3D Sighting-Report Spacetime Clustering

Adding time as a third axis turns a flat spatial scatter of case reports into a genuine event-detection view: this simulator places sighting reports in a cube where x/y encode location and height encodes when the report was filed, so a real correlated event — many independent witnesses reporting the same actual occurrence within a short window — shows up as a visibly tight knot of points, while independent noise (hoaxes, misidentifications, duplicate filings) drifts diffusely through the whole spacetime volume. A live 3D nearest-neighbor statistic, extending the same Poisson-random null model used in the 2D case-database view to three dimensions, flags candidate clusters and reports a false-positive rate against the seeded ground truth. Rotate the cloud, tune the noise rate and cluster tightness, and watch how much harder — or easier — real events are to isolate once you can see both where and when a report was filed.