EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

- Newspapers say there has been a UFO sighting spike.
- Some papers claim it's due to a kind of lockdown cabin fever.
  Others say it never happened.
- A simple s/w finds quakes at the mid Atlantic Ridge have a
  statistically suspicious similar form as the UFO sightings data from
  2019 through to at least mid 2020.
- A more likely explanation is there was a real spike in UFO activity
  related to a large increase in undersea activity in the mid Atlantic.


There have been a few newspaper articles about ufo sightings since
early 2020. Some say sightings are way up, some say it's because
people are stuck at home and have started "seeing things", some say
nothing is happening and there is no uptick at all. And others offer
other opinions.

  Analysis: More UFO sightings during pandemic lockdown
  www.ctpost.com # news # article # Analysis-More-UFO...
  Jan 4, 2021 - A look at UFO sighting data reveals a significant
  uptick in the number of sightings in...
  
  Why are UFO Sightings Increasing Amid the COVID-19 ...
  www.thecut.com # 2020/08 # ufo-sightings-covid-19-pan...
  Aug 3, 2020 - Canada and Belgium have reported increased UFO
  sightings under coronavirus lockdown measures, as has the United
  States. Ufologist Nick ...
  
  Lockdown spike in UFO sightings 'hugely significant' and ...
  www.dailystar.co.uk # News # Weird News # UFO
  Dec 29, 2020 - Retired cop and UFO expert Gary Heseltine says 2020
  could be a "hugely significant moment" as there's been a 30-year
  spike in reports of ...
  
  Coronavirus to blame for record number of UFO sightings in ...
  www.telegraph.co.uk # news # 2020/04/02 # coronavir...
  Apr 2, 2020 - The Covid-19 lockdown, clear weather and Elon Musk
  have caused the highest number of sightings since Belgium's great
  'UFO wave' of 1989.

This is where simple AI can come to the rescue and tell you what to think. :)

I can run a little program that manipulates a largish database of
satellite and other "weather" data and ask it to find the one(s) that
look as close as possible to any supposed uptick in UFO sightings in
2020 e.g.  as per the NUFORC data you can download (e.g. their
"bymonth" dataset which is usually reasonably up-to-date).

After chuckling to itself for 5-10 mins on my creaking old desktop
machine it comes up with:

Data Series		Lag	Filter	Transf	R2
qcentatlridge           1       1               0.954092
uah_globe6NHOcean       1       1       log     0.88792331
gavqseg120              12      1       log     0.88635943
gavqphilippines         12      1       log     0.88634864
uah_mtNoPolLand         1       1               0.883809
uah_mtNoPolOcean        1       1               0.882305
gavaravgNHland          1       1               0.878778
uah_mtNoPol             1       1               0.872542
gaviraq                 12      1       log     0.85485701
gavqsegmag-80           0       1       log     0.853523

The "Data series" is the s/w's name for how it obtained the data
series. Some come from "well known" monthly data such as the UAH
atmospheric temperature data. Some come from data published by
Berkeley Earth e.g. "iraq" is the avg temp of the Iraq region month by
month (last update I have around mid 2020).  And the "q" codes are
earthquake data from <http://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de>.

The "Lag" says the s/w tried to prove a causal link by comparing data
from the named series with LATER UFO sighting data. A lag of 1 is 1
month and 12 is a year.

The Filter column says how severe the s/w was in trimming noisy data.
The "1" is the maximum filtering it can use -- ignorning any data that
is more than 1 std deviation from the trend line.

The Transf is a "transform" that can be used to make the Data Series
look more like the target series (i.e. the UFO sighting data in this
case).  It has a few choices of things to try, guided by its previous
experience with similar data.

And, finally, the "R2" number shows what fraction of the target data
is "explained" by the named Data Series.

The table is only the top 10 lines from the results. The s/w tried
about 40,000 possibilities, culled that down to around 4000 things to
try using its accumulated wisdom from past work, and whittled that
down to a few 100 intersting possibilities of which the table are
probably the best or most likely reasons the target data (UFO
sightings) look the way they do.

The target data looks like:

Year.MM		Adjusted number of
		UFO sightings in the month
		from NUFORC database.
2019.04		440.0605
2019.12		270.4284
2019.21		380.6100
2019.29		529.7292
2019.38		648.2685
2019.46		397.0000
2019.54		809.3010
2019.62		430.0000
2019.71		864.7716
2019.79		960.9538
2019.88		777.7131
2019.96		840.8235
2020.04		681.5342
2020.12		673.9425
2020.21		1121.3356
2020.29		1314.6635
2020.38		577.2585
2020.46		449.7416
2020.54		555.0000
2020.62		619.0000

The "adjustments" removed some noise from the sighting data.  E.g. the
numbers show a large bias to sightings reported on Sat rather than
Mon. In fact the number of sightings in each day of the weak seems to
increase from Mon through Sat. For some reason.  So the s/w takes the
Sat numbers at face value and adjusts upward all the others by a
suitable factor.

Some other adjutsments are made to remove any sudden changes in the
data that may be related to breaking news stories whereby a lot of
people suddenly see lights in the sky because they have become
"sensitised" to UFO's. Or similar reasons.

So we can see from the numbers there *did* seem to be a 2x up-tick in
Mar and Apr of 2020 which was the start of the pandemic.  Maybe it
*was* having nothing to do because stuck at home that "caused" the
increase in sightings.

But the AI says no.

It has a limited ability to make deductions to back up its testing.
It has learned from that UFO sightings response to earthquake
actvitiy.  It has a number of theories why that could be and it's
*still* evaluating which theory is best by performing little side
experiments and looking at the results. I personally dont like what
it's finding but we'll let that run a while longer before I start
writing about it.

So the s/w says there is a very good reason totally unrelated to being
locked down at home to explain why UFO sightings shot up 2x in Mar and
Apr.  Any of those 10 lines above explain almost all of the up-tick
with high statistical reliability -- the testing the s/w does is
"extreme" and if it says something is so then there's only about 1%
chance the pattern is rekated just to a lucky coincidence in the data.

Let's look at the #1 line above. qcentatlridge. Quakes around the
Central Atlantic Ridge. There might be some reason quakes around there
could get UFO's buzzing around. At least the s/w has see it happen
time and time again and expects it will keep happening into the future.

Here's the data it came up with in connection with the UFO sightings data:

MODEL:

y = 415.523*x + 60.739
beta in 415.523 +- 49.3547    90% CI
alpha in 60.739 +- 80.0218 
P(beta>0.000000) = 1.000000
r2 = 0.954092
calculated Spearman corr = 0.923077
Critical Spearman = 0.673000 2-sided at 1%; reject H0:connected

Binned data:
Bin label	    Av #quakes/mo    Av #UFO/mo    Model-estimated
		at Cent Atl Ridge    from NUFORC   #UFO sightings/mo
   2019.04                      1       440.06      476.262
   2019.21                      1       380.61      476.262*(model +1sd)
   2019.29                1.01172      529.729      481.132(-1sd)
   2019.38                1.37207      648.269      630.866
   2019.54                1.96037      809.301      875.318*(+1)
   2019.62                1.03969          430      492.754
   2019.71                1.94883      864.772      870.523
   2020.04                1.50684      681.534      686.866
   2020.21                2.53829      1121.34      1115.46
   2020.29                2.95406      1314.66      1288.22
   2020.46                      1      449.742      476.262
   2020.54                      1          555      476.262*(-1)
   2020.62                1.05191          619      497.832*(-1)

So the number of quakes reported around the Cent Atl Ridge in Feb &
Mar increased to 3 -- more than any other time between Jan 2019 and
mid 2020.  And we see the expected #UFO sightings in Feb and Mar just
due to the #quake from the data it was playing with should have been
1115 for Feb and 1288 for Mar, very closely matching what was actually
seen.  In Apr May and Jun the numbers were expected to drop back to
~470/mo because the number of quakes nr the Cent Atl Ridge dropped
back to around 1/mo. And they did.

It seems people SAW more UFO's in Feb & Mar -- it wasn't cabin fever.
The UFO's were perhaps stirred up "for some reason" by a tripling in
the number of usual quakes around the Mid Atl Ridge and later in the
year dropped back because the quakes dropped back to normal levels.

And the "some reason" seems to be a reccuring pattern consistent with
quales in SOME regions "causing" an increase in UFO sightings in later
months while more quakes in *other* regions cause a temporary decline
in UFO sightings in later months.

If you sat at LAX and tallied up planes landing you might find if
there were suddenly a lot of earthaquakes in the UK and Europe the
number of planes might increase subsequenmtly. If there were a few big
jolts at Dulles or O'Hare there might be a decrease in incoming fliughts.

--
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