How it works, and how to catch us out

We do not tell you what happened to you. We tell you who else said something like it, and exactly why we put those accounts together. This page is the whole method, including where it fails.

The test we set ourselves

Anyone can build something that finds patterns. The hard part is proving it finds real ones. So we handed the engine 43,684 accounts stripped of any labels, told it nothing about history, and asked a simple question: would it find the famous nights on its own?

Where it failed

It missed the Yukon entirely. Not because the engine is blind, but because the archives we started with are heavily American and barely record where Canadian accounts came from. That is a gap in the record, not a mystery, and we are filling it. We would rather show you the miss than a table of nine wins.

How two accounts get connected

Three things, all of them visible to you on every match.

Does it read the same?

Your words are compared against every account in the record. Not keyword search, meaning. Someone writing “a tall dark shape crossed the road” and someone writing “a big black figure walked in front of my car” are saying the same thing.

Did you both notice something unusual?

Sharing something rare counts far more than sharing something common. Half the record mentions lights. Almost nobody mentions wood knocking. If you both mention wood knocking, that matters.

How far apart were you?

Closer counts for more, but distance never rules a match out. Some of the strangest connections in the record are between people on opposite sides of a continent.

What is actually doing the searching

The connections are found by a memory system called Neruva, built by the same person who built this site. It is not a chatbot and there is no language model reading your account. That distinction matters more than it sounds, for four reasons.

It gives the same answer twice

Ask it the same question tomorrow and you get the same result, in the same order, for the same reasons. A system that quietly changes its mind cannot be checked by anybody, and a record that cannot be checked is just a rumour with a database behind it.

It can be replayed

Every connection can be reconstructed afterwards: what was searched, what came back, and how it was scored. When we publish a claim like the nine of ten result above, that claim is a re-runnable procedure rather than a screenshot.

It costs nothing to ask

Searching the whole record does not bill anybody by the question, so we never have to ration it, put it behind a subscription, or quietly search less of the archive to save money. One person running this on a modest budget can let everybody search everything.

It shows the reasons

Because the connection is assembled from parts we can name, we can hand you the parts. That is why every match on this site arrives with a sentence explaining itself instead of a confidence percentage you are asked to take on faith.

How the substrate represents and retrieves all this is the technology behind it, and we keep that under the hood. What we owe you is not the engine schematic, it is the reasoning behind every claim on your screen, and that is on the page every time.

When we have nothing

If the record holds nothing genuinely like your account, we say so and show you nothing. It would be easy to fill the page with five loose matches and let you draw a line between them. That is how these places go wrong. “You may be the first” is a real answer here.

The same account twice is still one account

If one report reaches us through two archives, or somebody submits theirs twice, our counts inflate and the site shows corroboration that never existed. That is the error most likely to discredit a record like this, and it is a known plague of every large report database.

So before anything is counted, the record is checked for accounts that are the same account written twice, by comparing overlapping runs of words rather than trusting dates and places. We found 38 clusters and set aside 39 accounts, 0.089% of the record. They stay readable. They just never count as a second witness.

Twenty-five people are not always twenty-five people

If a story reaches the news, accounts start echoing each other. So before we call a night significant we check whether people described it in their own words or in the same borrowed ones. Our own headline case gets marked down for this: the Halloween night in Tinley Park has the most accounts of any night in the record, and the weakest independence score. We publish that number next to it.

We check for the boring answer first

Most places in this field leave “could it have been something ordinary?” as an argument in a comment thread. We compute it. Every night the engine detects is checked against the public record of what was genuinely happening at that place and hour:

• Fireballs, from NASA's near-earth object survey.
• Earthquakes, from the USGS catalogue, which explains a surprising number of booms, rumbles and shaking houses.
• The moon, because a full moon behind cloud has fooled a great many people, including sober ones.
• Venus, calculated for that place and that hour. It is the most misidentified object in the sky, by a distance.
• The calendar, because orange lights rising silently on the fourth of July are usually sky lanterns.

Of the first 120 nights we checked, 79 had at least one ordinary candidate, and it is written on the page. The other 41 had none. That second number is the one worth caring about, and it only means anything because we went looking for the first.

A candidate is not a verdict. A fireball the same evening does not prove that is what somebody saw, and we do not close a case because a computer found a coincidence.

The meteor

One night the engine flagged as significant turned out to be a documented fireball over the Great Lakes in 1999. It had no idea what a meteor was. It simply noticed ten strangers describing the same thing within an hour. We keep that one on the site, marked answered. An instrument that cannot find ordinary explanations has no business pointing at strange ones. Read it

What we do with your account

• A person reads it before anything appears publicly.
• Locations are always blurred. We never publish an address.
• Nobody gets your contact details. If two people want to compare notes, it goes through us, both sides have to agree, and either can walk away.
• We never mock a witness and we never diagnose one.
• Ask us to remove your account and we remove it.