Hi all! I’ve been chipping away at a side project, and it’s finally in a state where I’m not too embarrassed to share it: https://bluebookfiles.org It’s still very much a work in progress, and there are definitely some bugs. Quick context if you’re new to Project Blue Book: it was the U.S. Air Force’s official UFO investigation program (1952–1969). The records are already online via the National Archives (and places like Fold3, Archive.org, etc.). The issue I kept running into when trying to research Blue Book is that browsing and searching the documents on those sites feels slow and clunky. I wanted one place where I could search across the whole collection. So I built a proper archive that includes most of the Project 10073 Record Cards (the one-page “summary sheets” investigators filled out for each report), plus some other related Blue Book/UFO documents. Each card usually has the date, location, witness info, what was seen, and the official explanation or conclusion. Usual stuff: Venus, aircraft, and of course, swamp gas 😅 A few features: I ran ~6,000 documents/reports through OCR so you can full-text search the actual content (locations, dates, descriptions, weird phrases, whatever). That said, some of these scans are rough, and the OCR will be imperfect on the worst ones. The search is also pretty forgiving. It’s not just strict keyword matching. It does typo tolerance, partial matching, and relevance ranking (for example, searching “disk” will also find “disc”, and a lot of misspellings still get picked up). You can also search exact phrases using quotes, like “swamp gas”. The document text is selectable/copyable, so you can grab snippets or just download the full OCR’d PDF. There’s also a map view with a geocoded location for each report: https://bluebookfiles.org/?view=map (this is my favorite part). I tried to make the locations as accurate as possible, but a few will definitely land on the wrong pinpoint. I also labeled some key military bases/government locations because I thought it would be interesting to see any clusters of sightings near them. This is a personal project and it’s not monetized in any way (and never will be). I just wanted to make these historical documents easier to access for researchers and the community. If you find anything interesting or have suggestions, let me know. I’ve got lots of ideas for improvements, and I’m definitely looking for input. submitted by /u/tmosh [link] [comments]