So we are in Day 2. Todays data set was interesting – UFO sightings around the world!
The first task was to scrape the data from https://nuforc.org/databan/
UFO reports can be accessed from the following four indexes:
Index by EVENT DATE
Index by STATE
Index by SHAPE OF UFO
Index by DATE POSTED
I wanted to focus on USA , hence I went with the link for STATE. It was a really good refresher on web scraping and Regex.
Data Prep
It required two steps of download to get to the final data. Make sure to cache and run the workflow .Below is a screen shot of the download. Rest of the workflow was done using Regex Tools.
Dashboard
For the Dashboard I used a story telling style and focused on USA. I created a trend of the sighting from 2000-2021 and compared it to the other countries where sightings were more. Interestingly USA had far more sightings compared to the rest of the world. It seems UFO knows national boundary :).The trend seems to be decreasing in UK, however in other parts of the world there seems to be spike during recent years.
Then I looked at the seasonality of reporting as well as the Shapes that were more often spotted.
I also read upon the UFO stories (as it is interesting for me) and the general conclusion is that as we have never been contacted by any ET and we have never found any sort of alien wreckage so far .So it is safe to assume that these sightings are human fascination or anomalies in the sky. However, it is not crazy to keep an eye on it . We never know who is watching us!!!!