Newsgroups: alt.astronomy
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: math models vs eye-watering ignorance

[uploaded 42 times; last 17/10/2024]

It's UNPOSSIBUL!!  screech the peanut gallery.


Of course grade school grads understand proving anything is impossible
is generally not possible.  In geometry and math theories you by
definition have everything that is known about the topic you're
playing with. To prove something is impossible in math you have to
systematically checked every conceivable way something COULD be
possible and show it involves a contradiction.  If you close off every
path you have proved something is impossible.  But you can only do
that because -- in math -- you "know everything"; it was all written
down in the assumptions and rules of the theory.

In real life you do not know everything. You never will know
everything.  You can never even determine what is true.  So even in
principle you can't prove something is impossible. You may never have
seen X happen.  No-one may ever have seen X happen. But that proves
nothing.  Ask a black swan.

We estimate these days that science has been spinning it's wheels on
about 5% of the content of the physical universe. We know something
about normal matter but have almost total lack of knowledge about the
other 95% of the material universe. We essentially know nothing.  On
the plus side, some of us realize we know nothing. So we know
something. :)

Various screechers here-abouts seem to have been positioned to play
down one particular threatening possibility to the powers-that-be.
That it's possible -- maybe even very likely :) -- that some form of
non-human life is operating around the Earth and authorities have
known about it for some time but tried to ignore it because they can't
touch it. Authorities have "form" on doing this kind of thing for...
I dunno... maybe the last 6000 years.

But trying to deny "something is going on" has become particularly
hard given some very credible people are now saying something *is*
going on.  An increasing number of military and other officials say
there are unusual aircraft operating over earth. Despite our
wonderful network of spy satellites we can not find where the heck
they are based.  We haven't spotted landing strips in outback
Siberia. Or anywhere else.  But we can see them whizz around the
atmosphere and ocean at impossible speeds. And there are growing
numbers of reports of "fast movers" have been spotted by instruments
coming and going from space.

These things turn up on radar and other sensors, typically are visible
for a few seconds only, then disappear like they were never there.

This kind of thing is very hard for traditional science to deal
with. So it has largely been denied there is subject matter.  It
doesn't happen. Code for it's too hard to deal with.  Unfortunately
the traditional scientific establishment has a long and well-earned
reputation for total gutlessness on topics like this.

While witnesses continue to come forward and investigators continue to
jot down what they say, individual reports don't mean much.
Individual reports can be faked or mistaken. We don't use single data
points from a graph to characterise the slope of the curve.  We don't
use single reports to learn anything about the phenomenon behind them.

What is much harder to fake or mistake is the totality of or
significant groups of data from the growing collection of reports.
Patterns across the reports are hard to fake and sets of reports reduce
the possibility of repeated random errors. And consistent errors can
be removed (e.g.  supposing people mistake Saturn or a sat train for
some unusual object in the sky can be massaged out by ignoring
reports on nights when Saturn or sat trains were visible in the sky at
that location).

As an example, let's look at a very simple math treatment of a certain
type of report -- claims that military aircraft have been seen
"interacting" with unusual high-speed objects in the sky over mostly
N America.

The NUFORC says about 430 people over the past 70y have reported
seeing one or more apparently normal military aircraft -- jets or
choppers -- chase or even fire at lights or other strange aircraft
zooming around the skies. (There are also reports that some unusual
objects sometimes fire at other types of unusual objects; but we shall
leave that to another time :).

We can the relevant time series to a small AI program that has been
trained to do robust statistics. It uses "validated models" to
determine whether some factor -- from a growing list of presently 10s of
1000s it has on file -- is "highly predictive" of the phenomenon we
are looking at.

"Validated" means the s/w uses part of the data to try to spot a
pattern -- e.g. a trend or association -- and then checks whether the
"unseen" part of the data has the same pattern.  In science the
ability to predict things is the only real test that a theory captures
something about the real natural world.  Eben if a theory is a little
buggy -- like relativity and its naive concept of "the vacuum" -- but
still manages to make correct predictions then we tend to keep using it.

In this case we take the list of "military jet seen chasing UFO" data
and relate them to all the satellite weather data for the past 100y,
all the national demographics, commodity and stock prices, and 10s of
1000s of other things and this turns up near the very best things that
predict the appearance of reports.

Distance between Uranus and Earth versus "military interactions with UFOs":
(The following data has been summaries using binning to make it
presentable in a small table).
Months like            Av Ura-E dist  Av #reports/yr  Model prediction
                           (AU)       mil & UFO
1970.46                   17.3712      -1.7007     -1.48367
1978.54                   17.5777      2.71707      0.27911
1979.54                    17.656      5.33433     0.947515*
1974.62                    17.881    -0.724467      2.86822
1970.62                   18.1013       1.8541       4.7488
1987.62                   18.2182      5.44285      5.74671
1990.62                   18.3574       2.6908      6.93499*
1965.62                   18.4898      2.08745      8.06521*
1993.71                    18.598      3.80377      8.98886*
2021.04                    18.787      6.61949      10.6022
2020.04                   18.9552      14.8284      12.0381
2017.88                   19.0949      21.4002      13.2306*
2020.12                    19.241      16.9098      14.4778
2018.79                   19.4309      22.8895      16.0989*
2020.79                   19.5312      21.4568      16.9551*
2021.21                   19.6347      18.0611      17.8386
2019.21                   19.8108      24.9904      19.3419*
2017.71                   19.9517      22.8013      20.5447
2021.29                   20.0876      18.9851      21.7048
2012.62                    20.269      19.2524      23.2533
2017.62                   20.3835      24.0659      24.2307
2021.62                   20.5343       21.733       25.518
2012.54                   20.6804      31.2711      26.7652*
2021.54                   20.7894      24.6678      27.6957
2017.46                   20.9932      25.3891      29.4354

The no. of reports has been de-seasonalised to allow for different
times of the year possibly affecting the number of observers available
to make such reports. We might expect more people are outside in
summer and fewer are outside in winter, so we have to allow for that.

We also have to allow for the fact there are sometimes only 1 report
in a month that spot some military/UFO interaction.  If a stream of
data is just 0 or 1 then some numerical procedures can't make much out
of it. So we use the no. of reports in each month to estimate a "rate
of reports per year" centered on that month.

The Uranus-Earth distance varies daily as the Earth revolves in its
orbit. The orbit of Uranus is very long and the data doesn't capture
even 1 complete orbit. However, the extra +-1 AU "wobbles" in the data
due of the annual orbit of the Earth allow extremely high certainty
the 2 things -- Uranus distance and UFO sightings that include
military aircraft interacting -- are connected.

The stats part of the output looks like:

MODEL:
x lagged by 2m
y = 8.53646*x + -149.772
beta in 8.53646 +- 1.35834   90% CI
alpha in -149.772 +- 26.1433
T-test: P(beta>0) = 1.000000
Rank test: calculated Spearman corr = 0.900000
	critical value = 0.475 2-sided at 1%; reject H0:not_connected
r2 = 0.83454466

For non-stats heads the s/w says the 2 things appear to be connected.
Strongly. 2 different tests say it's 99% beyond-chance the numbers
could be as seen without some underlying causal connection.
I.e. together the data-set would be up to 1 chance in 10,000 unlikely
to ever be seen.

Moreover, the R2 says the model predicts 83% of the month-to-month
chances in "reporting rate". IOW the 2 data sets are practically a
straight line with points all very close to the line.

So we are forced to conclude that "for some reason" the distance
between Earth and Uranus from month to month seems to predict how many
times people will report seeing an interaction between a UFO and
military-type aircraft.

As I said this is a validated model. It was estimated on part of the
data (typically we use 1/2 of the data to estimate and 1/2 to validate
the estimated model) and tested on the rest and found to show the same
pattern. We can be fairly sure over the next 70y or so the same model
will operate unless something suddenly changes.  Presumably they
can't happen with the orbits of Uranus or Earth.  But of course it
could happen with a change of military policy.

We are forced to conclude all the witnesses may be onto something.
The military has known about these unusual objects for some time and
effectively been in a low-level war with them since shortly after
UFO's became a modern thing in the 1950s.

But now for the kicker. It wouldn't be an authentic post from me if
there wasn't a kicker.

The above model predicts that when Uranus is furthest from Earth
there are the most UFO/military interactions seen. Why this should be
is not addressed by this simple model. We might speculate that as
distances narrow it's easier to travel between Earth and some distance
"home". In the same way anyone left on Earth at that time is liable to
be "trapped" here.

By not total coincidence in 2004 there was a report of a US carrier
group operating off California was buzzed over a period of several
days by squadrons of unusual objects that had some pretty unusual
capabilities not limited to high speed and ability to disappear into
the ocean.

That was in Nov 2004. In early 2005 Uranus was more than 21 AU
from Earth. About as far as it ever gets.

Remember the 2m lag in the model. The AI tried 0, 1 and 3 as well.
2 was the best (maximum R2).  Spot on.

--
"I think some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be
unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the
result of something that we don't yet understand."
--Ex-CIA Director John Brennan

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