You Can Prove Anything You Like With Statistics

by Kevin Candela

So last week our daring news-shredder Trent/Craig finds that article that tells us that Florida and California had the most UFO sightings last year. I simply took those bare statistics, factored them in with other raw data (state populations) and what do you know? The article seems to suggest you’re better off by far looking for aerial anomalies in CA or FL than some out of the way spot like, say, Montana or New Hampshire. But that only slightly deeper analysis (took a lot of time but wasn’t hard) that I did with its information says this is really not the case at all.

Are we being misled by such supposedly pro-disclosure articles—told to watch the wrong skies? 

I’m not answering that because if you know me on here, you know I don’t bring this kind of thing up for idle chat. So you are aware of what I think.

I’ve said many times that you can prove just about anything using statistics, whether what you’re asserting is legit or not. Logic, math and the English language conspire with our ever-shorter attention spans and voila…anything is possible. (Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea that anything is possible, but it’s not more important than what actually IS possible/real. This is certainly a material existence on at least SOME levels, so we need to address material issues.)

Included here are the original article (see link above), my breakdown of UFO sightings per capita and a map I made from that data for visual reference. Here are the ideas that map has given me, you may draw some conclusions of your own.

Click to enlarge

1) The states shown in purple and red feature a lot of mountain terrain. 

This is a biggie. Maybe THE biggie. What’s the deal? Do they have bases in these places (excuse the rhyme), and if so is it because mountain rock is stable and allows for easy and safe excavation? Does the exposed basalt and granite work as a sort of energy source, a provider of electromagnetic, gravitational or “free space” energy(ies) that the UFOs use in some way? So many possibilities that conjecture, while interesting, isn’t necessarily productive in the short run. What can we take from this? If you want to see aerial phenomena, it’s a good idea to look over mountain ranges. 

2) There’s a lot of stuff going on in Montana.

A friend of mine, Marilyn Collins Tucker, sent me a very interesting book a while back on Montana UFOs (and other paranormal phenomena). Turns out one of the best early accounts, featuring military cover-up as always, is in the form of a video shot over a public school, sent away and returned as a few worthless fragments to the trusting high school parent who filmed the saucers flying overhead in broad daylight. Montana was the site of a famous missile base UFO incident as well. Not many people live in the appropriately named Big Sky Country, which means that it’s a nice “private” place as America goes these days. Right next to Canada too. Speaking of which, who knows what a map like this of Canada might tell us? Will the provinces sharing boundaries with Montana be purple or red too?

3) New Mexico truly is the Land of Enchantment.

There’s something about the place for sure. I felt it. Not bad, just…powerful. From Roswell through the Sacramento Mountains to the strange human realms of Alamogordo, White Sands and Las Cruces, my excursion through New Mexico had an indescribably cool feel to it overall. I somehow felt like I was near Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters: so close to the mystery that it was permeating my own form as I drove and walked around there. I think there’s something about the Sacramentos—a feel I can’t describe—but of course I don’t want to shortchange the fact that in driving from Roswell to Alamogordo, by all accounts I was driving the same road over which at least a body or two from the crash(es) made its way to Oppenheimer, Teller, etc., over at White Sands. But which came first: the saucers or the bomb?

4) New England is looking more and more like rental property on alien land. 

At first glance it seems odd that Massachusetts, home of the Bridgewater Triangle, sits like a yellow island amidst the purple and red of Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, but I think it’s pretty easy to see why if you look just a little deeper. Featuring Boston and a few other fairly large (mostly coastal) urban centers, Massachusetts has a very large populace by comparison to its neighbors. Additionally, as I noted, most of it can be found living on or near the coastline and thus in general away from the mountains I mentioned first and foremost in this analysis. Adjusting for this, I think, would move the non-coastal physical majority of the state up into the orange, red or maybe even purple.

5) All that paranormal focus on Alaska is legit, even if The Fourth Kind was a bit of a scam.

Again with the mountains. And seismic activity. Were it not for the relative stability of New England, I’d have mentioned the “volcano/quake” factor right up there in observation number one. Plus the remoteness, low populace, etc. I’d have been surprised if Alaska had turned out anything “lower” than orange, and red makes perfect sense to me. 

6) Clear skies don’t matter as much as you might think.

You notice that most of the purple, red and orange states tend to be lower humidity places with associated clearer skies and fewer overcast days. But Missouri? We’re right next to there. Missouri is foggy, steamy, and overcast plenty of the time. But it has the Ozark Mountains, whereas we here in Blue Illinois have a manmade structure—Cahokia Mounds—as our highest elevation (I think). So mountains again. Even if the skies over them are often overcast.

7) People don’t move to California to live away from the coast.

Despite being one of the states highlighted in the original article, California makes an apparently weak UFO showing on this map. And what with mountain ranges, clean air (east of those ranges, anyway) and lots of clear skies, you’d think it would be at least as orange to red as its neighbors in Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. And I think it really is, but the thing is that in the greater Los Angeles area you can look right up at the pale white sun a lot of the time. And that gives us quite a few million of the state’s many millions who spend most of their time in a hazy dome filled with urban light pollution. 

That’s the thing here: Most of the state’s population lives in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles (including Long Beach, etc.) and San Diego. Most of the sightings probably happen outside those regions to the fraction of the CA populace that doesn’t live in the urban mega-centers.

Not counting launches of the Space-X, of course.

8) Hawaii must be a place where there’s too much to see to bother looking up.

So much for the whole volcanic/tectonic thing, it seems. Or maybe not. Maybe that joking lead line for this one isn’t all joke. Hawaii is a place where many likely spend all day in what a lot of us consider an ecological paradise and, by nightfall, are probably ready to go indoors (or at least not sit out watching the skies).  Or go to a luau, where the focus still isn’t going to be looking upwards. Ironic, considering that we have some major observatories on those islands. 

Islands? Is that it, maybe? Simply not as interesting/useful to the UFOs as mainland? Food for thought, anyway. I really can’t recall any memorable Hawaii UFO encounters, but there may be some. Something to look into at some point: the most remote locale on Earth doesn’t seem all that interesting to the Sky Folks.

9) South Carolina and Delaware are “islands” in their own right.

Obviously the Appalachian Mountain chain and its offshoots aren’t making the whole East Coast even yellow, much less orange, so these older mountains don’t have the apparent draw of the western ones (Rockies, etc.) from the looks of this UFO sighting “density” map. Still, the Ozarks are old too and they seem to boost Missouri noticeably. So let’s throw out the mountain factor, especially in the case of Delaware, and try to figure out why SC and Delaware are oranges in a sea of milder colors.

For South Carolina, I’m going to group it with Florida and Georgia and say it’s all a little hotter along this portion of this coast because of the so-called Bermuda Triangle, which is off Florida’s Atlantic coast though who knows how far its influence extends. Why is Georgia so low density? Simple: Atlanta, the Chicago of Georgia, and Macon, another large population area, represent a significant portion of the state’s populace—and those cities and others (Yay Athens!) are too far removed from the sparsely-populated Georgia coast to get the coastal sightings that Florida and South Carolina (don’t forget Myrtle Beach) experience. All Georgia has on the coast is Savannah, and that’s a party town.

Delaware? Good question. I’m not sure why it would stand out next to the ones around it, but I will say this: It COULD just be that the low density results for Pennsylvania and New York owe a lot to the fact that Philadelphia-New York is extremely high density population and as such may be significantly lowering the final density of what might otherwise be two more orange states.It could be that ALL of the northeastern states have a lot of activity, but population distribution hides that for some of them.

10) The infamous 33rd Parallel is right there on the map.

There it is: Even Ancient Aliens has talked about this phenomenon—a latitude where many UFO events have centered in the past. Obviously, it’s still going on. 

Taking into account previous comments about California and starting at the Pacific Coast on Latitude 33, we see the following: 

​California (GREEN)

​Nevada (ORANGE)

​Utah (ORANGE)

​Colorado (RED)

​Kansas (YELLOW)

​Missouri (ORANGE)

​Kentucky (YELLOW)

​West Virginia (LIGHT BLUE)

​Maryland (YELLOW)

​Delaware (ORANGE)

Note that West Virginia, though highly mountainous, is a humid state with a lot of forests and valleys and this may account for it appearing the weak link in the chain. But every other state listed here saw an average to high number of UFOs per capita in 2017.

That’s a lot of observation, but I bet others can add to it. Either way I hope this map and analysis help us get a better fix on what’s going on…and where.

UFO Sightings by State per Million Population

STATE	#UFOs	Pop (M)	UFO/M	UFO/M Rank
Montana	47	1.05	44.8	1
Connecticut	146	3.59	40.7	2
N. Hampshire	49	1.34	36.6	3
N. Mexico	73	2.09	34.9	4
Wyoming	17	0.58	29.3	5
Vermont	17	0.62	27.4	6
Oregon	111	4.14	26.8	7
Rhode Island	28	1.06	26.4	8
Maine	35	1.33	26.3	9
Colorado	147	5.61	26.2	10
Washington	192	7.41	25.9	11
Arizona	180	7.02	25.6	12-13 (Tie)
Alaska	19	0.74	25.6	12-13 (Tie)
Idaho	41	1.72	23.8	14
Delaware	22	0.96	22.9	15
Utah	67	3.10	21.6	16
S. Carolina	103	5.02	20.5	17
S. Dakota	16	0.87	18.4	18
Nevada	55	3.00	18.3	19
Missouri	111	6.11	18.2	20
Kansas	49	2.91	16.8	21
Florida	308	20.98	14.7	22
Minnesota	81	5.58	14.5	23
Massachusetts	99	6.86	14.4	24
Wisconsin	83	5.80	14.3	25
Maryland	86	6.05	14.2	26
Kentucky	62	4.45	13.9	27
N. Carolina	135	10.27	13.1	28-29 (Tie)
Tennessee	88	6.72	13.1	28-29 (Tie)
Nebraska	25	1.92	13.0	30
Iowa	40	3.15	12.7	31
Pennsylvania	161	12.81	12.6	32
Ohio	146	11.66	12.5	33
California	490	39.54	12.4	34
Alabama	60	4.87	12.3	35-36 (Tie)
New Jersey	111	9.01	12.3	35-36 (Tie)
Michigan	121	9.96	12.1	37
Oklahoma	47	3.93	12.0	38
Virginia	99	8.47	11.7	39
Georgia	113	10.43	10.8	40
Arkansas	30	3.00	10.0	41
W. Virginia	18	1.82	9.9	42
Hawaii	13	1.42	9.2	43
New York	170	19.85	9.2	44
N. Dakota	6	0.76	7.9	45-46 (Tie)
Indiana	53	6.67	7.9	45-46 (Tie)
Louisiana	34	4.68	7.3	47
Mississippi	21	2.98	7.1	48
Illinois	85	12.80	6.6	49
Texas	116	28.30	4.1	50