Hotspot analysis of unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) sightings reported from 2001 to 2020. Excerpt from the paper “Environmental Analysis of Public UAP Sightings and Sky View Potential”.
RM Medina et al.
My favorite subgenre of scientific writing is “Usually associated with conspiracy theories and cheesy sci-fi movies, but please take this seriously.” So I gleefully dove into a recent example with a very technical title. Environmental Analysis of UAP Public Sightings and Sky View Potential”. Translation: “We looked at where the most people saw UFOs and correlated that with how easy it was to see them in the sky.”
First of all, I want to emphasize that this is not a silly thesis, and I am not saying that UFOs should not be studied as a cultural or physical phenomenon. The authors, two geographers and a military intelligence expert, are acutely aware of how ridiculous their work may sound to some readers, and their method of analysis is entirely rational. It is.
That being said, I would like to celebrate some of the acronyms I learned while reading this paper. We will henceforth refer to UFOs as UAPs, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” This is partly to avoid the stigma of the pseudoscientific UFO community, and partly so that future generations can collect data on giant monsters and such anomalies not captured by science. I think it’s for the purpose of The term “flying object”.
The authors used data from NUFORC. NUFORC sounds like his 1970s new wave band, but it actually stands for National UFO Reporting Center. Its website allows people to report sightings, and the number of people doing so increased during the study period from 2001 to 2020. This is largely due to the increased number of sensors, phones, and other technologies that can record strange things in our environment. To study the geographic distribution of these sightings, the authors examined approximately 200,000 reports per U.S. county. What they found was that more people saw UFOs, er, UAPs, in the western part of the country, where less population means generally darker skies.
But how exactly did researchers know where all these sightings were coming from? Which brings us to VGI, or “Voluntary Geographic Information.” The authors acknowledge that this is “usually provided voluntarily by individuals, consciously or unconsciously, with the assistance of location-enabled digital tools.” Many cell phone cameras and apps automatically record the geographic coordinates of the photos you take, whether you know it or not. While this is great for friendly scientists looking for data about UAPs, VGI is also used in the United States by law enforcement and marketing companies to understand where they are at any given time.
But perhaps my favorite acronym is AARO (All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office). This is the department within the Department of Defense where one of the author’s boyfriends, Sean Kirkpatrick, worked until two years before him, and it has a nice name. he got tired of it and quit Late 2023. AARO may sound like Charles Stross invented it for him. laundry file Although it is a series of fantasy novels, it is actually called in to determine whether the military secretly possesses alien “biological agents” or spaceships. Kirkpatrick told Congress that the answer is a resounding “no,” and that conspiracy buffs inside and outside the government have discovered extraterrestrial weapons in the huge warehouse where the Pentagon stores the Ark of the Covenant and the Sacred Ark. He resigned because he continued to insist that something must be hidden. Holy Grail.
As can be inferred from Kirkpatrick’s involvement in the paper, the authors found no evidence of alien visitors. By correlating VGI-labeled sightings with data collection including military bases, airports, light pollution, cloud cover, and tree canopy locations, they found that most UAPs are found in deep, easy-to-see locations. It means that it is. To the night sky. According to NUFORC, his most commonly reported UAPs turned out to be either Starlink satellites or the planet Venus. Other reports come from locations where it is easy to observe human-built objects, such as airplanes and drones, moving quickly and in irregular patterns across the sky.
There are also more reports coming from areas with a “culture of paranormal ideas,” such as the area around Roswell, New Mexico, where UFOs are said to have crashed in the 1940s. Still, researchers conclude that some sightings remain unexplained.
This paper confirms that people who report UAP are not suffering from mental illness or hallucinations. There is clearly something strange in the sky. Perhaps it’s not aliens, but our environments always produce bizarre visual effects that are strange yet realistic. And the heavens are full of imaginary and unknown objects created by humans. Analyzing anomalies with scientific rigor does not dispel the wonder, but it does reveal that we can witness wonders in our own backyards every day.
Annalee’s week
what I am reading
Stuart Hall’s Classic Media Studies Essay encode/decode, it is still relevant.
what I see
dungeon food, Anime about cooking from dungeon to table.
what I am working on
Make Google Gemini say weird things.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is Terraformars, and they are co-hosts of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Follow @annaleen and their website is: techsploitation.com
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Source: www.newscientist.com
