The June 2021 UFO Report
In the past year, a deadly virus has taken over the entire United States. The government has failed to give us the information we need to endure it and, as a consequence, many people have denied that it’s even happening. Though there’s hope on the horizon, it’s an issue that continues to deepen the all consuming division in the United States. I’m talking, of course, about UFO fever.
That’s right, with the official Pentagon report on UFOs right around the corner, and the hype building, I think it’s an appropriate time to examine one of the oldest and largest collections of UFO reports on the internet: the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) database.
And I went for the biggest question of all: What are all these lights in the sky? Can we truly attribute all sightings to tricks of the light, misinterpreted aircraft, and bugs on windshields? Or are we in the midst of an interplanetary invasion?
Are there any significant anomalies?
There are several ways you could approach answering this question, but I believed that the best place to start was looking for spikes in activity. If there was an anomalous surge in UFO activity, then the explanation for that surge would tell us more about what people interpret to be alien spacecraft.
And find surges I did. In my analysis I found two rather surprising spikes. The first was in November of 2015.
This is absolutely the kind of thing I was looking for. So, of course, I had to find out more. According to the LA Times, the U.S. Navy had been testing a Trident II D5 missile and, for security purposes, hadn’t disclosed where or when the test was taking place. This meant that people looked up in the sky one night, and saw a flying object that they couldn’t identify. Naturally, those people reported it to NUFORC; who then, to their credit, labelled the sightings as being related to the missile launch.
Now of course, I didn’t stop there. Another thing that had caught my attention was an annual spike in July. So I decided to plot the average sightings for that month, and I realized exactly what was going on.
That’s right. There is a recurring spike in UFO reports, every year, on the 4th of July. You know, the day that is famous for large, attention-grabbing lights in the sky.
Now I joke, but saying that these reports are all from people seeing fireworks is a little unfair. When I went to look at the reports, what I discovered was that people weren’t just seeing fireworks. Look at these for example:
“Low flying, small, lanternish look. No sound.’’
“Red/Green light hovering over fireworks display.’’
“Green then Red light hanging out over Jacobus, PA, fireworks.’’
“Watching the community fire works in Davenport, Florida, I notice a Pale white circular light.”
There’s a clear commonality between these reports. They all describe silent, illuminated craft hovering over fireworks displays. Now, in my opinion, that sounds like a description of drones. Drones are often used to take video of fireworks displays, and they usually have lights on them; sometimes specifically red and green lights which help the operator determine the orientation of the craft. However, even this explanation only accounts for some of the many sightings. If you have the time, I would strongly recommend you go check out the reports for yourself.
When are UFO reports most common?
Seeing an annual spike made me wonder if there was an annual trend for UFO reports as well. So I plotted the percentage of a year’s UFO reports that occurred within each month for the last 20 years and this is what it looked like:
Now this trend is pretty interesting. With the exception of 2020, the sightings seem to pick up in June, peak in July, then decrease over the next 5 months.
Now I believe this is the result of a very simple principal. If we assume that UFO activity itself is unaffected by the time of year, this trend must be a result of whether or not people are exposed to that activity. So as to why more UFO reports are made later in the year, I would attribute that to more people going outside later in the year. We go outside more as we do fun activities in the summer or travel for the holidays. This is only conjecture of course, but it seems reasonable to me.
Day v. Night — When do more sightings occur?
Once I had found the previous trend I started wondering if there were other examples of visibility affecting sightings. If people have to be able to see something to report it, then surely times of high visibility should result in more reports, right? To test this theory, I decided that I needed to compare a time of high visiblity to one of low visiblity, two terms which very convienently describe daytime and nighttime. So I counted up every sighting in the dataset based on whether the sun was up or down. Here’s what I found:
That’s right, around 78% of sightings occurred at night. This was the exact opposite of what I had assumed. But of course, this fairly simple comparison doesn’t tell the full story. To find out more I had to look a bit deeper. So I again counted every sighting in the dataset, but this time based on which hour-of-the-day it took place in. Then, as some hours change from day to night depending on the time of year, I color coded the plot to reflect that.
As you can see, there is an incredibly smooth relationship between how typical it is for the sun to be down during a given hour, and how many sightings happen within that hour. However, if that was the only principal on display here, you would expect the peak to be closer to midnight. In fact, the peak hour is 10 P.M. which is probably because most people are asleep for the later hours.
This data both confirms and counters my previous assumption. Though sightings happen more when people are able to see the sky, sightings also happen much more during a time when it’s dfficult to see anything in the sky. It seems there is a blend of high exposure and low visibility needed in order to experience a UFO encounter.
So what causes someone to report a UFO?
As we’ve seen, you need the right conditions in order to experience a UFO encounter. You need to be able to see the sky clearly, but you also need low visiblity conditions like the nighttime. Why is that?
I believe the answer lies in the name itself: Unidentified Flying Object. In the daylight, it’s difficult to mistake a plane, missile, drone, or firework for an alien spacecraft. There is simply too much light to make that kind of mistake. There needs to be enough evidence that the event itself is undeniable, but enough deniability to let your mind fill in the gaps with what it wants to believe.
Though I initially drew a parallel between the Coronavirus and “UFO fever” as a joke, that impulse to take small amounts of evidence at face value so long as it confirms what you want to believe is the selfsame thing that fuels conspiracies about vaccines and elections. It’s in our nature but it’s something we need to be cautious of. So, the next time you see something that goes unexplained, whether it be a glowing disk hurtling through the sky, or a pile of ballots in the trash, remember to interrogate the explanations that come to mind.