UFOs
Do I believe in UFOs? Data does not allow for easy refutation of a UFO hypothesis
I found a good dataset on UFO reportings, here is 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.