Notes
This visualization uses a dataset of UFO Reports in the United States which I came across on Abigail Larion's Kaggle Notebook (open it with care as my browser crashes with every attempt to scroll through it). Her data was actually sourced from Sigmond Axel, who had scrapped the data from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
There are 68,000+ usable records, and any attempt to plot them all lead to my browser crashing while trying to draw that many SVG circle elements. With the year filter, the maximum number of records being drawn from seems to be just under 7,000.
I find the comments associated with each reporting the most entertaining part of the dataset. Sadly some are truncated right as they're getting interesting...
At 3:30 on January 7, 2012 I was hunting on my fathers farm just South of Ashville, Ohio. I was looking up at the sky and all of a su
Truncated comments appear to be part of the process when tabulated data is presented on the NUFORC site. But they do link to the rest of our hunter's tale in its individual report page.
The visualization allows you to zoom into each state by clicking on it. As well you can click, drag, and scroll in and out across the SVG. This possible with the d3.zoom constructor, though I basically adapted a map visualization with zoom features. You can zoom out to the full map at anytime by clicking a point outside the United States, or clicking a selected state.