How to Create a UFO Sightings Map with Extended Label Pins

Creating a UFO Sightings Map: A Step-by-Step Guide

Have you ever gazed skyward and pondered our solitude in the universe? Indeed, reports of UFO sightings span across America, and with ZeeMaps’ latest feature, you now have the power to depict these enigmatic occurrences with unprecedented clarity. The days of being constrained to three-character map pin labels are behind us. Let’s embark on a journey to craft a detailed UFO sightings map featuring extended pin labels.

Step 1: Assemble Your UFO Sightings Data

Your adventure starts with gathering data. Collect incidents of UFO sightings, carefully recording their locations and specifics. For instance, notable examples include:

  • Texas Lights: July 2021 brought bright, unexplained lights to Dallas.
  • Nevada Desert Encounter: A low-flying, silver object made its presence known near Area 51 in August 2019.
  • Seattle Sphere: May 2019 witnessed a shimmering sphere in Seattle.

Ensure that each sighting bears a unique identifier to act as its map label.

Step 2: Create Your Map

Commence by creating a new map on ZeeMaps, importing your catalog of UFO sightings. Verify that one of your data fields encapsulates the complete descriptions or identifiers for labeling.

UFO Sighting Map

Step 3: Apply the Labels

Once you’ve uploaded your data, proceed to label your pins:

Begin by navigating to Map -> Settings.

Subsequently, select the Markers Display tab.

Then, use the dropdown menu in the “Label markers using field” section to select the data field with your UFO sighting identifiers.

Finally, hit Save Changes.

Step 4: Customize Your Map Display

With your pins now labeled, furthermore, you might consider enhancing their display:

  • In the Marker Icons settings, opt for larger pins to make your extended labels clearly visible.
  • Optionally, Choose File to upload an image file to replace markers for an added visual touch to your map.
UFO Sighting Map Icons

Step 5: Explore and Share Your UFO Sightings Map

At last, your map is now ready for exploration. Hence, we can delve into the patterns of sightings across the nation. Moreover, circulate your map among fellow UFO enthusiasts and contribute to our collective quest for understanding.

Conclusion: Embracing the Unknown

After all, your UFO sightings map is more than a collection of pins; it’s a tool for the curious, the believers, and the skeptics. Consequently, ZeeMaps’ new feature turns your quest for the truth to now vividly pinned to the canvas of America’s landscape, each label a testament to the enduring mystery of the skies.

Finally, remember, the truth is out there, and now it’s mapped out, too.

Use Our Spreadsheets to Create Your Own Map

Download our UFO Sightigs spreadsheets below to create your own map. It’s easy!

1: Create your map

2: Share on social

3: Tag ZeeMaps! #ZeeMaps #WeMapYourLists

UK Post Codes Districts – ZeeMaps

UK Post Codes are designated by two alphanumeric codes. The first one or two letters indicate a postcode area, followed by one or two digits signifying a district within that area. Following this is a space and then a number denoting a sector within the district, and finally two letters which are allocated to streets or sides of a street. While originally designed for mail sorting and delivery, UK Post Codes, as postal codes around the world, have become important geographical boundaries for varying kinds of analysis, e.g., where to put a new store. The reason is that the population within the same post code district or area usually share characteristics like income, education, family structure and so forth.

Due to the rich demographic utility of post code district and areas, having the ability to highlight post code districts or post code areas in different colors on a map can be important aid in performing analysis like which areas have a concentration of certain value, e.g., car dealers.

ZeeMaps has supported the highlighting of UK Post Code areas for a while, and recently we’ve added the capability to highlight UK Post Code districts as well. This will allow our users to perform finer grained analysis with post codes.

You can highlight UK Post Code districts or areas in ZeeMaps in one of two ways:

  1. Use the Additions -> Highlight Post codes -> menu item on your map
  2. Upload a spreadsheet with UK Post Code districts.

Highlight Post Code districts a few at a time

To highlight a few post code districts at a time, use the Additions -> Highlight Post Codes menu item on the map.

Adding UK post codes using highlight postcode areas

Next, choose the UK tab at the top. Then, enter the Post Code or Area that you wish to have added to the map. We added CR0 for Croydon. Also, see that as you start typing the Post Code that a drop-down list will appear to assist in your selection.

UK Post Code Drop down list example

Notice, you are able to add more than one at a time. Finally, choose the boundary and fill color, along with opacity. Last, click Submit.

Highlight Post Code – Croydon Example Output

UK Post Codes through Spreadsheet Upload

If you have a large number of Post Code districts to highlight, then highlighting them one at a time can become tedious. Instead, you can use our spreadsheet upload to highlight the post code area.

One such example is Heat Maps – a common map type used to represent the magnitude of a phenomenon as color in two dimensions. In other words, it highlights the hot spots, or data clusters.

For this example we used the UK Post Codes Districts spreadsheet, attached below. In the first column of the spreadsheet, we specify the post code area or district, in the second column we have a numeric value, e.g., the number of car dealers in the given post code district. We add a third column that specifies a color based on the value in the second column. For details on how to do this easily, please see our post on the Excel IF Function. Color value is based on the number of dealers (column B). Therefore, red represents higher numbers while green represents the lowest.

UK Post Codes Excel example

Upload the data

To upload the data, we added the UK Post Codes spreadsheet to our map via Additions > Upload (Copy – Paste) Spreadsheet.

UK Post Codes Upload Data Prompt
Upload Data Prompt

To begin, we selected UK Post Code District from the drop-down.

Upload data example

Next, we chose United Kingdom as Default country.

Finally, notice our selections – Dealers selected for Name, Color selected for Category, and Post Code selected for Post Code. These are default selections. Last, click Submit.

View our example map below.

UK Postal Areas Map

The process for creating the UK Postal Areas Map is the same as above, except we are mapping postal areas instead of post codes.

View our example map below.

Use Our Spreadsheets to Create Your Own Map

Download our UK Post Codes or UK Postal Areas spreadsheets below to create your own map. It’s easy!

1: Create your map

2: Share on social

3: Tag ZeeMaps! #ZeeMaps #WeMapYourLists


IF Function in Excel – IFS Function in ZeeMaps

A type of IF function in Excel is the IFS function in which you can input multiple conditions to determine cell values. The function is checked from left to right for the multiple conditions, and the value set for the cell is determined by the first condition that is met. IFS is a much easier way of testing for multiple conditions instead of nesting multiple IF functions.

This statement is extremely helpful when we want to make one field value dependent on another. For example, if the score is => 80, then the Grade is B; if the score is =>90, then Grade is A.

In this post we will show you how to assign different colors to pins or highlighted regions when you upload a spreadsheet. We will use a spreadsheet that has zip codes in the US with a column for number of dealers in that zip code. The sample spreadsheet is attached to the bottom of this post and has just two columns, ‘zip code’ and ‘dealers’. We’ll add a third column – ‘colors’.

Find the Color Name

First, for this task we need to take a look at the color options in ZeeMaps, which are listed here. All ZeeMaps users have access to 32 colors and users on our Enterprise plan have access to 72 colors. To use the extended color palette, please see our blog post.

Color Name for Excel IF Function

For our IF Function, we will need to assign different color values based on values in a given column of our spreadsheet, e.g., number of dealers, grades, etc. For this purpose, note the Color Name in the color list. Use this as the color value in your expression.

If Function Excel Color Choices
IF Function in Excel Color Choice Example

How to write the Excel IF Function

Generally, the syntax for the Excel IFS function is:

=IFS([Something is True1, Value if True1,Something is True2,Value if True2,Something is True3,Value if True3)

The Excel IF Function allows you to test up to 127 different conditions.

Note that the conditions need to be entered in the correct order, and can be very difficult to build, test and update if you have entered a large number of conditions.

The Expression – Excel IF Function

We entered the following Excel IF Function expression for our example below. Since our spreadsheet column B contains the number of dealers, we’ll enter an IF Function expression in cell C2 as follows:

=IFS(B2 <= 5, “Green”, B2 <= 10, “Light Yellow”, B2 <= 15, “Yellow”, B2 <= 20, “Red”)

If Function Excel Expression
Excel IF Function Spreadsheet Example

Then, we copy the formula to the rest of the column C and voila, we have colors for each of the zip codes! You can find our example spreadsheet at the end of this tutorial

A look at our IF Function Map

For more info on IF Function Excel visit Microsoft’s detailed instructions for some helpful tips.

Example Data Download

Click the download button below to view our example data excel spreadsheet

Zip Code Look up & Other Region Search Tools

In this blog, we show you how to perform a quick zip code look up in your map, if you have pins representing the zip codes and areas highlighted for your search geography. Start by adding pins and highlighted area(s) on your map.

There are many useful applications for looking up points that fall within a zip code or region.

For instance, you could look up all your customers within a zip code or other boundary outline. Alternatively, you could look up how many service stations are in your state or zip code. In the end, it comes down selecting and summarizing map points inside of a boundary. Essentially, any point feature and any boundary will work. You can even draw your own!

In an earlier post, we had detailed the ZeeMaps search feature that allows you to perform extensive searches for the pins on your map.

The detailed search dialog allows you to search for points based on field values. As well as, combine them with distance or geographical search. The geographical search includes searching within a highlighted region.

We’ve now added the ability to quickly do a look up search within a region by simply right-clicking on the region.

To start the search, just right-click on any highlighted region (boundary) and the display will limit itself to the points that fall within regions of the same color. To reset the search, right-click on the region again.

Once you have started the search, you can get a list of points that match your search by doing a Map -> Save as CSV.

For example, we are going to work with look up for a sales territory map that shows the sales territory zip code for three salespersons of a company. Each sales person covers roughly 2-3 zip codes. Each sales persons territory highlighted in different color.

As an example, we are going to work with a look up sales territory map that shows sales zip codes for three salespersons of a company. Each sales person covers roughly 2-3 zip codes.

We’ve added a list of potential customers to this map, with different customer types in different colors. For example, customers not contacted are red, while those contacted are green.

To get an overview of all the customers that have already signed-up, we can use the legend at the bottom of the map to view just the customers who are shown with green pins. But, how do we see all the green customers for Sales Person A?

Of course, that is where the new feature comes in handy. Now, simply right click on a colored territory area (zip code) for Sales Person A (pink). Notice the look up view of pins is limited to customers that fall within that sales person’s territory. Now, right click again to undo.

Simply right click on a colored zip code for Sales Person A and the look up view of pins is now limited to the customers that fall within that sales person's territory

Moreover, we can also get a list of the customers by exporting a CSV file from Map -> Save As CSV.

we can also get a list of the customers by exporting a CSV file from Map -> Save As CSV for zip code look up

If you have any issues opening the .csv in excel try following these steps.

Continental Divide – Splitting Regions Map

Frequent ways of dividing large areas of land in the United States, or across the world, is by grouping them into regions according to their geographic position on the continent. Perhaps, the Northeast, Southwest, West, Southeast, or Midwest. Another, is to split the areas of land, such as with continental divide maps.

Continental Divides in North America.
Continental Divides in North America.
Map: Wikipedia

A continental divide is a natural (i.e. not man-made) boundary separating precipitation. Essentially, rivers, rainfall, snowfall, etc., water that flows into two oceans. Therefore, divides are the barriers that prevent rivers, etc on one side from flowing into oceans on the other.

Next, we see still another example when we look at state boundaries. Splitting areas of land, like with the continental divide trail map, can be extremely useful.

Perhaps you would like to make a map visualizing regions or splits, such as those with geographic position or continental divide map.

Here we show how to split regions within ZeeMaps.


Split a region in three steps:

Divide continents, regions, or any other map boundary!

Step 1: Select the region. For large regions, as with continental divide or region maps, the setup for this might take a while, as we change the entire boundary to be editable.

Select the region. For large regions, such as continental divide, the setup for this might take a while, as we change the entire boundary to be editable.

Step 2: Next, mark the vertices for the start and end of the split on the selected region

Next, mark the vertices for the start and end of the split on the selected region, or continental divide

Step 3: Last, connect the split vertices by a new polyline edge

connect the split vertices by a new polyline edge

For connecting the two vertices with a new edge, start by a single click and then click for each step. At the final step do a double-click. Use the Select button to initiate the first step.

connect the split vertices by a new polyline edge

Remember to do the steps in proper sequence. If regions are not grouped, the original highlighted region will be removed.


Connecting Trail Routes or Lines

Design your own Continental Divide Trail Map!

Connecting two markers with a line or route tutorial gives direction on how to create a trial or route, such as those seen in Continental Divide Trail Maps, as show below:

To connect two markers with a route or trail between them, please do the following:

  1. Click on the first marker to open its information balloon.
  2. Click on the third icon of the four icons to the right bottom of the information balloon. You must have unlocked the map as Map Admin for the icons to show.
  3. This should result in a dialog box for the connection. Customize your connection, e.g., whether it is a route or straight line, etc.
  4. Click on the second marker for the connection.
  5. Hit Submit.

For connecting another set of two markers, please close the connection dialog and repeat steps 1 through 5.


Finally, we challenge you to create your own continental divide trail, re-write the map! How to you think regions should be split, what trail looks like a great hike? Use your imagination and be creative!

Don’t forget to tag @zeemaps in your social media posts!