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UFO sightings at all time high.


lost_shaman

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I like the Independent's title there, "extraterrestrials-aliens-space-america-x-files". Good to see no cliché unturned. 

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I'm pleased to hear it. Since it's been going for so long (since at least 1947), it's rather pleasing that no one'es ever been able to debunk it, and in fact their attempts at squeezing the whole business into some convenient pigeonhole or other of a "rational explanation" have failed abjectly.

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The numbers of yearly UFO reports in NUFORC's database are at an all time high, not the number of actual UFO sightings.  Huge difference.  The NUFORC database he's using has several gaps of years in the early 20th century with no reports in their database.  Does he think that equates to no-one actually seeing strange things in the skies in those years?

It's not hard to guess at obvious reasons why in 2017, far more people would report UFOs than in 1905, that has nothing to do with the actually frequency of UFO sightings.

The source of the OP article seems like very sloppy research: https://vizthis.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/i-want-to-believe-ufo-sightings-around-the-world/

Edited by JesseCuster
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4 hours ago, lost_shaman said:



Put a graph next to it showing when cable television, internet ( available for public, and as it gets more available ), smart phones, etc. came into play ( in that order ).....They will show why the trend went up.......Same with Bigfoot sightings.

 

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4 minutes ago, Sakari said:

Put a graph next to it showing when cable television, internet ( available for public, and as it gets more available ), smart phones, etc. came into play ( in that order ).....They will show why the trend went up.......Same with Bigfoot sightings.

I'm not saying you are entirely wrong. However, I think there is a much simpler explanation. Notice that the uptick starts at the same time that the Roswell story emerges. Books are written, Memo's surface, and researchers gain traction and Skeptics also get much more attention all beginning ~ 1980. The Air Force then puts out two reports dealing with the case in the mid 1990's. 

Not only did Roswell go "viral" so to speak, but a major consequence of this was that the term "UFO" got dumbed down so far that now it can mean almost anything to anyone. Before this there was a much more well defined meaning of the acronym, although the Air Force official definition also changed slightly over time until ~ 1969.

So because the acronym "UFO" basically lost its coherent definition, then now anyone can see a UFO if they just don't know what they are looking at!

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4 hours ago, Manfred von Dreidecker said:

I'm pleased to hear it. Since it's been going for so long (since at least 1947), it's rather pleasing that no one'es ever been able to debunk it, and in fact their attempts at squeezing the whole business into some convenient pigeonhole or other of a "rational explanation" have failed abjectly.

?

No they haven't many of them have been explained adequately. It's like religion in that way, we have some devout believers and some rationalists. The devout believers will always consider any light in the Sky and alien spaceship, but there is just no good reason to believe that is the answer. It's more a cultural expectation than anything else. Very poor logic behind that train of thought I might add. 

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7 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

No they haven't many of them have been explained adequately.

I thought Manfred was talking about the underlying phenomena, in which case he would be correct.

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9 minutes ago, lost_shaman said:

I thought Manfred was talking about the underlying phenomena, in which case he would be correct.

But no single pigeonhole exists. The explanations are wide and varied. 

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4 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

But no single pigeonhole exists. The explanations are wide and varied. 

Well. Yeah, but there are still the ~ 5% * or so that defy explanation and seem to represent some type of unknown phenomena.

* as researched during the late 1960's before the 1980 "uptick".

Edited by lost_shaman
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3 minutes ago, lost_shaman said:

Well. Yeah, but there are still the ~ 5% * or so that defy explanation and seem to represent some type of unknown phenomena.

Exactly, the majority do get explained and under many banners. And there are some rather impressive terrestrial hypotheses for the 5% where our knowledge is growing such as the Hessdalen Project. 

3 minutes ago, lost_shaman said:

* as researched during the late 1960's before the 1980 "uptick".

I agree with your hypothesis, just another aspect to feed the pop culture expectations. Again, illustrating that there never was any single pigeonhole. Why people associate lights in the sky with alien I feel is explained by pop culture and the expectations it propagates. That reaches a great many. It seems to me there as as many explanations that we are unable to determine due to lack of evidence as there are reports. It is too varied to provide one underlying explanation as people see things differently and natural phenomena is just as varied, making it equally difficult to pin down. 

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On 2/23/2017 at 5:29 PM, JesseCuster said:

The numbers of yearly UFO reports in NUFORC's database are at an all time high, not the number of actual UFO sightings.  Huge difference.

Yes, that's true but the same is also true with Blue Book or any other collection of "reports". That does not mean there is no value to them.

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On 2/24/2017 at 10:58 AM, internetperson said:

That graph may as well read 'internet availability.'

Or people who identify with the "Save the Whales" campaign. But that does not infer a correlation.

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This makes sense with drones on the rise more then ever. Plus all the ufo related stuff in the media would cause people to look up and see something, quickly dubbing it a ufo for easily explainable phenomenon ( doo dooo, da dooo dooo!)

Edited by AstralHorus
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I would infer that someone who did not even mention, let alone make the slightest effort to measure or estimate the effects of such issues as are mentioned here and as I've started to list below, is in fact someone who has just called himself a 'statistician'.. and if that 'report' is anything to go by, he is in fact not even a pimple on the butt of one..

Just some of those issues being:

- the rise of the Interwebz
- the rise of social media, virality, trolls, fakers and fifteen minute heroes
- huge increases in airtraffic from cheaper and safer airtravel (discounted airfares only really took off in the 80's)
- even more increases in air traffic from surveillance, law enforcement, aerial photography/sensing/surveys etc
- increased numbers of RC aircraft and now drones

.. and others, simply don't even get a mention.  I won't be wasting further time on indy100 links if that is a guide to the quality.

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On 2/26/2017 at 8:33 PM, lost_shaman said:

Yes, that's true but the same is also true with Blue Book or any other collection of "reports". That does not mean there is no value to them.

It's not that there's no value to historical databases of UFO reports.  It's that the blog article upon which the Indy100 article is drawn is an example of very sloppy methodology.

A couple of obvious problems from a quick glance at Monfort's blog post:

1. The graph that supposedly shows a recent spike in sightings over the past couple of decades is marked one axis "sightings" when the axis should be marked "reports".  For obvious reasons, the number of reports over the years does not correlate directly (or possibly even loosely) with the actual number of sightings, yet the graph is marked as if the data presented represents the number of actual UFO sightings.

2. Another graph showing the % of different types of sightings (shape of UFO) is extrapolating in earlier years from decades in which there were less than 10 total reports in the database.  One of the most fundamental errors in statistics is extrapolating from too small of a sample.  It's meaningless to say that 25% of sightings were of type "x" when you've only got a sample of 4 reports upon which to draw that data.

There might be all sorts of interesting things which can be learned from studying historical databases of UFO reports, but this is not an example.

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8 hours ago, JesseCuster said:

1. The graph that supposedly shows a recent spike in sightings over the past couple of decades is marked one axis "sightings" when the axis should be marked "reports".  For obvious reasons, the number of reports over the years does not correlate directly (or possibly even loosely) with the actual number of sightings, yet the graph is marked as if the data presented represents the number of actual UFO sightings.

 

Ok. point taken, but it is still more or less splitting hairs. It boils down to how you define a "sighting". After all, all "reports" are in fact "sightings".

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The amount of hair splitting and stubborn refusal of the skeptikal community to consider that there might be any validity in what other people may have seen (and the recurrence of that so funny satirical word 'interwebz') is a reminder why I haven't looked at this section much lately. 

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2 hours ago, Manfred von Dreidecker said:

The amount of hair splitting and stubborn refusal of the skeptikal community to consider that there might be any validity in what other people may have seen (and the recurrence of that so funny satirical word 'interwebz') is a reminder why I haven't looked at this section much lately. 

Could you point at a specific example, and while doing so, explain what you mean by 'validity'?

Could you then point at what you think is the very best recent ufo sighting that requires some sort of non-terrestrial explanation, or whatever it is that you think is 'valid'?  I trust that example will also show evidence of 'hair splitting and stubborn refusal'..

 

Or is this just *another* of your endless handwaved hit and run criticisms?

 

Because, apart from the obvious trolls (on both sides - where is Zoser, anyway..?), I see nothing but good suggestions and quite reasonable and intelligent analyses.  Sure, some stuff remains unidentified after that, but usually that's because of the poor quality of the observation / lack of evidence, and I see nothing that suggests out-of-this world maneuvers or off-world origin.  If that's not what you mean, please clarify.

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8 hours ago, Manfred von Dreidecker said:

The amount of hair splitting and stubborn refusal of the skeptikal community to consider that there might be any validity in what other people may have seen (and the recurrence of that so funny satirical word 'interwebz') is a reminder why I haven't looked at this section much lately. 

Yeah, there's better hobbies out there. I've been having more fun in the politics section lately anyway. Also, I've not witnessed anything that can't be explained in the skies in quite awhile now. Still working on my old ones.

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7 minutes ago, Sweetpumper said:

Also, I've not witnessed anything that can't be explained in the skies in quite awhile now. Still working on my old ones.

Dude you too? IDK if the timeline is the same for you but I was just talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday.  It seems like 2012-2014  there were constantly sightings in  my area and my family and myself had several but the last couple of years we havent seen anything or heard of anyone else having sightings. 

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