Public Work / Live
UFO Disclosure Map
An interactive geospatial interface over the United States Department of Defense UFO disclosure archive, releases one through three.
Direct answer
What did Devzilla build?
Devzilla turned a difficult government disclosure archive into an interactive geospatial system with searchable events, documents, imagery, and remote media.
Constraint
The challenge
The source archive mixes documents, images, video, audio, locations, and release-specific URL structures. The complete source archive is roughly twelve gigabytes, which is too large to treat as an ordinary static website bundle.
Architecture
What was built
The application uses a framework-free MapLibre interface over a generated events dataset. It bundles the images needed for stable visual context, links documents to war.gov, and embeds video and audio from DVIDS. A separate archive repository owns the data-regeneration pipeline while the deployed application remains self-contained.
Engineering decisions
The choices that shaped the system
- Keep map state in the URL hash so shared views need no server-side path routing.
- Bundle the twenty-four images the interface actually displays instead of depending on untracked parent directories.
- Remove approximately seven megabytes of thumbnails that the application never reads.
- Keep heavy government video, audio, and documents remote so the deploy remains approximately twenty-one megabytes instead of twelve gigabytes.
Current result
What exists now
The map is live from one Cloudflare Worker at its canonical Devzilla subdomain. Missing assets return real 404 responses, the source repository builds from a clean clone, and the original government media remains linked to its primary hosts.
Bring Devzilla the difficult source.
We will start with what must be true, what can fail, and who needs to own the result.
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