Method

In short

• This archive does not claim, it documents. Every fact comes from an official document and links to the exact page it appears on.
• Artificial intelligence helps read, translate and draft; one person, the editor, reviews it and decides what is published. There may be mistakes: the official document always prevails.
• The editor's opinion is kept apart, signed and dated, and never presented as data.

What counts as a source

Only primary official records: videos, reports, statements, hearing transcripts and documents published by US government bodies (the Department of War, AARO, the Navy, the FBI, the CIA, NASA, Congress and others).

Books, documentaries, the press, forums and third-party websites are not used as sources. If a fact appears only in a secondary source, it is not published.

Each source carries its verification date: the day the original was read and checked to say what it is cited for. There are 65 verified sources today.

How a fact is checked

1. The original is downloaded from its official site, by hand: several government sites block automated downloads, and HUME does not try to get around them.
2. Its fingerprint is kept (SHA-256), with its size and the address it came from. Anyone can download the same file and check that it is identical, byte for byte.
3. It is read in full, and a verification log records what each document says, page by page, contradictions included.
4. Quotes are checked against the page image, not against machine-read text (OCR), which is often wrong in scanned documents.
5. It is cited with its page. The page is the one printed on the document; when the scan has none, the PDF page, and the case file says so.
6. Measurements use methods anyone can repeat (sun positions, angles, durations counted frame by frame) and are explained in the case file.

A fact enters a case file only after it has gone through that log.

What AI does and what the editor does

HUME is made by one person with the help of artificial intelligence: Claude, the model made by Anthropic, through its Claude Code tool. We name it because readers have the right to know which tool was involved and in what. This is how the work is split:

AI does not generate images for HUME, and it does not decide what the editor thinks.

Vocabulary

Official status of a case

The status is always the one the official sources give. Every PURSUE card reads “Unresolved · per PURSUE”, because that is how the catalogue labels everything, program contracts and studies included.

Hypotheses

Each case file goes through the possible explanations and says what the cited official sources make of each. The archive takes no side.

Editor's reading

It is the editor's opinion, not official data. It has its own section, signed and dated, and each reason rests on a cited record. If the records change, the reading changes.

Anomalous does not mean “non-human”: it means unexplained by what is known.

There are never percentages. No source allows a probability of “non-human” origin to be calculated, and a number would pass an opinion off as data.

Discrepancies

When two official sources contradict each other, the contradiction is not settled by choosing one: it is shown in its own section of the case file, with a quote from each.

Images

• Only real evidence is published: frames from the official videos, pages, charts and photos from the documents, and drawings handed in by witnesses, labelled as such.
• Artist recreations, illustrations and AI-generated images are not published, even when they are in the official catalogue. Each case file says what it left out and why.
• Frames are extracted at the published video's original resolution. At most they are cropped: any other change makes them a processed image.
• Numbered markers on a frame are HUME's (“Annotated by HUME”) and never cover what they point at. The clean frame is always one tap away.
• Processed images (for example, a brightened average of several frames) are flagged in their caption and carry a credit band. Their original file is signed with Content Credentials (C2PA): anyone can check in a verifier which original it was made from and which steps were applied.
• Each image links to its official file and carries its record: author, origin, license, download date and file fingerprint.

Places

Cases are placed in uncertainty zones, never on an exact point: official records rarely publish coordinates. The size of the zone reflects what the sources say; when they give no precise place, the zone is wide and the case file explains why (GIMBAL, for example, has a 650 km zone).

The PURSUE catalogue

PURSUE is the catalogue of declassified records the US Department of War has published in batches since May 2026. This is how HUME takes it in:

• From records to cases. The catalogue pairs videos and documents about the same event. HUME groups paired records into one case: 450 records make 290 cases. The three 2020 Navy videos, which are not in PURSUE, are added to them.
• Dates. The catalogue's text is kept and only what is certain is extracted (a year, a month or a day, depending on the case).
• Places. Each place in the catalogue is mapped by hand to a zone on the globe. Cases with no place (67) or off Earth (orbit, the Moon) do not appear on the globe, but can be filtered in the archive.
• Catalogue errors. Misspelled pairings, mismatched titles, misspelled places and reused codes are shown on each card as they appear. They are not quietly fixed.
• Translations. Descriptions are translated with AI and labelled unofficial. If the official text changes, its translation is no longer shown until it is translated again.
• Cards and case files. Every case is published as a catalogue card and analyzed one by one: 14 of 293 are analyzed today. The archive log dates every case opened, published or revised. An analyzed case file keeps showing the catalogue's description, records and errors: it adds to them, it never hides them.
• Records, not commentary. PURSUE's records are cited, not the political statements that come with them.

Catalogue data as of Sep 18, 2026 · catalogue file fingerprint (SHA-256): c3f8209ef5f53a124bf3f30c4a36106ffaa63ea9770ad2d33e2ba5c4fec347c7

The live sky

The Observatory shows what is in the sky right now that could be mistaken for a UAP. It is context, not evidence:

• Space Station and Starlink: orbits published by CelesTrak, computed with the SGP4 model. True altitude.
• Flights: The OpenSky Network, a network of volunteer receivers. It refreshes every 15 minutes for every visitor; between refreshes, aircraft move in straight lines. Coverage is thin over the oceans.
• Weather balloons: there are no official real-time positions. What you see is a model of the scheduled launches of NOAA's radiosonde stations, and it is labelled as such.
• Day and night: a calculation of the sun's position.
• Scale: flight altitudes are exaggerated ×8 and balloon altitudes ×20 so they lift off the surface; at true scale an airliner would sit 0.2 % above the ground.

Known limitations

What HUME does not do well yet, or cannot do:

• Version 1 shows frames, not the videos: motion is described, not seen. The official video is always one click away.
• The PURSUE translations are made by AI and not reviewed; they also reproduce the original's typos.
• The Timeline relies mostly on AARO's history, which centres on the US; the 1980s have no milestone in the sources read.
• The GOFAST parallax lab ignores wind and the aircraft's true heading, which is unknown. AARO declares the same limitation.
• Some cases have no place or are off the globe, and some zones overlap at global zoom.

Facts we looked for and do not publish, because they could not be verified in a primary source. When something cannot be checked, it is left out, and we say so:

• The publication date of AARO's 2025 annual report: it is not printed in the PDF, so its cut-off date is used.
• When the term “UFO” was coined: only its use from 1952 on is on record.
• The exact wording of the 2022 change from “aerial” to “anomalous”: the title of the law's section is cited.
• An alleged 2026 AARO note on GIMBAL, cited only by a secondary website.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, write to uap@thehumeproject.com or raise it on r/TheHumeProject. Say which page and, if you can, which official document and page contradicts it.

Every correction is checked against the primary source. If it holds, the case file is corrected and the archive log records it as “Revised”, with its date and what changed. Corrections are never made quietly.

Source index

Every document cited on HUME, with its date and the day it was verified. Each one opens its original.

Credits and license

HUME is a personal project by Isaac Chaves, editor, unaffiliated with any government or agency. Design: Isaac Chaves. Code: Claude Code, by Anthropic.

What HUME adds is published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license; the official originals are in the public domain. License and reuse · Privacy