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Scope freeze — nuforc Eventdex kind

Frozen 2026-06-26. One slot = one UFO sighting report from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). A report-log Eventdex, the sighting analogue of the FEMA administrative-record kind.

The slot

  • One slot = one sighting report. Slot id is a deterministic content hash, {YYYYMMDDTHHMM}_{hash10}, over the report's time, place, shape, duration, and description (NUFORC carries no native report id). Re-running is idempotent and the byte-identical duplicate filings collapse to one slot.
  • Roster: 80,324 slots (from 80,332 PG observations; 8 exact-duplicate filings collapse). Span 1906-11-11 .. 2014-05-08.
  • Real ground point: unlike FEMA (an area), every NUFORC report has a geocoded lat/lon, so the slot keeps the point. 80,324 / 80,324 carry coords.

Measured reality

NUFORC is a report log: the measured fact is that a human filed a sighting report at a given time and place, the same footing as the FEMA disaster declarations (a record that a declaration was made). It is eyewitness testimony as data, not an instrument reading and not a model. TerraPulse already treats it this way: the published earthquake-lights paper (/articles, 2026-05-30) used NUFORC sightings cross-matched against USGS quakes. It clears the bright line as a catalog of human reports; it is never presented as a measurement of a physical field. The slot records what was reported, verbatim, without endorsing it.

Source

nuforc datasource (already normalized in PG, metric ufo_sighting, 80,332 observations). A static historical archive that ended in 2014, so the build is a one-shot PG read with no live edge (nothing new arrives). Each observation already carries the shape, duration (seconds + free text), description, posting date, and city/state/country in extra_json.

Slot contents (spine columns)

slot_id, kind, origin_utc (UTC), lat, lon, shape (the subtype), duration_seconds + duration_text, city / state / country, date_posted, description, year.

Storage — spine parquet first (the severe-wx rule)

Follows the locked severe-wx ruling (docs/scope-severe-wx-eventdex.md, 2026-06-17): a big Eventdex kind is written spine-parquet first, not file-per-slot, so the shared storehouse_index.json (~101 MB / 297k slots) does not absorb another 80k files and slow every kind's rebuild_index_from_disk().

data/event_storehouse/nuforc/nuforc_spine.parquet   (one row per sighting)

Per-slot JSON dossiers + the terrestrial cross-match are Brick D, deferred behind the scalable per-kind index, same as the 15 severe-wx kinds. Flagged in docs/dex-triage-surfaced.md, not silently dropped.

Builder

scripts/build_nuforc_spine.py (pure PG read; importable slot_id / _row / load_rows / build). Tests: tests/test_monitor/test_nuforc_spine.py (6, slot-id determinism + dup-collapse + row mapping).

Frozen vs deferred

  • Frozen (this brick): the 80,324-slot spine parquet (one row per report, with ground point + record fields).
  • Deferred (Brick D): per-slot JSON dossiers; the terrestrial cross-match read-across (does a sighting line up in time and place with a quake, a launch, a fireball reentry); any enrichment of the free-text description.
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