Real-Time UFO Sighting Alerts for Your Area

Browsing the live map is satisfying, but nobody refreshes it every hour. The whole point of real-time UFO sighting alerts is to flip the model: instead of you checking the map, the map checks on you and speaks up only when it's worth your attention. Here's how that works on UFO Intel, and the design choices that keep it from becoming noise.

Pick an area, set a radius

Setting up an alert takes about as long as reporting a sighting. You choose a point on the map — your town, a stretch of coast, a patch of desert you keep an eye on — and a radius around it. That circle is your watch area. When sighting activity inside it rises meaningfully above the normal background level, you get a notification. You can make the radius tight around your neighborhood or wide enough to cover a whole region, depending on how much you want to hear.

No account, no password

Alerts are deliberately password-less. You register with an email address, confirm through a link, and alerts are then delivered as browser push notifications straight to your device — no account to create, no password to forget or leak. If you ever want them to stop, you block notifications in your browser and that's the end of it. The same privacy posture that governs everything else on the site applies here: we record what we need to run the alert and nothing we'd publish.

One honest note on delivery: email confirmation and push notifications depend on your browser and mail provider actually accepting them, so we treat delivery as best-effort rather than guaranteed. If a confirmation doesn't arrive, it's usually a spam filter or a browser that declined the notification permission — not a sighting you missed.

Why we tuned alerts not to cry wolf

An alert system that fires constantly is worse than none, because you learn to ignore it. That risk is real for UFO data: reports naturally rise around big cities, holiday fireworks, and viral news, and a naïve system would spam you every Fourth of July. So the trigger isn't raw count — it's a cluster of activity that stands out from the area's own baseline over a recent window. A quiet rural watch area might alert on a handful of reports in a night, while a busy metro needs a much sharper spike to say anything. The goal is a notification that means “something unusual is happening near you,” not “people exist near you.”

We'd rather occasionally stay silent through borderline activity than train you to swipe our alerts away. If anything, the system errs toward restraint.

What to do when an alert lands

Getting pinged is an invitation, not a conclusion. Open the map to your watch area and read the actual reports behind the spike: what shapes, what times, how tightly clustered. Often you'll find several people describing the same object from different vantage points — which is exactly the pattern that a single report can't reveal. And if you step outside, look up, and see it yourself, close the loop by filing your own sighting. Your report becomes part of the very cluster that alerted someone else.

Who alerts are for

Casual sky-watchers use a wide radius and enjoy the occasional heads-up. People near recurring hot spots — certain coastlines, ranges, and basins that stay active — set tighter areas and treat alerts as a genuine watch. Either way, the value compounds with the community: the more people who report, the sharper the clusters, and the more meaningful each alert becomes. It's a system that quite literally works better the more people use it.