UFOs

Do I believe in UFOs? Data does not allow for easy refutation of a UFO hypothesis. One good dataset [2] on UFO reportings, some code for a plot,

import pandas as pd, zipfile

with zipfile.ZipFile('ufo.csv.zip', 'r') as z:
   d = pd.read_csv(z.open('ufo.csv'),sep=',',parse_dates=['DateOccurred'])
d = d.sort_index(by=['DateOccurred'])
d = d[pd.isnull(d['DateOccurred']) == False]
dates = d.DateOccurred.astype(str)
dates = dates[dates!='nan']
d['year'] = dates.apply(lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d').year)
g = d.groupby('year').size()
g[g.index>1960].plot()

The plot is for yearly count of UFO reports,

The dataset has UFO reports that go back to 1400s, with long descriptions of what people said when they reported the event. One sighting was recorded by a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. He thought it was a Union balloon but the thing he reported was moving too fast for a balloon. He must have thought "those damn Yankies and their tech!". I read all that with a general skepticism; One hypothesis I had was "UFO sightings increase with scifi becoming more accessible through media, people project their scifi fantasies onto the real world". Then the graph should've shown huge increase after the 60s/70s, it did not. There is a huge increase, but it is after 1992. What happened that year? Bill Clinton is elected as President. I don't know. Did the aliens started finding Earth more interesting because of Bill Clinton? Weird. There is a drop at 2008 - well, Barack Obama is elected as President. Aliens lose interest after this time? Joking aside, I urge readers the test their own hypothesis'. Some more: Let's say UFO delusion effects a certain percent of the population, then with more people we'd have more sightings. Then why is there a fall after 2008? Or why isn't there an exponential rise (in parallel to population growth which is exponential) much earlier than 1992? Or, if UFO sightings are actually sightings of Air Force weirdo toys mistaken for UFOs, then why is there a fall during Reagan years? The Gipper would've loved to fund that kind of tech.

NUFORC Dataset

This dataset [3] contains over 80,000 reports of UFO sightings over the last century. Original data from [1]. The scrubbed version is below,

Code

Output

Code filters out sightings before 2010, then downsamples to reduce the plotted points.

US Per State Analysis, Ratio Comparison

In this analysis, per state sightings ratio was compared to state's population ratio (to US total). A lot of people report a lot of sightings, but do some states report more sightings disproportionate to their population, indicating something mysterious..? Proportion ratio z-test was used to determine significance. For significant states, then calculated per-state sightings midpoint. Also plotted are known US nuclear missile bases (red circles).

Code

Output

References

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/NUFORC/ufo-sightings

[2] UFO

[3] NUFORC