License and reuse
What is public domain, what is HUME's own work, and how to reuse it with credit.
Updated
In short
The official videos, frames and documents are public domain: you can use them freely. What HUME adds is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0).
You may share and adapt it without asking, as long as you credit HUME with a link to the page you took it from, name the license and do not use it commercially.
HUME's own work
The license covers everything HUME adds to the official records:
- The case-file analyses: summaries, key facts, timelines, hypotheses, discrepancies and the editor's reading.
- The translations of the documents and of the PURSUE catalogue cards.
- The numbered markers and readouts on the frames.
- The images HUME has processed (for example, brightened averages of a video), which carry a credit band and are flagged in their caption.
- The selection and arrangement of the archive, and the cards shown when a link is shared.
The official originals
Videos, frames, reports and documents from US federal agencies (the Department of War, AARO, the FBI, the Navy, the CIA and others) are works of the federal government and in the public domain. HUME claims no rights over them: cropping or copying them does not make them HUME's. Every image links to its original file.
Some videos were filmed by private citizens and released by the agency with the public domain mark: they are reproduced under that mark. Witness drawings are reproduced as the agency released them; their authors may keep their rights.
How to cite
Name HUME, link the page you took the content from and name the license. If you changed something, say so. Every case file ends with its citation ready to copy. For example:
Source: HUME · https://thehumeproject.com/en/sensor-room/gimbal · CC BY-NC 4.0
Commercial use
To use HUME's work commercially (a monetized video, a book, a documentary, a paid publication), ask for permission at uap@thehumeproject.com. The official originals need nobody's permission.
Search engines and AI
Search engines and AI assistants are welcome to read and cite HUME. We ask of them what we ask of any reader: link the page each fact comes from. Every page states its authorship and license in structured data (schema.org), and there is a summary of the project written for them: llms.txt.
What the license does not cover
The HUME name, its visual identity and the site's code.