Description

Greetings UFO enthusiasts,

Hope everyone is having a good day. In this post, I share the results of measuring spatial autocorrelation (https://pysal.org/esda/notebooks/spatialautocorrelation.html) of UFO shapes in reports from the NUFORC data bank (https://nuforc.org/databank/). I reached out to them to ask for an extract of the data bank in order to do this analysis and they were kind enough to share the data with me.

Spatial autocorrelation measures spatial and attribute similarity in one metric. If something is spatially autocorrelated, it means that objects of similar attributes tend to cluster together in space. It looks at the spatial distribution of an attribute in a dataset and asks the question, "how likely is it that this attribute is randomly distributed over space?" If the answer is "not very likely", then that attribute can be said to be spatially autocorrelated.

This is particularly interesting when looking at UFO reports because it can show us patterns in the characteristics of the reports irrespective of external variables such as population density or military activity. A high number of reports in one spot does not necessarily mean it is a hotspot if there are many different types of shapes reported in that location.

The question I am asking here is summarized as the following - are there locations in the US where there are an unusually high number of reported shapes as compared to the rest of the country?

This is an updated version of my first post (https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/174x7jl/analysis_spatial_hotsp…). The main difference in this post is I've combined similar shapes into a single categories.

This analysis looks at ~120,000 reports in ~27,000 unique locations. The hotspots plotted on these maps are only the most significant with p <= 0.001.

All reports

https://preview.redd.it/iayo8876gkvb1.png?width=1136&format=png&auto=…

Results

n=3361 (https://preview.redd.it/dwj4vf3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=12124 (https://preview.redd.it/1po7gl3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=473 (https://preview.redd.it/t5xalg3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=425 (https://preview.redd.it/v3h06g3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=5267 (https://preview.redd.it/m79shh3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=1768 (https://preview.redd.it/lzzcpi3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=7181 (https://preview.redd.it/5tpbnj3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=4174 (https://preview.redd.it/vzu9kk3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=34219 (https://preview.redd.it/xplmml3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=11461 (https://preview.redd.it/grf8kn3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=6423 (https://preview.redd.it/jakhjt3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=2236 (https://preview.redd.it/wy8pun3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=1050 (https://preview.redd.it/um40dt3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

n=12884 (https://preview.redd.it/1u967u3bgkvb1.png?width=1389&format=png&auto=…)

Interpretation

Do these hotspots show areas where there is concentrated activity of certain UFO types? Military tests? Experimental Boeing/Lockheed/Raytheon aircraft? Or dare I say it, *aliens*??? No. Well, maybe. All that we can say is that many people saw the same thing at the same location. This gives more credibility to these sightings and reduces the likelihood that these were hoaxes, hallucinations, or a mischaracterization.

Ultimately the point of this post is not to tell a compelling story or support one theory over another. Just want to let the data speak for itself and use this as a starting point for further characterization.

GitHub link

Link to the Jupyter notebook where this analysis was conducted (sorry, source data not included) - https://github.com/uforesearcher44/nuforc-analysis

A big thanks to NUFORC (https://nuforc.org/) for sharing their data bank with me and giving me the OK to conduct this analysis. If anyone is interested in extending this or working with this data in some other capacity let me know and I can try to connect you with NUFORC. You can also contact them yourself with your idea. There are a number of ways this could be extended such as proximity to water or military installations, temporal autocorrelation, or looking at some other characteristic of the reports.