Show the source.
The Nommo keeps what has been measured, dated and catalogued at ancient sites, on objects and in texts. Every figure links to where it was published. The record stays factual. The debate lives in The Circle.
How records are built
Every number on a record page cites its source. Where surveys disagree, both figures are shown side by side. Coordinates are WGS84 and checked against a second source where one exists. Artifacts and texts are pinned at the museum or library that holds them, or at the place they were found.
UFO records
Three categories cover UFO / UAP material: reported sightings, alleged crash sites, and released records (official files governments have made public: declassified archives, FOIA releases and published reports, each linked to the release or archive itself). These records only state what was reported or alleged, and give the official explanation or conclusion where one exists, each with a source. The Nommo takes no position on what was seen. The sightings board on the home page shows posts from the Sightings circle in The Circle.
What’s here
438 records: 196 sites, 92 artifacts and 73 texts, plus 41 reported sightings, 8 alleged crash sites and 28 released government records. 374 are pinned on the globe. Every record has its own page.
Alignment Map: method
The Alignment Map shows geometry and simple statistics. It never tells you a line or direction means something. Here is exactly how it counts.
Distances and lines
All distances are great-circle distances on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 km (the IUGG mean Earth radius), computed with the haversine formula. Over long lines this differs from the true ellipsoid distance by up to about 0.5%. Bearings are initial bearings from true north. Coordinates are only as precise as published: the Alignment Map reports each record's precision as half its last decimal place (for example 3 decimals ≈ ±56 m).
“Near a line” and places
A record counts as on a line when its perpendicular distance to the full great circle is within the tolerance you set (default 100 km for claims, 50 km for the finder). Records within 5 km of each other are merged into one place, so a site with many catalogue entries is not counted many times. The two points that define a claimed line are not counted.
Chance baselines
- Test a claim compares the count with 1,000 great circles with uniformly random poles, and 1,000 random circles through the first named point. The percentage is the share of random circles the claim beats (ties count half). A line chosen after looking at a map will tend to score high on this test.
- Alignment finder corrects for that: it searches every pair of places (at least 3° apart) for the best circle, then repeats the whole search 20 times on shuffled data. Chance A keeps each place's latitude and gives it a random longitude. Chance B keeps regional clusters (places linked within 1,000 km) and spins each cluster to a random longitude. B is the fairer test because real places bunch together. Above 150 places (90 on phones) a fixed sample is searched. Random numbers come from a seeded generator (mulberry32), so results repeat exactly.
- Clustering compares the mean nearest-neighbour distance with 20 latitude-preserving shuffles.
- Orientation check gives the share of uniformly random axis directions that land at least as close to one of the reference directions (both ends of an axis count). Reference directions are the June-solstice, equinox and December-solstice sunrise and sunset (6 directions) or the four cardinal points.
Sun directions
Sunrise azimuth A comes from cos A = sin δ / cos φ, for a flat horizon, with no refraction and the sun's centre on the horizon. Real horizons and refraction move these by about 1° or more. Earth's tilt (obliquity) for a given year comes from Laskar (1986), using only the linear and quadratic terms: 23.439291° − 0.0130042 T − 1.64×10⁻⁷ T², where T is in Julian centuries from 2000. This is reliable within roughly ±10,000 years. Declination for an axis uses sin δ = cos φ cos A (horizon altitude 0°). Calendar dates for a declination use a simple seasonal curve that is accurate to about a day.
Orientation data and claims
Measured azimuths come from Big Ski's research library, which compiles master.db, and only where the library names the source: Cole 1925 and Petrie 1883 (Giza), Šprajc (Teotihuacan), Hoskin and the Corpus Mensurarum (Malta), Thom & Thom 1974 (Carnac), García Sanjuán et al. (Menga), Malville et al. (Nabta Playa), Baedeker 1892 (Dendera), and Posnansky 1945 (Tiwanaku, claim). Claimed lines are labelled as claims, with their source, or marked “unsourced”. Record pages stay facts only.
Not included
The Becker–Hagens grid and an ice-age (−120 m) coastline are not shown. The grid has no peer-reviewed definition in the research library, and no free coastline dataset was small enough to include with a clear licence. Both may be added later if a cited source is found.
Credits
Globe: globe.gl by Vasco Asturiano (MIT) on three.js (MIT). Earth texture: three-globe example image, derived from NASA Visible Earth imagery (public domain). Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, with the author and license credited under each gallery. Home-page Explore tile covers: Illustration · The Nommo (custom illustrations made for this site, not photographs).