The Standard · Part 5 of 5 — Evaluation
Two separate questions, scored separately: how completely is a case documented, and how compelling is what the evidence shows? Opinion lives here — never in the record.
Scoring deliberately answers two questions that are usually conflated, and never lets one masquerade as the other. A thin record of something extraordinary and an exhaustive record of something mundane should both be visible for exactly what they are.
How well-documented is this case?
Measures how much of a record is actually filled in, against every field the standard defines. Add a field to the standard and the measure extends automatically.
How anomalous is what the evidence shows?
Blends the technology, biologics, and origin claims on a record into a weighted consensus — with an honest range when evaluators disagree.
There is no hand-maintained checklist. The measure is derived from the standard itself: every individual field a record can hold — 226 fields today, 12 of them required — checked for whether it actually carries a value. Add a field to the standard and the measure extends automatically. The fields that come back empty are the point: the missing list is the disclosure gap, named field by field.
temporal40 fields · 2 required
location30 fields · 6 required
provenance27 fields
sourceData18 fields
objectCharacteristics12 fields
featuredMedia11 fields
movement11 fields
aviation10 fields
identifiers10 fields
environment9 fields
investigation9 fields
relations7 fields
witnesses7 fields
responseImpact6 fields
sensorEvidence4 fields
createdAt1 field · 1 required
dataSourceId1 field
description1 field
documents1 field
eventType1 field
extensions1 field
id1 field · 1 required
internalNotes1 field
media1 field
physicalEvidence1 field
schemaVersion1 field
status1 field · 1 required
summary1 field
testimony1 field
updatedAt1 field · 1 required
The second axis reads the claims attached to a record — never the raw facts directly — and reduces them to one weighted consensus. Each signal comes from an earlier part of the standard, and the default weights are published numbers, not hidden settings: anyone can apply their own, and every result records which weights produced it.
Observable claims — anomaly strength
Each observable claim contributes its evidentiary tier’s weight, multiplied by the claim’s confidence. The ladder is the same one from Part 2: testimony alone moves the score a quarter as far as independently confirmed sensor data.
Origin claims — the prosaic gate
An origin claim contributes its confidence in a non-prosaic explanation. A confident classification under the prosaic branch of the Part 3 tree means the case is explained — so it contributes zero anomaly signal, no matter how dramatic the testimony reads.
1.1.1.*Prosaic→ 0Ordinary or conventional explanations for observed phenomena.
The prefix set is overridable per call — a stricter policy can treat more of the tree as explained.
Because a record keeps every claim as a list (Part 4), the scorer never has to pick a winner. It reports the consensus, the honest spread across competing claims, and whether evaluators disagree about whether anything anomalous happened at all — in one result.
scoreOverall compellingness (consensus point estimate), 0–1.
rangeSpread of the score across competing claims — wide range signals disagreement. Bounds are computed per-signal under the same strongest-anomaly (max) reduction as the point estimate, not a global min/max over every claim.
contestedTrue when claims disagree on *direction* (some assert anomaly, some assert none).
componentsPer-signal consensus contributions before weighting.
weightsRelative weights for the compellingness components. Need not sum to 1 — normalized internally.
scoringVersionMethodology version that produced this score.
Records hold facts and attributed claims; scoring is where trust enters. The consensus score accepts an evaluatorWeight setting that controls how much each evaluator’s assessment counts toward the final number (all equal by default). An organization can give official or verified evaluators more weight without changing the method. The range and the contested flag are deliberately untouched by trust: they always report what evaluators actually said. Different organizations can apply their own policy to the same records; the standard ships one transparent default, and every part of it can be adjusted.
The record below is USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” (2004) — the standard’s golden-path example, carrying the claims from Parts 2 and 3. Every number in this section is computed by @disclosureos/scoring when this page builds. Nothing here is typed in, so if the methodology changes, this section changes with it.
Inputs — the claims on the record
Radar tracked descent from ~80,000 ft to sea level in seconds.
Subsurface radar returns reported on departure.
1.1.3Extraterrestrial40%Performance exceeds known aerospace capability; cannot exclude advanced terrestrial program.
1.1.1.2.1Governmentalalternative25%Completeness
Even one of the best-known cases on record fills a fraction of the schema. That gap is the point: completeness quantifies what disclosure would actually take.
Every claim asserts some anomaly, so the consensus is tight and the range collapses to a point.
Now add one dissenting claim
Apparent acceleration is consistent with a radar-processing artifact.
One evaluator asserts no anomaly. The point drops, the range widens to show both readings, and the case is flagged contested.
That completes the journey: a record of facts, the observables it may exhibit, the explanations it may have, the claims that attach each assessment to its evidence, and the scoring layer that turns it all into honest numbers. To put it to work, start with the documentation.