The Conversational Intake: How Project Hermes Redesigned the UAP Report Around How Humans Actually Remember

If you have ever tried to file a UFO report on a legacy platform, you know the shape of the problem. A single long page. Required fields in a vocabulary the witness does not own — bearing, azimuth, elevation angle in degrees, UTC offset. Validation errors for leaving optional fields blank. And if the witness loses signal or closes the tab, the whole thing is gone.

Hermes v0.7.2 threw out that template.

One question per screen, in human memory order

The new intake at /intake is a 12-step wizard. Each screen asks one question. The questions appear in the order a human actually remembers an event: when, where, where-in-the-sky, what-you-saw-first, what-it-did, how-it-ended, duration, who-was-with-you, how-you're-feeling, privacy. A review screen lets the witness edit any answer before submission. A success screen gives the case ID with explicit write this down framing.

This order is not cosmetic. Episodic memory does not retrieve by field type; it retrieves by narrative. Asking "when" before "coordinates" is not condescension — it is alignment with how recall actually works. The data that comes out the other side is denser, more internally consistent, and less contaminated by the witness back-filling gaps to satisfy a form.

The witness never sees the word "latitude"

The default flow has no lat/lon fields. The witness types a city, an address, a landmark, or a highway milepost. Hermes forward-geocodes it via OpenStreetMap Nominatim — the same dependency the old intake already used — and shows a confirmation card. A "use my phone's GPS" button is the secondary option. An Expert toggle is available for users who want to enter raw coordinates, but the words latitude and longitude never appear unless the witness asks for them.

This is the single most important UX decision in the release. Latitude and longitude are not the witness's unit of memory. They are the analyst's unit of reasoning. Mixing them up at the collection point has been degrading UAP data for as long as UAP data has existed.

Draft-save on every keystroke

Every answer persists to localStorage under hermes.intake.draft.v2. A resume banner appears at the top of the page if an unfinished draft exists on the device. A frazzled witness who loses signal, closes the tab, or hands their phone to a passenger can come back and pick up mid-flow. This single affordance — drafts that do not disappear — probably recovers more completed reports per year than any other feature in the release.

Sky direction, calibrated

Azimuth (0–359°), elevation angle (−10° to 90°), and apparent field-of-view ("the size of the moon," "a fist at arm's length") are captured through a compass rose, sliders, and a plain-language FOV selector. They feed the same facing, elevation_angle, and new FOV interpretation that the rule catalog reasons over. A placeholder is reserved for a 3D Earth calibration surface (Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles), which will replace the sliders once the Maps API key is configured — but the parameter tuple stays the same regardless, so no existing analysis is invalidated by the eventual switch.

The new "how are you feeling" question

Four options: shaken, curious, unsure, fine. Stored verbatim in the case record as feeling. And here is the crucial discipline: this is witness-experience data, not phenomenon data. It never enters the audit trail. It never affects confidence scores. It exists because witness affect is a real dimension of the data — a report filed by someone shaken is not the same artifact as a report filed by someone curious, and any analysis of reporting behavior that ignores this is missing a variable. But affect must not contaminate the rule catalog. Hermes collects it, separates it, and labels the separation.

Privacy posture, on the record

During intake, the witness chooses between coarse (nearest town) and exact public display of their location. Default is coarse. Precise coordinates are always retained internally for the rule catalog to reason over; only the public case-detail rendering is affected by this choice. This is stored as privacy.location_precision. It is a small field with a large implication: it means a witness can contribute to the corpus — privately, precisely, on the record internally — without publishing their driveway's GPS coordinates to the internet.

Why it matters for the study of UAP

Bad reports are not the witness's fault. They are the form's fault. For decades, the forms in this field have been optimized for the analyst's convenience at collection time, and the result has been a corpus contaminated by the mismatch between what the witness knew and what the form required. Hermes's conversational intake is the first serious attempt to fix this at the collection point rather than clean it up afterward.

The downstream effect is not instantly visible. It will be visible in a year, in the density of case records that actually contain enough information to audit; in the completion rate of reports that used to be abandoned at step five; in the reduction of witness-induced noise in reporting-behavior analyses. These are boring-sounding wins, and they are exactly the kind of wins a maturing scientific field collects.

File a report — the new way — at projecthermes.tech/intake.

Project Hermes and UFO Index are affiliated projects.