How to tell what's behind a claim here — and how to tell when there's nothing.

How well a connection is sourced

Three states, and they are rendered differently everywhere they appear.

• opens a document437
  A record is attached and you can go and read it. Where a specific page has been checked against the claim, the page number is recorded too, and 197 of those pages resolve to a reading this file records as rendered and read by eye — the only grade this project quotes from. A further 88 carry a binding note marked VERIFIED that the document’s own page record does not bear out, 78 of them notes that say the page was rendered and read while the document records no such reading at that page. That is this file disagreeing with itself in two places, it was found by audit on 4 September 2026, and it is not resolved here.
• attached, but not counted24
  A document is attached and you can read what it says here — but it is not a source you can go and open, so it is deliberately excluded from the number above. Every one of these is a contested document, or one this project has no right to republish, or both. The claim is shown; the dispute is shown with it; the count stays honest.
• public record, not bound28
  An appointment, a board seat, a succession in office or a term of employment — a matter of official record that anyone can check against a government biography, a corporate filing or the Federal Register. This project has not bound it to a document it holds, so it counts as unsourced everywhere on this site. Six connections of exactly this kind are bound — to the OSD list of Deputy Secretaries and the CIA factbook of Directors — and those are the model for what these should become.
• asserted790
  A source is named in prose — a book, a report, a broadcast, an agency — but no document is attached yet. Checkable by a person, not by a click.
• nothing yet111
   No source recorded at all. Shown as a black bar, never hidden. An admitted gap is more honest than a citation that does not hold up. Absence is on the map because it is as informative as a presence.

How the record treats a connection

Separate from sourcing. A well-sourced claim can still be disputed, and a disputed one is not thereby false. These three describe the relationship, not the evidence — how well-evidenced a connection is, is the scale above, and only that one.

• agreement679
  One party is described as supporting or endorsing the other.
• referential588
  A link or mention, with no claim of agreement or dispute.
• contested123
  The parties are described as being in dispute. Contested claims are labeled contested and both sides are recorded — never quietly resolved in one direction.

Connections this project decided something about

Not every line on a map comes from a source. Some are ours, some name who else drew them, and some were taken off after review. All three are marked.

• ours18
  Placed by this project to organize the map. Nobody else asserts them, so they can never be "sourced" — and counting them as missing sources would overstate how unfinished the work is and understate how much of it is authored.
• attributed5
  Somebody else drew the comparison and the connection names who.
• removed11
  Taken off the map after review — either the record did not support it, or it duplicated a path already drawn. Kept in the file, not deleted, so the judgment stays checkable.

How documents are handled

138 documents, 4114 pages held between them.

• read93
  At least one passage has been read off the page. 617 passages so far, plus 143 pages transcribed in full — the whole sheet rather than a chosen quotation, which is the only thing that can show what a page does not say. How each one was read is recorded on it — a rendered scan read by eye is not the same as text pulled through a tool, and the weaker one says so.
• pages held, unread16
  The pages are here and nobody has read them yet. The page says so plainly rather than implying otherwise.
• catalogue only29
  We know it exists and where. We do not hold it.

Machine-read text is never a source. OCR is used to find things and never to quote them. Absence from OCR is not evidence of absence.

Some pages are held and cannot be shown. 17 documents contain third-party material — usually newspaper clippings filed inside a government record. A newspaper's words do not become a public record by being filed in one, so those pages are described but not reproduced. Withholding an image is a rights decision, not a gap in the record.

Where a document has been read and turns out not to support the claim resting on it, that is recorded on the document rather than quietly fixed. 3 passages currently carry such a note.

A note on AARO

The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is not treated here as a source of record. Its findings are publicly contested, including by witnesses who testified before Congress. Where AARO is referenced it is attributed as a party to the story, not cited as adjudication — the same treatment given to any other party.

When this site is wrong

It has been, and it will be again. 73 connections currently carry a correction recording what the old version said, what changed, and which document settled it. Corrections are part of the record here, not an embarrassment to be tidied away — a project that never shows its errors is asking to be trusted rather than checked.

5 documents have rights status recorded as unknown. That is the honest value and it is left alone; guessing would be worse.

How the front-door chart is drawn

What the timeline on the front page does to the record, in its own words. The first two of these are also printed under the chart itself; the rest are here.

Distance down this page is not time

Years are in exact order, but a year holding several documents is taller than an empty one, so distance down this page is not strictly proportional to time. The strip pinned at the top IS linear and to scale — the true proportions are always up there.

Adjacency, not descent

The psychoenergetics blocks are drawn beside the UFO programs, not beneath them. No document held here says one led to the other, and none is drawn as if it did. They are drawn differently because they were asking a different question, and they are counted separately, so the 39-year figure still means what it has always meant: no public UFO program.

What is inside the 39 years

206 of 576 dated entities on this map fall inside those 39 years. Half are government or contractor entities — the Stargate Project ran 1978–95 on federal funding. The work did not stop; the public program did. That the hole is not empty is the finding, and it is only a finding if the hole is still drawn.

8 congressional hearings, and the longest gap between any two of them is 54 years — 1968 to 2022. That is fifteen years longer than the program gap, and it does not close when AATIP begins in 2008: AATIP ran four years without a single public hearing.

Which of these columns is a judgment

The documents column and the density column are read straight from the file: every document held, every dated entity. 105 of the 138 documents held carry a date inside this window and are drawn here; 34 of the 82 years hold none. The bar counts what this map holds, not what happened.

The programs in the first column are a selection, not a query. Public here means openly acknowledged, not publicly funded — the psychoenergetics programs were federally funded and were not public in this sense. The three filled blocks are the official U.S. public UAP investigation programs, and naming those three is the argument this page makes. The 6 outlined blocks are the federally funded psychoenergetics programs — STAR GATE and its phases — and they are in this column because they are the same kind of thing: a government program with a budget, a named director, a Special Access Program designation and a congressional paper trail. The dotted block is MK-ULTRA, and it is neither of those things: it was not a UFO program, and it is not a segment of the psychoenergetic chain, which is why it is counted in neither figure. It is drawn because the Director of Central Intelligence, listing the fifteen categories of MKULTRA subproject to a Senate joint hearing in 1977, gave the thirteenth as "analysis of extrasensory perception" — which puts government money on that question twenty-five years before STAR GATE, out of the same Technical Services office that documents in this corpus show being recommended as a funder of paranormal perception research at SRI. Adjacency, not descent: no document held here says one led to the other, and none is drawn as if it did.

Almost nothing here was caused by a sighting

Hover any incident, hearing or programme and the card names whoever the record says caused it. Of the 38 things on this map that can be caused, 10 name someone and 28 name nobody at all — and of the 17 agents those 10 rows produce, not one is a sighting, a witness or a press flap — a claim this page refuses to build rather than print if it ever stops being true. They are, in full: Central Intelligence Agency, Marshall Chadwell, Pentacle Memorandum (1953), H.P. Robertson, Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford, J. Edward Roush, INSCOM, James Lacatski, AATIP, Luis Elizondo, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Burchett, Glenn Grothman, Anna Paulina Luna, Michael Shellenberger, Nancy Mace. The thing most people assume drove all of this — somebody saw something — causes nothing here. 13 of the 17 are people; the rest are institutions and one is a document, because that is what the record's own wording gives. The blanks are a statement about what this map holds, not about history, and the cards say so in those words.

22 program-shaped entities are not drawn in that column

The useful thing to know about them is whether anything behind them opens. 12 have at least one source you can open, with how many after each: PURSUE 14; Project Mogul 11; AAWSAP 7; NYU Balloon Project 3; Project SIGN 3; Project GRUDGE (reestablished) 3; Project Y (Avrocar) 2; Project GRUDGE (original) 2; Project TWINKLE 2; Project BEAR 2; Immaculate Constellation 1; Project SAUCER 1. The other 10 have none: Advanced Theoretical Physics Project; Classified-Researcher Deaths Review (2025-26); Soviet/Russian UFO Study; Project Palladium; Clementine Mission (1994); Project Stork; Project Moon Dust; Operation Blue Fly; Operation Paperclip; The Disclosure Project. Some were not American, some were not public, one is only alleged, and several are too short to draw at this scale — the column does not try to say which applies to each. If you disagree with the selection, the disagreement is with us, not with the data.

43 entities are drawn at their start year only

43 entities on this map lasted more than a year and are drawn at their start year only — 22 people, 13 organizations, 4 programs, 2 events, 2 patterns. Between them that is 634 entity-years compressed into 43 points: Jim Simons 60y, Edgar Mitchell 45y, TRW 45y, EG&G 40y, and so on down. The programs drawn as blocks in the first column are not in that figure; they are drawn at their true length. This is a known limitation of the chart and not a claim about any of them — an organization that existed for forty years appears here exactly as heavily as one that existed for one.