dataset_bundle/methodology.md

Drone Sightings Near Covered U.S. Military and Civilian Areas

What This Shows

This release shows a bounded set of U.S. news-reported drone sightings mapped to official military and civilian covered-area registries.

How The Slice Was Built

• Covered areas come from official U.S. government sources for military installations, airports, power plants, and ports.
• News candidates are harvested through a bounded search layer and then fetched as raw article HTML for deterministic parsing.
• Stories are matched only to covered-area registry entries and deduped into area-scoped events.
• When a story mentions more than one plausible area and a single primary area cannot be resolved deterministically, the story is kept out of the public map.

Source Window

• Start: 2026-01-01
• End: 2026-04-20

What This Does Not Prove

This release tracks reported drone sightings from news stories and does not prove intent, threat, wrongdoing, illegality, or the identity of any aircraft operator.