Case Study
Discussion & Debate
This happened around 2016. I was on a cargo ship traveling from england to nova scotia. Somewhere off the south coast of greenland, while on midnight to 4am watch, the weirdest thing occurred. We noticed some activity on the radar, so i kept my eyes peeled out of the bridge windows trying to spot something. The night was crystal clear, tons of stars, and no signs of any other vessels anywhere near us. All of a sudden, an almost blanket of the thickest blizzard type snow i have ever seen overtook our location. I was shocked, it had a slight hum from how thick it was, and our visibility went down to absolute zero. I called the navigation officer to the window to experience the strange sight. All of a sudden, towards the port side bow of our ship, a ball of light formed and then imploded in a split second, making a slight vacuum thump noise, and the brightest light i have ever experienced exploded outward, completely blinding us. We fell back from the window shocked and waited for our vision to come back. Just as it did, like breaking through a wall, we exited the storm and were back in clear star filled skies. I did a round on deck shortly after to look for marks on the deck, but there was nothing. Iv been thinking about this for years. The only explanation i can come up with is that the snow storm was so thick, and our ship was so big (1000 foot) that the snow created some sort of static electricity, much like pulling a blanket over your feet in the dark and seeing small sparks, but on a much larger scale. Or could it have been something else completely?…
Research/info gathering
Built Ask the Record specifically because LLMs hallucinate constantly on UAP material, the training data is contaminated with decades of speculation and the models can't distinguish documented claims from popular myth.
How I addressed that:
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Retrieval over a curated, citation grounded corpus only (UAP/MKUltra/COINTELPRO declassified releases, no third party speculation)
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Hybrid retrieval, full text search plus embedding similarity, reranked
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Off topic gate: a classifier and a corpus similarity check must both agree before refusing a question, this avoids wrongly rejecting real but obscure topics
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Hard requirement that every answer cites source documents and page numbers, no source means no claim
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A Deep Research mode that breaks a complex question into 8 to 12 sub questions, runs them in parallel, then synthesizes the results
Corpus right now:
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UAP: CIA UFO files (1947 onward), the 2023 ODNI release, AAWSAP/AATIP material, Nimitz/Roosevelt incident files
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MKUltra: full declassified CIA records (1977 and 2001 releases)
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COINTELPRO: FBI files (1956 to 1971)
JFK records are next.
, free tier covers 3 questions, free signed in gets 25/month, Pro tier is $7/month and unlocks Deep Research.
Happy to discuss retrieval design, the off topic gate logic, or how the corpus is curated.
