The UFO Timeline eras
The UFO Timeline Project organizes sightings, cases, documents and cultural milestones into clear historical eras, so patterns are easier to see at a glance. Each era has its own interactive timeline, from the earliest cave art to today's official UAP reports.
- 1. Prehistory — Before 3300 BCE
- 2. Ancient History — 3300 BCE – 500 CE
- 3. Classical Era — 500 BCE – 500 CE
- 4. Middle Ages — 500 CE – 1500 CE
- 5. Early Modern — 1500 CE – 1800 CE
- 6. Industrial Age — 1800 CE – 1900 CE
- 7. Modern Era — 1900 CE – 2000 CE
- 8. Contemporary Era — 2000 CE – Present
Our holistic approach to the UFO problem
The UFO question has usually been studied in pieces: radar specialists look at tracks, folklorists look at legends, psychologists look at witnesses, and governments look at threats. Each piece alone tends to explain away what doesn't fit. The UTP puts the pieces side by side, across all of recorded history, and asks what survives when they are looked at together.
- Time as a dataset. A 1561 broadsheet, a 1952 radar log and a 2004 Navy video are placed on the same line. Repeating shapes, behaviors and witness effects across centuries are clues; changing descriptions show how culture shapes what people report.
- Several kinds of evidence. Testimony, physical traces, photographs and film, official records and scientific data are all logged, but labeled for what they are. A claim is not a record, and an illustration is never presented as evidence.
- Separate scoring for separate questions. The Verg Credibility Matrix weighs cases, the Verg Abduction Matrix weighs close-contact and abduction reports, and the Verg Media Matrix weighs photos and footage. Scores stay "Pending" until a real review is done.
- The human side counts. Physical effects, missing time, lasting psychological change and the high strangeness many witnesses describe are recorded rather than filtered out, because they recur.
- Secrecy is part of the history. Government programs, panels, redactions and recent disclosures are tracked as events in their own right, since they shape what the public was allowed to know.
- Open hypotheses. Misidentification, hoax, secret technology, extraterrestrial visitors and stranger interdimensional ideas are all kept on the table. The goal is not to prove one answer, but to keep the full record honest enough that the right answer can eventually show itself.
How to read a timeline entry
Each entry shows a date, place, short summary and category tag. Entries with a full case file show a thumbnail and a "Read the case file" link, where you'll find the classification, matrix assessments and sources. Undated and theoretical material lives in Outside Time.