8 hand-picked UFO incidents that any enthusiast recognises:
- Kenneth Arnold 1947 (the genesis — "flying saucers" coined)
- Roswell 1947 (the original Army press release)
- Maury Island 1947 (Puget Sound, slag drop, FBI plane crash)
- Mantell 1948 (first known UFO casualty)
- Rendlesham Forest 1980 (USAF security police, deputy commander tape)
- Phoenix Lights 1997 (V-formation across Arizona, governor's reversal)
- Nimitz Tic-Tac 2004 (USS Nimitz F/A-18, gun-cam released 2017)
- Green Fireballs Sandia 1948 (copper salts, nuclear-site overflights)
Each case has:
- Bilingual hand-written editorial blurb (PT-BR + EN, no LLM)
- Painterly editorial hero illustration at 2K
- Year + tag chips (military / civilian / modern / early / naval /
aviation / mass-sighting)
- Link to /e/events/<id> when indexed in corpus, /search?q=... when not,
/c/<slug> for the green-fireballs narrative case
Components:
lib/iconic-cases.ts — IconicCase type + ICONIC_CASES editorial list
components/iconic-cases.tsx — magazine grid: first two as wide hero pair,
rest as 3-up tiles below. Hover scale on images, gradient overlays,
aspect-16/11 hero + 16/10 compact, lazy-loaded.
app/page.tsx — inserted between <FeaturedCase /> and <PortalGrid />
4 new hero illustrations generated this session:
- iconic-nimitz-tic-tac-2004.png (Nano Banana Pro)
- iconic-phoenix-lights-1997.png (Nano Banana Pro)
- iconic-rendlesham-forest-1980.png (gpt-image-1.5 via Codex)
- iconic-mantell-1948.png (Nano Banana Pro)
Per user direction: mixed generators (Nano Banana primary, Codex
co-pilot) so the homepage has stylistic variety while keeping the
painterly editorial register.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
