The house rule
The evidence standard
We do not tell you what to believe. We tell you what is known, what is claimed, and where the two part company. That is the promise every Thaumatica archive makes, and this is the hardest subject to keep it on — which is why the rules are written down.
Every entry rests on the documentary record. A sighting cites the archive that holds it; a case cites every place the event surfaces — the government file, the FOIA release, the wire story, the reporting-center log — linked on one page rather than retold. Where the paper does not exist yet, the entry says so, and the house instrument exists to go and ask for it.
Dispositions are recorded as given, with their provenance. When the Air Force wrote "ball lightning," that is what the entry says the Air Force wrote — next to the weather records that argue with it. When the Pentagon wrote "remains characterized as unidentified," the entry says exactly that, and no more. An archive that upgrades its unknowns into visitors, or quietly explains them into weather, has stopped being an archive; a skeptic and a believer should both be able to trust this catalog, and neither should feel it is arguing with them.
The six grades
This archive's dialect of the house grading vocabulary, in the family's shared seal colours.
- Identified
Resolved to a known cause by an investigating body, with the identification on the record.
- Probable conventional
A conventional explanation is favored by the record but was never formally confirmed.
- Contested
Explanations were offered and are materially disputed — by investigators, witnesses, or the documents themselves.
- Unexplained
Investigated by a competent body and left unresolved. The rarest grade, and never awarded by us — only recorded.
- As reported
A witness account on file, unevaluated. Most of the archive rests here, and honestly so.
- Hoax
Established as fabrication, and kept in the catalog as such — deletion is its own distortion.
The linking rule
One event, however many archives it appears in, is one case. References to the same sighting across sources are attached to that case rather than duplicated in the log — a Blue Book file, a declassified memo, and sixty telephone reports from the same night sit on one page, each keeping its own provenance. Where the log's own entries fall inside a case's window of time and place, they are linked to it automatically and say so.
Witness text is preserved verbatim, spelling included. Editing a report for readability is editing the evidence.