Reporting and publication terms

Your authority to submit

You must have created the material or have all permissions required to submit it. Do not submit copyrighted material you are not authorised to provide, confidential or classified material, unlawfully obtained recordings, private documents, or content whose publication would violate another person’s privacy, publicity or other rights. If you are not legally able to grant these permissions yourself, do not submit without the authorisation required in your jurisdiction.

Licence granted for an approved submission

You retain your rights. By submitting, you grant UAPLocations a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to receive, store, reproduce, technically modify, resize, crop for thumbnails, transcode, display, distribute and make the submitted material available as reasonably necessary to operate, secure, document and present the UAPLocations archive. This includes allowing hosting, storage and technical service providers to perform those operations on behalf of UAPLocations. The licence does not transfer ownership to UAPLocations.

No payment or publication guarantee

Submission does not create an employment, investigation, reward or payment relationship and does not guarantee publication. UAPLocations may reject, remove, hide, correct metadata, reduce location precision or reclassify a submission for quality, legal, privacy, safety, security or editorial reasons.

Safe and lawful capture

Do not trespass, interfere with aircraft, emergency services or restricted areas, operate a vehicle unsafely, or place yourself or another person at risk to obtain material. The scanner is an observation aid only and is not an aviation or navigation service.

Photos, video and temporary originals

The incoming file is processed on the server. Verification information and a cryptographic hash may be read or calculated before optimization. Images can be re-encoded and resized; recordings can be transcoded when the server supports it. The service is designed not to keep an unnecessary second heavy upload after processing, but normal backups or security copies can persist for limited technical periods.

Technical observation and file metadata

A live report may include capture time, location and GPS accuracy, device orientation, camera information exposed by the browser, selected image point, an orientation track for a recording, and a snapshot of labels visible in the scanner. An uploaded camera file can contain EXIF or similar metadata such as capture time, camera/lens information and GPS or image direction.

Privacy and public location

No account, name or e-mail address is required by the reporting form. Exact coordinates used for moderation are not intended to be published at full device precision; approved map coordinates are reduced in precision. Avoid faces, vehicle plates, home addresses, private conversations and other unnecessary information about identifiable people.

Moderation and scientific caution

Approved reports are labelled COMMUNITY REPORT · UNVERIFIED. Aircraft, satellite, star or planet labels are technical aids only. A missing match does not prove that an object is anomalous, unexplained or extraterrestrial. UAPLocations can publish a conventional explanation or correction if later evidence supports one.

Abuse prevention

The application can keep a keyed hash of the connecting IP address and limited browser information to enforce rate limits, defend against bots, investigate abuse and protect the service. Standard hosting/server logs can exist independently of this application. Automated, deceptive or malicious submissions may be rejected or deleted.

Removal requests

An approved community report can be removed from public view when there is a valid privacy, rights, safety or correction reason. A removal request should identify the public record and provide enough information to verify the request. Technical backups may take additional time to expire.