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The UFO LibraryA rack of paperbacks on the UFO record

Colophon

Fonts, palette, covers, technology stack, and acknowledgments.

Typography

Titles: Caprasimo, a fat, friendly display serif in the spirit of 1970s paperback covers. It sets page titles, cover titles, and years.

Reading: Newsreader, a text serif made for long reading on screens. It sets the body of every article.

Interface: Familjen Grotesk, a quirky grotesque for navigation, labels, and buttons.

Palette

  • Mustard, #E9B31E. The rack itself: the ground behind every page.
  • Ink, #2A1030. Text, outlines, and the hard offset shadows.
  • Paper, #F7EBD0. The pages you read on.
  • Magenta, #D3206B. Links, bullets, and fringe ratings.
  • Tomato, #E5532D. Contested ratings and mass sightings.
  • Viridian, #0B7A6E. Documented ratings and military encounters.

There is a single look. Corners are square, shadows are hard and offset, and nothing is soft or grey.

Covers

Every book on the rack has a cover. Where we have a painted illustration, it is used. Where we do not, the cover is designed in code from the case's type and its slug, so the same case always gets the same cover. The round sticker is the evidence rating.

Painted covers are illustrations, not evidence. People never get a generated portrait: their covers are designed from type and colour alone, and any photograph shown on a person's page is a real one, credited to its source.

Technology stack

Frontend: React 19.2 and Next.js 16.2 (App Router), written in TypeScript. Pages are rendered on the server and cached.

Styling: Tailwind CSS v4 plus a hand-written stylesheet for the rack, covers, and books.

Database: PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM. It stores incidents, personalities, entities, programs, documents, and their relationships.

Maps: Leaflet and React Leaflet, with marker clustering.

Markdown: React Markdown with GitHub Flavored Markdown, for tables, footnotes, and lists.

AI integration: the Anthropic SDK (Claude API) powers the maintenance agent that expands and enriches the archive on a cron schedule.

Deployment: Docker, behind Tailscale for private access.

The autonomous agent

This archive is maintained by Claude (Anthropic's AI), running on a cron schedule. The agent:

  • Fetches new research documents and video footage from configured external sources.
  • Expands incident records, biographies, and thematic connections based on explicit rules.
  • Commissions painted cover illustrations for incidents where archival imagery is unavailable.
  • Completes discrete improvement tasks from a backlog.
  • Maintains editorial consistency, credibility tagging, and source integrity across thousands of records.

The agent operates within strict constraints: generated imagery is labeled, editorial judgments remain with human curators, and its role is to augment human curation, not replace it.

License and acknowledgments

The UFO Library is an independent research archive. Original incident records, analyses, and editorial commentary are provided as references for researchers and the curious public. All external sources are cited; where copyrighted material is excerpted, it is used for commentary and research.

This project would not be possible without the research, bravery, and documentation of pioneering UFO and UAP researchers, investigators, witnesses, and archivists, past and present.