ufo_data/README.md

UFO Event Timeline Processing Tool

Copyrights:

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)

Data files (in 'bin' directory):

• George M. Eberhart - Copyright (c) 2022
• LeRoy Pea - Copyright (c) 9/8/1988 (updated 3/17/2005)
• 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
• Some portions of the specific file udb_tables.h (such as get_hatch_geo, g_hatch_continents) use strings from the "uDb" project by Jérôme Beau. The license of his project us known.

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.