EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
- We look at the relationship between location of US nuclear plants
and UFO sightings of different types.
- We find there is a strong statistical link. States with more nuke
plants or more reactors seem to report more UFO sightings of certain types.
- But when we adjust all the data for state populations we find a
surprising result. States with more plants or reactors per capita
have FEWER sightings of certain types per capita.
- It seems some UFO types are "shy" of concentrations of reactors.
- We recall UFO's of certain types also seem to be shy to approach
concentrations of Air Force Bases (but seemingly not concerned about
Army bases). It's unclear what about nuclear plants might explain
the pattern. Increased security?


I just dropped by the BV where they had some documents from the NRC.
It seems the Nuclear agency has a list of UFO sightings it's been
maintaining (more or less) from the 1950s. Some of them involve
sightings seen at nuclear plants by staff, and some are related to
letters they receive from the public about UFO activity in the
neighbourhood -- something the NRC tells writers it has no remit
to iinvestigate but thankyou for your letter.

And of course the Big Report released recently did mention at least in
passing that some nuclear weapons facilities (and maybe some aircraft
weapons systems) have apparently been "interfered with" at the same
time as one or other UFO was in the vicinity. The has elsewhere been
taken by some commentators as a message "get rid of your nukes; they
are dangerous". But some of the more jaded of us also spot a possible continuation of a pattern of low-level intimidation and the message
might really be "surrender now; your best weapons are useless against
us". of course the first part might also be "leave us alone; we don't
want to talk with you".

So, naturally, we have to take a look at whether nuclear plants
actually seem to "attract" UFO activity or not. Or something else. :)

From the NUFORC we can break down sightings by US state. And various
lists are available counting commercial nuclear plants and total
number of reactors for each state. The situation is complicated a bit
because reactors and plants as a whole can come and go as the
economics and other factors dictate. So a count of reactors is
generally only applicable to some specific year.

But we can run the numbers through some robust regressions and see
what we get. As usual I'll only concentrate on those regressions that
pass 2 statistical tests -- a T-test on the \bate and a rank test on
the comparative ordering of the X and Y data -- at 90% confidence. And
then we only will look at the top10 results by R2 -- the so called
"explanation power" of the statistical model. The higher the R2 the
larger the percentage of state-by-state variation in UFO activity is
matched by similar state-by-state variation in the nuclear plant or
reactor numbers.

We'll also break the UFO numbers down in terms of "type" (mostly
determined by visible shape as determined by the folks at NUFORC) and
also pre 2006 and post 2006 when NUFORC started using a web report
form that greatly changed the character of reports they received.

OK. Got all that under your belt? Then let's look at the results and
prepare for a shock.


Nuke type UFO type R2 \beta +- 90% CI
Years Shape
plants <2006 Triangle 0.46505011 5.19158 +- 1.34795 plants <2006 Circle 0.43177366 3.73168 +- 1.04776 recators >2006 Egg 0.42952165 2.16787 +- 0.604824 recators >2006 Cigar 0.42177169 5.56501 +- 1.59478 recators >2006 Light 0.42115611 56.481 +- 16.2064 plants >2006 Triangle 0.41961490 42.8254 +- 12.1928 plants >2006 Egg 0.41869157 3.78347 +- 1.07923 recators <2006 Triangle 0.41813878 2.78489 +- 0.795291 plants >2006 Cigar 0.41392097 10.9026 +- 3.14065 plants >2006 Fireball 0.41316531 40.22 +- 11.7318

Which all seems to indicate for those states with more nuke plants
(or indiv reactors) there seems to be more Triangle and Circle UFO
activity, at least as reported prior to NUFORC before 2006.

The \beta for the "best model" (first line) says for each nuclear
plant in a state there is an overall pattern of about 5+-1 Triangle
UFO reports prior to 2006. The 2 stat tests say the association is
<10% likely to be some noise in the data or a chance link.

It seems open and shut, more or less. UFO's of certain types seem to
be "attracted" to nuclear plants. Or maybe that is people that see
UFO's of certain types are likely to live in states with more nuclear plants.

And this is almost universally what UFO researchers and some chunk of
the general public believe. "They" are hanging around nuclear sites
"for some reason".

But -- the surprise bit is now coming -- we would expect larger states
to have a larger number of reactors and probably plants. And we would
expect larger states to also report more UFO activity. Maybe the link
is due entirely to this underlying "common factor".

So let's re-do the whole exercise by this time based on plants/mn
cap and UFO sightings/mn cap instead of raw counts.

The top 10 largest R2 models then become:

Nuke type UFO type R2 \beta +- 90% CI
Years Shape
plantspc >2006 Diskpc 0.20324200 -11.2117 +- 5.43318 plantspc >2006 Otherpc 0.17687100 -17.9411 +- 9.57942 recatorspc <2006 Conepc 0.14538338 -0.569959 +- 0.338218 plantspc <2006 Flashpc 0.13766746 -0.93742 +- 0.594288 plantspc >2006 Cylinderpc 0.13480402 -4.18458 +- 2.59467 recatorspc <2006 Eggpc 0.13343271 -0.62297 +- 0.397457 recatorspc <2006 Unknownpc 0.13294601 -1.589 +- 1.00437 recatorspc >2006 Conepc 0.12749719 -1.38299 +- 0.895438 recatorspc <2006 Crosspc 0.12639032 -0.433907 +- 0.282346 recatorspc >2006 Changingpc 0.12563661 -4.16071 +- 2.71668

SURPRISE!

No only are the R2's reduced a lot from the above table of raw counts,
but all the \beta's are now negative. These are the top10 results but
no combination of plant/reactor and year/type showed a positive \beta
that was statistically significant.

It seems UFO's are actually "scared" of nuclear plants.

Taking the best model, above, we find for each nuclear plant per
mn cap there are 11 FEWER Disk sightings per mn cap in that state
in the data prior to 2006.

If you're the curious type we can look at the first model in detail:

MODEL (plants/mn cap vs pre 2006 Disk sightings/mn cap):

y = -11.2117*x + 13.2465
beta in -11.2117 +- 5.43318 90% CI
alpha in 13.2465 +- 1.31111
T-test: P(beta<0.000000) = 0.999425
calculated Spearman corr = -0.511939
Critical Spearman = 0.432000 2-sided at 1%; reject H0:not_connected
r2 = 0.20324200

DATA:

State plants/mn cap Disk/mn cap model-predicted Disk/mn cap Alabama 0.411609 6.37994 8.63165
Arizona 0.146454 16.9887 11.6045* (model -1sd re obs)
Arkansas 0.335773 10.0732 9.48191
California 0.0255462 10.9593 12.9601
Colorado 0 15.7608 13.2465
Connecticut 0.278483 11.6963 10.1242
Delaware 0 10.5716 13.2465 District.of.Columbia 0 7.43795 13.2465*(+1sd)
Florida 0.147993 10.5075 11.5872
Georgia 0.195793 7.73383 11.0513
Hawaii 0 10.4778 13.2465
Idaho 0 19.3362 13.2465*(-1sd)
Illinois 0.466563 8.55366 8.01552
Indiana 0 11.632 13.2465
Iowa 0.320113 8.96316 9.65748
Kansas 0.343449 8.24277 9.39584
Kentucky 0 12.2031 13.2465
Louisiana 0.428199 6.42299 8.44565
Maine 0 17.302 13.2465
Maryland 0.166489 8.82392 11.3799
Massachusetts 0 10.0082 13.2465
Michigan 0.302341 7.76008 9.85674
Minnesota 0.364326 9.83679 9.16178
Mississippi 0.334187 5.68119 9.49969
Missouri 0.164374 13.6431 11.4036
Montana 0 18.3939 13.2465*(-1sd)
Nebraska 0.527373 6.85585 7.33374
Nevada 0 15.2205 13.2465
New.Jersey 0.223264 9.04218 10.7433
New.Mexico 0 22.5408 13.2465**(-2sd)
New.York 0.202063 7.82995 10.981
North.Carolina 0.298721 10.3557 9.89732
North.Dakota 0 5.28453 13.2465*(+1)
Ohio 0.172215 7.31912 11.3157
Oklahoma 0 8.94834 13.2465*(+1)
Oregon 0 18.8633 13.2465*
Pennsylvania 0.312439 9.06073 9.74352
Rhode.Island 0 22.7209 13.2465**(-2) South.Carolina 0.816969 10.6206 4.08686*(-1)
South.Dakota 0 12.8135 13.2465
Tennessee 0.303017 10.1511 9.84916
TX 0.072809 5.71551 12.4302*(+1)
Utah 0 13.3515 13.2465
Vermont 0 22.3627 13.2465**(-2)
Virginia 0 9.66242 13.2465
Washington 0.139463 18.5486 11.6829*(-1)
West.Virginia 0 10.303 13.2465
Wisconsin 0.17327 8.14369 11.3038
Wyoming 0 11.9432 13.2465


The model predictions are not particularly good -- you know from the
R2 that 80% of the state-by-state variation must be related to
"something else" -- but the stat tests say the nuclear plants are a
factor. Both tests are 90% sure the factor is -ve. I.e. more plants
means fewer reports of Disks in that state (in the pre 2006 part of
the NUFORC dataset).

It seems the folkloric belief "they are interested in our nukes" has
been misled by a "confounding factor". Adjusting for state populations
it seems, if anything, some types of UFO's are "scared off" by too
many nuclear plants.

We recall also a previous post that suggested UFO's are also shy about appearing in states with large numbers of AFB's. While they still
make the occasional appearance in such states, they appear
increasingly more the further away from those bases the sightings
come. The shape of this curve can be analyzed to guess what it is the
UFO's are "shy" of. E.g. a curve that shows UFO numbers rise linearly
the further from a cluster of AFB's they occur it suggests they
consider something that travels at constant speed (i.e. takes a time proportional to distance to reach them) as some kind of
threat. E.g. aircraft that might be scrambled to intercept them.

If the curve rises with other characteristic shapes other cases
suggest certain UFO types are concerned about interception by area
patrols (rather than scrambled interceptors) or approx
constant-accelerating ground-to-air missiles.

Why they may be avoiding concentrations of nuclear plants (all the
ones we listed above are supposedly civilian power generating plants)
is not clear. Certainly security might be "touchy" in those areas. We
hope the concern is not connected with possible interference between
the operation of the plant and whatever plant and engines the UFO are
using. That could be nasty for everyone.

--
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* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)