So, how long should you wait before reporting a UFO sighting? On the one hand, reporting the sighting immediately exposes you to criticism. After all, you'd need some pretty amazing evidence to be taken seriously. But on the other hand, anybody could say they saw a UFO 20 years ago after a few drinks one Saturday night on a holiday in North Dakota. It also may not be immediately obvious which agency is the best to report the sighting to. Come to think about it, I don't know the answer to that.
This decision process does actually appear to be at play in the data (Figure 1). In statisticians speak, the distribution of the time it takes to report a sighting is, somewhat, bimodal. About half of UFO sightings are reported in one day. Some even note that the UFO was still around as they made the report. But some wait for years, with about one in eight taking longer than than 10 years to report the sighting.
Figure 1 - Delay Before Reporting UFO Sightings
Since 1990 in the United States
Since 1990 in the United States
Interestingly, the time taken before reporting sightings has shrunk in recent years, especially since 1995. This suggests that either: improvements in technology have made it easier to report UFO sightings quickly; the stigma associated with reporting a UFO sighting has fallen; or there are biases in how the data were collected.
Next post, Summer is coming (in the Northern Hemisphere). Should I be worried about UFOs? But first, to avoid being typecast as a conspiracy theorist blog, I'll post something completely different. It's a data science blog.
Technical stuff
Once again all of the calculations were in R. But nothing here was overly complicated or used non-standard libraries. The radial chart above was made in ggplot2, which I'm quickly learning is the gold standard in R's graph libraries. But because you are looking here you may actually want to see the density plot of the length time it takes to report sightings (Figure 2).
Figure 2 - Delay Before Reporting UFO Sightings
Log Density Function
Well done, especially like the pie chart. :P
ReplyDeleteMy first comment. Thanks. But just to let you know, it's a radial chart.
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