A place to put it on record.
People in Washington see things they can’t explain. Most of them never tell anyone, because the two available options are being laughed at or being charged a membership fee to file a form. This is the third option: a public map, an open archive, and a small group of people who take the work seriously without pretending to know more than they do.
Investigating the unexplained, one case at a time.
Three commitments
These aren’t marketing. They’re the reasons this exists, and each one is built into how the site actually works rather than just stated here.
Reporting is free. Reading every case is free. Membership is free. Nothing on this site has ever been behind a payment and nothing will be. If money is ever needed to keep it running, it will be asked for openly and it will buy the asker nothing except our thanks — no early access, no hidden cases, no rank.
Every published case is readable by anyone, member or not, with no login and no request form. The map is public. The archive is public. If a case is interesting enough to keep in a drawer, it’s interesting enough to show you — the only things ever withheld are the things that would identify a witness.
Lights, craft, creatures, figures, sounds, physical traces. Nobody here will tell you your sighting belongs to the wrong category or the wrong organisation. Washington doesn’t sort itself into tidy subjects and neither will we.
What happens to your report
This is the part that matters most, so it’s written plainly rather than as a privacy policy nobody reads.
- You choose who sees it. The default is nobody.
- Every report is filed as private unless you say otherwise. A private report is never published, never mapped, and can’t be published later — the database refuses the write, not just the button. If you want it on the map you have to choose that, deliberately, at the time.
- Your exact location is never public.
- Where it happened is stored separately from the case itself, in a table that the public site cannot read at all. What appears on the map is a deliberately generalised point — near a town, not at an address. Your back garden does not become a pin.
- Your email is a way to reach you, not a byline.
- Contact details live in their own restricted table, visible only to reviewed investigators, and never appear on any public page. Giving one is optional. Reports without one are read exactly as carefully.
- You never need an account.
- Reporting requires no sign-up, no membership, and no application. Membership is for people who want to be in the room while the work happens — it has never been a condition of being listened to.
How a report becomes a case
- You file it.A few minutes, phone-friendly. Say what you saw, when, roughly where, and what you think it might have been — that last part is optional and kept separate from the observation itself.
- A moderator reads it.A person, not a filter. They see the full testimony including the restricted details, because you can’t assess a report without them.
- A public case file is written.A title, a redacted summary, a generalised location, a category and a status. Names, addresses, contact details and exact coordinates are removed at this step, not hidden by a setting.
- It goes on the map — or it doesn’t.Reports marked private are held, never published. Anything published can be revised as an investigation continues, and every revision records who changed what and when.
What the statuses actually mean
A case’s status is a claim about our confidence, not about how exciting it is. It changes as we learn more, in both directions.
- Under review
- Filed and read. Nobody has looked into it properly yet.
- Investigating
- Somebody is actively working it — checking flight paths, weather, satellite launches, other reports from the same night.
- Unexplained
- We looked and came up short. Not proof of anything; an honest admission that the ordinary explanations were checked and didn’t fit.
- Identified
- We found the answer and it was ordinary. These stay published on purpose. A record that only keeps its mysteries isn’t a record, it’s a highlight reel.
- Historical
- Documented before this project existed, kept here for context and continuity.
Who’s behind it
Between Worlds · Case Files is run by the author of Between Worlds and a small group of researchers in Washington who already meet monthly, in person, across the state. There is no head office and no membership department. It is a handful of people with a database and a standard.
We are not a government body, we are not affiliated with any national organisation, and we do not speak for anyone but ourselves.