XPost: alt.ufo.reports

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
- There is a large folklore connected with "UFO abduction". While
some psychiatrists are sure this is a modern mass psychosis, some
others are not so sure.
- From FBI missing persons data we find there are significant
correlations between UFO activity and changes the number of missing
persons.
- Some categories of missing persons are not connected with UFO
activity.
- Apparently young and disabled persons are more likely to become
missing after an up-tick in UFO activity than people with abusive
partners or someone whose home is destroyed by an earthquake.
- The patterns of which missing person groups are associated with UFO
activity and which are not apparently associated suggests planning
may be involved.


So far we've looked at several ways UFO's apparently interact with the
world, mostly leaving zero or very slight footprints. Apart from
apparently being connected with mass fish and dolphin deaths, increased
UFO activity so far does not seem to have any negative connotations.

But that may now change.

The connections between UFO's and missing persons is urban lore of
relatively long-standing. An unusually large number of people believe
they have been visited and sometimes abducted by "aliens".

While many aspects of the stories appear to be dream-like, and many down-players point out an unusually large number of abduction cases
seem to occur when the victims were in bed, some high-0profile
psychiatrists have argued there are just so many cases and they have
so much detail in common they must refer to something real.

Harvard prof John Mack was initially interested in alien abductions as
an exercise in analysing an unusual mass psychosis perhaps similar to
the old European belief in "night mare"/nachtmerrie/nachtmahr -- a
demon or goblin that tormented people with bad dreams.

But after years interviewing patients he says he was reluctantly
forced to conclude many cases may be actual, if not misrepresented by
the patient, events.

Mack rode out years of ridicule from his peers for his ideas. It's
said other psychiatrists yelled out at conferences whether he had been
declared insane yet.

But is there any evidence for the idea that UFO activity could be
connected with abductions or missing persons?

It's easy enough to check. The FBI maintains a missing person database
with data maintained on different categories of missing people. At
least since 2015 there are monthly data available. Before that there
are annual summaries back to the 1990s.

As in other studies I'll use the NUFORC database as a proxy for UFO
activity. I'll use a simple time-series regression s/w to match monthly
numbers of different categories of missing persons published in FBI
reports against monthly sightings from NUFORC. At this point we wont
try to break down sightings by type, but subsequent posts will try to
point at characteristics of UFO sightings that seem to relate more to
missing persons than others. In some cases certain activity seems to
relate to the "return" of missing persons.

Seeing whether monthly UFO sightings "predict" different types of
monthly missing person reports finds:

Category Filter Trans Binning R2 \beta
INV 1.5 - 40 0.75219078 0.0973474
OTHER 1 - 10 0.39129340 0.592367
JUV 1 - 10 0.16165318 0.824093
DIS 1 log 9 0.06841812 20.3069

The "category" column is the FBI missing person category. In recent
reports there are 6 categories: juvenile, endangered, involuntary,
disabled, catastrophe, and other.

The software used very strong criteria to test whether UFO activity
predicted changes (either increase or decrease) in missing persons
month by month. In 4 out of the 6 categories it found a relationship
that tested at 90% confidence or more in 2 statistical tests -- a
T-test on the TS-adjusted \beta and a rank test on the ordering on
data records by "x" compared with "y". In addition, if there are fewer
than 10 points in the final binning model it is discarded. The final
results are meant to be "convincing" as well as statistically
robust. :)

It seems the only categories of missing persons NOT apparently
connected with UFO activity are "catastrophe" -- missing people
associated with an earthquake, tornado, or a road train driving their
their bedroom by accident. And there is no apparent link with
"endangered" victims -- those known to have gone missing in
circumstances where they were in some kind of danger or threat from
significant other or other reasons.

The "most certain" model is the top one. "INV" means the missing
person disappeared in circumstances that suggest it was
involuntary. For every 100 UFO sightings in months between 2015-2020
there were about 10 involuntary missing persons. For comparison,
the average net INV per month over the period was around 30.

Let's look at the model in detail to see "how convincing" it looks:

(AUTO CORR CORRECTION; estimated rho = -0.163019)
y = 0.0973474*x + -15.7542
beta in 0.0973474 +- 0.0367351 90% CI
alpha in -15.7542 +- 23.6245
P(beta>0.000000) = 0.999424
r2 = 0.75219078
calculated Spear man corr = 0.745455
Critical Spear man = 0.564000 2-sided at 5%; reject H0:not_connected

Bin label av #UFO av #new model-estimated
sightings/mo missing "INV" new missing INV cases
2019.12 242.981 33.625 7.89937*
2018.79 299.559 1.5 13.4071
2019.29 360.856 16.9231 19.3742
2018.54 443.188 27.5833 27.389
2019.62 505.259 28.7 33.4315
2016.62 564.114 22 39.1608*
2019.71 621.36 59.75 44.7336*
2019.88 688.57 61.3333 51.2763
2019.96 739.625 45.25 56.2464
2015.88 886.832 73 70.5766

The s/w is a binning time-series regression. It collects the data into
similar bins -- in this instance months between 2015 and 2020 -- and
averages all the points allocated to that bin. This produces an
improved or smoothed estimate of "x" and "y" for 1 case in the
regression. The binning operates to maximize the R2 robustly. The R2
number shows what fraction of the "y" (INV cases numbers per month)
data change in the same way as the "x" data (UFO sightings per month).

The "*" at the end of some lines shows points that are not close to
the regression line. It turns out only 3 out of 10 points are not "statistically close" to the trend line. The T-test says this can only
happen by luck 0.01% of the time. The Spearman test says the ordering
of the data by the missing person column is so similar to the data
ordered by the UFO sightings column it could only happen 10% of the
time just by luck. Together the 2 tests point at a real association
between UFO sightings and a small but measurable "involuntary"
missing persons per month is highly likely.

The other models have a lower R2 meaning the \beta is less certain.

E.g. for the OTHER category every 100 UFO sightings corresponds with
around 59 "other" missing persons and with around 82 missing juveniles
(a person <21 and not meeting any of the other categories, according
to FBI definitions). Finally, there is also a relationship between
UFO sightings and "disabled" persons. Unlike the other models this is
based on the logarithm of the number of UFO sightings. If the number
of sightings doubles it corresponds to an increase in missing disabled
persons of around 14.

The exact causal connection between UFO sightings and increases (or
decreases) in the number of missing Americans cant be determined from
these data. It is possible that e.g. for the "disabled" category
perhaps a bright light in the sky caused someone less able to cope
with a surprising occurrence to leave home and disappear.

But the pattern of which categories are associated, how much they are associated, and which categories are not associated indicates the
causal link may be as basic as many suspect.

And as I mentioned above, there are features of UFO sightings that
seems to suggests missing people can re-appear after certain types of
UFO activity. According to folklore they may not remember what happened.

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)