UFO Event Timeline Processing Tool

Copyrights:

Code:

ufojson tool: Copyright (c) 2023 By Richard Geldreich, Jr. (Apache 2.0 license)
libsoldout: Copyright (c) 2009, Natacha Porté (ISC license)
json: Copyright (c) 2013-2022 Niels Lohmann (MIT license)
Some portions of the specific file udb_tables.h (such as get_hatch_geo, g_hatch_continents) use strings/tables from the "uDb" project by Jérôme Beau.

Data files (in 'bin' directory):

George M. Eberhart - Copyright (c) 2022
LeRoy Pea - Copyright (c) 9/8/1988 (updated 3/17/2005). Permission given for use as long as his name is associated with the records.
Dr. Donald A. Johnson - Copyright (c) 2012
Fred Keziah - Copyright (c) 1958
Dr. Jacques F. Vallée - Copyright (c) 1993
Richard Geldreich, Jr. - Copyright (c) 2023
NICAP - Unknown copyright status
*U* binary database file U.RND: Copyright 1994-2002 Larry Hatch. According to David Marler, Executive Director of the National UFO Historical Records Center, "The family has verbally given permission for the database to be used. If you need to speak with them, I have their contact info."

Note: Although the C++ tool itself is open source with a permissive license (Apache 2.0), any commercial use of the copyrighted data in this repository may require permission from one or more copyright holders.

Instructions

This C++ command line tool reads several source files containing UFO related events, which were compiled from a variety of sources, and converts each of them to JSON. It then sorts all of these events into a single large timeline and outputs them as the Markdown file "timeline.md" and the JSON file "majestic.json". pandoc can then be used to convert this Markdown text file to HTML.

Currently, the tool is Windows only, but it would be trivial to port to Linux/OSX. (I'll do this soon.) To run it: compile the .SLN using Visual Studio 2022. There are no external 3rd party dependencies. Run it in the BIN directory. It'll convert all the source files to JSON then output a file named timeline.md.

Here's the output Markdown file converted to PDF. The latest HTML timeline is published here.

Special Thanks

Thanks to David Marler, Executive Director of the National UFO Historical Records Center, for assistance in recovering Hatch's DOS-era UFO program.
Thanks to Jérôme Beau, creator of the "uDb" project, for releasing his database tool. His output and code was very useful.

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