_deg	float	Moon altitude in degrees
nearest_airport_km	float	Distance to nearest airport
nearest_airport_code	string	ICAO code
wx_bucket	string	Approximate weather category
reports_z	float/null	Unused placeholder field (kept for completeness)

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⚠️ Notes & Limitations

• Accuracy of timestamps and locations depends entirely on original reporting.
• Weather buckets are coarse (not NOAA-grade).
• Airport distances are approximate nearest-neighbor lookups.
• Cluster labels are based solely on text similarity and do not reflect event reality.
• No claims are made about the nature or validity of any sighting.

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📄 License

Source data was public on Kaggle. This cleaned, merged, and lightly enriched version is released for research and educational use. Users should follow the original dataset licensing terms.