Reporting New Sightings: A Request & Suggestion

The percentage of new threads that come from the 'Aliens & UFOs' forum is on a dramatic rise. The interest that the O'Hare sighting engendered has the ATS community scouring the internet for new sightings. ATS has become a force in the UFO community, no question.

One problem is that everyone is anxious to be the one that breaks the next new sighting. What is happening instead is that we're getting a large number of duplicate postings of the same sighting over several days. It makes one sighting look like a wave at a certain location. We're also getting reports that go back months or years that are posted as if they just happened.

I think we're all after the same thing here: complete and accurate information. Let me make a couple of very simple suggestions that I believe will make our UFO investigation a much better resource for everyone.

First, before posting your new story, take a few minutes to search through the UFO forum to see if a thread already exists that talks about a sighting in the same geography as yours. If so, take the time to read the earlier post to make certain that yours is, in fact, a different event. If it's not a truly new event PLEASE don't start a new thread. Instead, add any new information you uncover to the existing thread. This keeps all the information about a particular event in the same place.

Second, before you start your 'new' sighting thread, verify the date, location and if possible time of the event. If you plan to start a thread about a 'NEW' sighting make sure it hasn't already been posted and that the event just happened. Just because you havn't heard of the event before does not make it 'NEW'.

Finally, if it is an older event but doesn't seem to have been posted already, frame your title accordingly: "2002 Sighting in Brazil", "April 1996 Photo of Cylinder in Greenland". You'll see alot of people doing it this way and it keeps the forum organized and easy to search.

These suggestions may slow down your 'breaking' post by a few minutes but it will hugely improve the quality of the ATS UFO & Aliens Forum and make it a far more robust investigative tool.

All in favor?