I was so happy when I saw UFO Day was this week – now more commonly referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) now.

Not because I believe in them. But because I’m personally convinced by the surfeit of evidence that non-human, high-intelligence systems that we don’t yet understand – and perhaps never can – coexist with humans on this planet right now.

It seems to me that many of these interact with us in inexplicable ways and some of these UFOs sightings are likely evidence of this. (That got trippy fast, didn’t it? Ha!)

Openly arguing that UAPs are more likely non-human intelligence is a minority position among the educated class, but I suppose that’s par for course for me. In my mind, interesting science is always in pushing the envelope and expanding our knowledge via hypotheses (and accepting the results of tests); unfortunately, the “funded” science is often found in the regurgitation of established knowledge.

The sightings are real – not hoaxes – and quite a few are inexplicable using contemporary physics. UAP research is definitely more interesting to me than writing another article on ethics in cartography, for example.

Does that mean I naively believe every citizen UFO report or government video is evidence? Absolutely not. In fact, studies have shown that only about 4% of sightings or remotely sensed objects are inexplicable.

But I do believe that as a scientist, I need to be open to evidence that goes against my original indoctrination and expectations. And I’ve read up on UAPs a lot in my spare time; the books by scientists and reputable journalists (some sources posted at the end of this blog) investigating the topic, primarily, as well as some good articles in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers Magazine, and similar.

I’ve also become a fellow of the Information Physics Institute (IPI), founded by physicist Melvin Vopson. The work of Vopson has really expanded my thinking about space-time and UAPs broadly. Coupled with the stellar works of Caleb Scharf (i.e., data is the agent, humans are part of its environment) and the research of Michael Levin (i.e., “life” is a social category; intelligent systems are everywhere), and Donald Hoffman’s evolutionary evidence that humans cannot possibly perceive or measure reality – oiur environment is a hallucinated construct – it seems far more likely that non-human intelligent systems run amok all around and even through us than not.

But the cool thing about science… it doesn’t matter what I think, you think, what anyone thinks. 🙂 We can build hypotheses and test them with evidence. And the tide is turning. More and more scientists are sincerely engaging with the topic and coming to the same conclusion – currently inexplicable sh*t is going down. That’s what excites me; no matter what we discover.

Which brings me to today’s map…

I was stoked to design a visualization that promotes some of the more famously documented experiences throughout history, as well as the 2026 www.war.gov/ufo releases that have videos. Note: You can view the videos from the maps and the support documents. You can filter by shape, credibility of the people who reported the sightings, year, etc.

The goal is to educate the public that largely still believes UAPs and UFOs are a giant hoax or only spotted by naive humans seeing things.

Perhaps this map won’t change minds at all, and that’s okay. Again, it doesn’t matter what we think. Something is there. That’s based on evidence.

I hope you have fun exploring the map. If you haven’t seen the videos released this year, they are available in the relevant info windows. Some are silly – balloons, likely. Others… I can see why President Obama refuses to say aliens aren’t real. 🙂

Further Reading (for those interested)

• Leslie Kean. UFOs: Generals,Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.
• Loeb, Avi. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. (Former Chair of the Astronomy Department at Harvard University. Personal, sincere, and hopeful.)
• Hastings, Robert Lambert. UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. (Systematic review of all the reported and observed UFOs around US nuclear missile and testing sites.)
• Coutlhart, Ross. In Plain Sight: An investigation into UFOs and impossible science. (Most readable but also least critical? Australian, 60 Minutes, investigative journalist.)
• Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. (An important counterpoint to the above. Argues it may be a psychological warfare campaign.)
• The New Yorker:
  • How the Pentagon Began Taking UFOs Seriously
  • The Unexplained Phenomena of the UFO Report
  • The Enticing Mysteries of UFO Photography
• Department of War, 2026 UFO/UAP Classified Materials Release Site: https://www.war.gov/UFO/

View Map Here

Web Mapper LLM Suite (www.webmapgpt.com/agents.html)

# Intention
Create a cool, non-sensational, but aesthetically spot on, map highlighting the most famous UAP sightings, alien encounters, and most mystifying US military photos and videos.

Continue reading →

The US is obsessed with hydration. It’s pretty amazing how many people carry around water bottles compared to when I was growing up. So it makes sense that someone, somewhere, came up with a National Hydration Day.

There are many reasons this day makes no sense.

First of all, hydration is temporary. Hydrating an entire nation in one day does not increase national life expectancy.

Second, and I’m loath to get into vegetal politics here given that I have already been accused of “bashing vegetarians” this week by an anonymous reader online, but… Should humans really promote hogging water for themselves? Politically, I have to side with flora over fauna – at least when it comes to hydration

But as you can see, this celebratory day is as ridiculous as many others.

Unless, I suppose, you’re actually feeling parched today. In which case, hydration could save your life.

So today I decided to map US drought data from the most recent date available (June 9, 2026).

I first  had GIS Dataset Doctor find the drought data across all US counties with a python script it wrote and also to determine the total area of different counties in different levels of drought. That was cool!

It also scraped some US Census data with that API to get populations and did a very rough, not-modeled equal population distribution analysis (i.e., definitely not overly accurate) of how many people were in different drought zones in each county.

It put it all in a single dataset for me and that was that.

I then asked Web Mapper to create a map that epitomizes dryness (hence the sandy/brown color scheme). And now we have a map showing which counties are parched today, on National Hydration Day, which have the most people likely/roughly living in parched areas, and where you can probably imbibe in hydrating today without feeling overly guilty… unless you aren’t into vegetal politics, in which case, I recommend drinking as much water as you like on any given day. 🙂

P.S. The bivariate legend doubles as a multi-select filter, and you can search for any county using a search menu.

View Map Here

Web Mapper Prompt (webmapgpt.com)

Please use the attached dataset(s) to design and create a map that fulfills the following, noting the caveats.

• Must show drought index severity by county.
• Must show what percentage of county is in different types of drought by area
• Should have a bivariate representation of this at some point
• Should be designed to look parched, dry, and very matter-of-fact scientific.
• Would be cool to include Puerto Rico too.

Can you use an Albers Equal Area map, though, with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left? I don’t really care for leaflet. Unless this will cause massive loading problems or mobile campatibility issues. Also, for Mobile Versions: please design a simple header title and hamburger dropdown menu for all legends, sources, modal, etc., to be hidden under.

Happy World Yoga Day. I can’t do yoga. I can’t stretch. I’m old.

My sister-in-laws are yoga instructors. Yes, plural. They don’t make a living at it, but they tell me I should do it. I probably should. But I know I won’t. I’m too addicted to my computer and board games.

Anyway, enough about my life, what about today’s map?

The world is very stressful these days. The idea of World Yoga Day got me thinking: if everyone took a day to do yoga, perhaps we’d all get along better – albeit briefly. Conflicts would fade away. (I feel like I should be playing a George Harrison LP right now… but the record player is in the garage so…)

And then I thought about those caricature and cartoon maps from the early-twentieth century, where different countries were shown as bears, octopods, feisty queens, menacing Lutherans, etc. (Okay, only one country was ever represented as a menacing Lutheran soldier, i.e., Prussian, but I liked the idea and had to sneak it in.)

So what if I created a map of people doing yoga around the world? Perhaps it might alleviate stress – if The Daily Dread map’s attempt at exposure therapy didn’t work – and bring about world peace.

So that’s what I did. It’s as trippy and weird as you might expect an LLM image maker to produce given the amount of body parts involved. I haven’t found anything offensive on it yet, though, fortunately. (Though, I’m not sure penguins would approve of being represented as so flexible.) So here it is. Honestly, the easiest map I’ll make this week; even though physically, I can’t possible replicate a single maneuver on here.

Thanks for following us on this journey! Happy mapping!

A Side Note for the AI Map Accuracy Police

Before any accuracy trolls bombard Ken with comments on social media, just a couple of notes:

I’m well aware that penguins don’t live in the arctic. Got us!

Also, the people on the map shouldn’t really be as big as they are! How did the AI (and I) miss that?! They weren’t even projected to scale.

Obviously, these issues lend credence to the popular narrative among elite cartographers and writers that AI produces slop. That it is destroying human thinking. That it will lead to brain apathy.

These are truly insightful hypotheses and arguments. Not reactionary or self-serving at all. Totally unexpected. I think with enough scientific evidence like this, you will surely turn the tide against the biggest technological development in human history. Best to hunker down with yesterday’s technology and wait this “fad” out.

But you won’t believe this!

I have a brilliant “Hello Kitty” world map in my home. Made by humans, and I love it! But there’s one thing that makes me absolutely livid whenever I look at it.

It shows Hello Kitty sitting on a bench waiting for a school bus in Antarctica.

What an egregious and sloppy error!

We all know school buses don’t stop in Antarctica.

View Full Size Zoomable and Pannable Version of Map

Prompt Used in Standard ChatGPT

For international day of yoga, I would like to create a funny world map where every country is curling around neighboring countries in yoga-like poses. The map should be styled off of the classic maps from the early 20th century where countries were represented as animals, caricatures, etc., bumping into one another. (I’ll try to find and post several examples here.)

The countries should look like people. The people included should be diverse. All of the people should be dressed in yoga clothing and mostly clothed. It should be satirical and comical. Wimmelwelt artistic humor but with the look and appearance of a map. They can be brighter colored than these older versions.

Please try to fill the countries or shape the countries as much as possible with people doing positions. I don’t really want boundaries being shown or any country labels. Just a massive game of global twister with some oceans inbetween where it makes sense. Try to create yoga poses for all of the larger countries by area. You may aglomerate smaller countries into the larger ones. At least 50 people doing yoga poses, though, hopefully more!

Make the image very large, landscape style (e.g., 2500 px wide by whatever). I will tile it and allow people to zoom in on it on a website to view details. Have fun with this.

In the lower right of the image, please add “www.webmapgpt.com”.