Ufology Research

It's the season for "floating orange lights" across Canada. Most of the reports we get during the summer are of lights meandering or otherwise moving across the night sky. (See: 2011 Canadian UFO Survey)

Here's a typical report, a sighting of objects seen about 11:30 pm on Monday, July 30, 2012, over Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada:

I just went for a walk and noticed some odd things in the sky... I saw what everyone is describing, an orange light floating in the sky, then a yellow one too, then they were gone - maybe burnt out, but I didn't see them "fly away",  just disappeared. It was so odd. Made no noise either and were both very low to the ground - not super low, but definitely not airplane high.

This is about average as far as UFO reports go. Not a lot of detail, but enough that you get the general idea.

But I also get these kind of notes, this one from Facebook:

Incidentally, did you get a spike in UFO reports Sat night? I launched 4 of these by the floodway, and I'm pretty sure they got as far as the perimeter. http://www.redbomb.com/products/product.php?sku=8200S  

I've also heard that others are doing the same in other parts of Canada. 

So, don't get too excited about UFO reports of "floating orange lights."

Labels: UFO orange lights sighting report Canada

Yahoo is reporting the following:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/canadian-city-preparing-alien-invasion-211253281.html

Statistically, Toronto has the most UFO sightings, but Kelowna has the most per capita.
Calgary is near Canada's only UFO Landing Pad, and a "UFO Hotline" is active in Alberta.

So denizens of those cities should watch out, going by the Yahoo article.

But Plum Coulee is safe, thank goodness!

Labels: 2011 Canada UFO survey cities statistics

It's interesting that most of the media coverage about the 2011 Canadian UFO Survey has been fair and unbiased. The Daily Mail story today was pretty good, all things considered.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2179685/UFO-sightings-Canada-reach-record-high.html

Sure, their lead suggests that there haven't been UFOs reported in Canada until now, but that's about par for the course. But beyond that, there wasn't an injection of silliness about "alien rectal probes" and things like that (as some media have done in the past). Considering we stayed away from speculation about extraterrestrials, that was good. (Although they did use stock photos of saucers, none of which were from Canada.)

But others are not so sensible.

In fact, one skeptic's comment on a news blog noted:

Giving fancy names like "Ufologist", "Ufology Research Centre", etc. is just an effort to make you think these are legitimate scientists.  If they want to be legitimate scientist I challenge them to follow standard scientific methodologies and PROVE that we have been visited by aliens by providing hard evidence that can be independently verified by other scientists instead of challenging real scientist to disprove their existence.  You would think that with all the reported crashed UFO's around the world that there would be some sort of physical evidence...which makes me think...these UFO's travel billions of miles or cross inter-dimensional space to get here only to crash on the lump of rock we call home.  Seems to me that either the pilots are incompetent or their crafts are pieces of junk.  Lastly...why is there so much interest in "Ufology"?  Just follow the money.

This is so ridiculous on so many levels, it wouldn't normally be worth discussing at length, but it does raise an important issue about the legitimacy of UFO-related research.

What is "Ufology Research," anyway? It's not based at any academic institution, and not affiliated with any think tank or corporate entity such as the Bilderbergs, so does anything that Ufology Research have to say of any value? Obviously, the poster doesn't consider us "legitimate scientists," either, or we wouldn't study UFO reports.

As for following "standard scientific methodologies," the poster has likely not read the study. In fact, that's obvious because we make it clear that we are not talking about extraterrestrials or trying to "PROVE" that aliens are visiting Earth. And we're certainly not challenging scientists to disprove anything. We're providing data on observations of objects.

So is the Canadian UFO Survey "legitimate?" In the sense that we have examined about 1,000 actual reports submitted in 2011 by individuals puzzled by their observations, our analyses of these reports are completely legitimate: true and accurate. We even provide the actual data so that others can check the calculations.

So, "legitimate?" Sure.

Is it worth anything? Maybe.

Does it prove UFOs and aliens are real?

Huh?

[Oh, and what's this about "follow the money?" Did NASA send me a cheque that got lost in the mail?]

Labels: 2011 Canada UFO Survey skeptic science methodology research

Reactions are about as expected to the 2011 Canadian UFO Survey. Hard-core buffs think we're being too conservative, and debunkers are just scoffing.

We just go with the "Joe Friday" treatment.

One thing I should elaborate on is the one case I describe from St. Catharines, where a "grapefruit-sized" object flew very close to a witness.

The Yahoo story quoted me as saying:

a man reported seeing a grapefruit-sized object circling around a hydro pole before flying toward him, missing him by as little as two metres, before disappearing.

The Winnipeg Sun had the longer quote:

In St. Catharines, Ont., in early February, a man reported seeing a beige object -- the size and shape of a grapefruit -- circling high around a hydro pole before it stopped and then flew toward him, missing him by about two metres, before he lost sight of it.

Among the comments to the Yahoo story was the following:

Markku  •  Surrey, British Columbia  

the grapefruit sized object could have been a plasma ball , from a power bump in the electrical system . Similar object can be made by giant tesla coils and are completely natural. In the case of a Hydro Pole there is a lot of cable up there long enough to create an inductance at high frequencies if there is a power bump, and cause a plasma discharge to occur. That is my theory, and I am sticking to it.

However, I had the opportunity to speak with this witness at length, and he was insistent that this was not a plasma discharge, which is typically blue in colour and intense, but a physical "opaque" object that had form and was beige or brown.

Someone who had personal experience with plasmas in the field emailed me:

When I heard the bit about the beige ring spinning around the hydro wires, I immediately thought of the insulator rings that are used on some hydro poles.  When I worked at [a TV station], we would occasionally be on-site for "pole fires" - and those things could be weird (electricity like lightning moving along the outside of the wire, insulators blowing up, etc.).

The lightning things that I saw skipped along the outside of the wire and were, as you say, bluish-white, like regular lightning - in fact, they looked exactly like lightning - but moving horizontally along the outside of the wire , but when the insulators blew up, they changed color to more like orange.  For safety purposes, curious by-standers were kept at bay (on the next block) by the police, because when the insulators blew up there was no predicting in which direction they would fly, and they could go several hundred feet at high speed. I only saw one, that was a little smaller than a Frisbee (say, 6 inches in diameter) shoot about 100 feet and hit a fence. If that thing had hit a person, it would have surely caused injury, or death (depending on where it hit). 

So, if it wasn't a plasma discharge or an insulator, what was it?

Labels: 2011 Canadian UFO Survey cases plasma discharge lightning

Geoff Dittman and I have finally finished the 2011 edition of the Canadian UFO Survey.

It is now available online at:  http://bit.ly/2011CDNUFOsurvey 
and the data is at: http://bit.ly/2011CDNUFOdata

The points I made this year included:

• Contrary to what some people might think, UFOs don’t seem to have gone away.
• There were 986 UFO sightings reported in Canada in 2011, approaching three each day.  This is near the record for numbers of reports in one year, when 1,004 reports were received in 2008.
• Ontario had an all-time record high number of UFOs reported in 2011. In fact, the percentage of reports in Ontario compared with the rest of Canada has been increasing steadily during the past ten years.
• In 2011, about 11 per cent of all UFO reports were judged unexplained. This percentage of “unknowns” falls to less than one per cent when only higher-quality cases are considered.
• Approximately one in ten Canadians believe they’ve seen UFOs
• There is an average of two witnesses per UFO sighting.
• The typical UFO sighting lasted approximately 11 minutes in 2011.
• The study found that more than half of all UFO sightings were of simple lights in the sky. Witnesses also reported point sources of light, spheres and boomerangs.

Labels: UFO Canadian UFO Survey statistics data reports analyses