Terms and data license

Version 2026-10-16. Plain language on purpose; where it is vague, the stricter reading applies. This is not legal advice.

1. What The Anomaly Commons is

The Anomaly Commons is a public archive of first-hand accounts of UFO sightings, hauntings, cryptid encounters and other anomalous experiences, published on this site and through a free API. It is run by one person as a public resource. Reports are what people say they experienced; the Commons does not vouch for them. Until 17 October 2026 the site was called ParaAPI, and that name lives on in the code and the API’s technical identifiers.

2. The data license

Reports submitted directly to The Anomaly Commons under these terms are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-4.0). In short: you may copy, share and build on them, for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit “The Anomaly Commons” and link back to the report or to this site. Credit given to “ParaAPI”, the site’s name before 17 October 2026, counts too.

Commercial use needs a commercial API key. Commercial use includes, without limitation: films, television and streaming programmes, podcasts or videos with sponsors or advertising, books sold for money, games, products and merchandise, paid datasets, and training or fine-tuning of models offered as a paid service. If that is you, contact the maintainer before you build; the answer is usually yes, on terms.

Research, journalism, education, personal projects, open-source tools and non-profit work are welcome under the free license. If you are not sure which side you are on, ask.

Imported reports (the source fields say where a report came from) remain under their source’s terms. The API states each report’s license in its license field, and reports with no explicit grant say so with null.

3. Using the API

• Reading is free and needs no key. Anonymous callers get a per-minute allowance per address; a free API key from /developers raises it and lets us contact you about changes.
• Submitting from code needs a key. Keys are personal: do not share them or embed them in public clients. We may revoke a key that is abused, and we may change limits with notice through the API’s headers and this page.
• Credit The Anomaly Commons wherever the data appears, and link back when you can.
• Do not use the data to identify, locate or contact witnesses. Published locations are deliberately imprecise unless a witness chose otherwise.
• The API is provided as is, without warranty of accuracy, availability or fitness for any purpose.

4. Submitting a report

When you submit a report you confirm that:

• it is your own account, or one you are entitled to pass on, and it is true to the best of your knowledge;
• you grant The Anomaly Commons a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive right to store, edit for clarity, publish and distribute it under section 2, and to let others use it on those terms;
• you keep your own rights and may publish the same account anywhere else;
• photos you attach are yours to share and contain nothing you would not want public.

You can edit or withdraw a report at any time through its private link. Withdrawal deletes the content and the photos; copies that others made under the license while it was published are not ours to recall.

5. What stays private

Your email address, the exact location you gave, the text you typed for the location, your IP address (stored only as a salted hash) and the original photo files are never published and never shared, with anyone, for any reason short of a legal obligation. The public location is the centre of the area you chose to publish at, and a private home is never shown closer than its town. Moderators see the private details to review the report.

6. Moderation

A person reads every report before it is published and may decline it (spam, duplicates, fiction, too little detail, off topic, abuse, legal risk), or remove a published one later. There is no appeal process beyond editing and resubmitting.

7. Changes

These terms may change. The version you accepted is recorded with your report or key, and the current version is always at this address. Material changes to the license apply only to reports submitted after the change.