Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: variation in sighting times of "lights"

[uploaded 40 times; last 17/09/2024]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- At least my own observations of unusual lights in the sky suggests
  the time they are likely to be seen has changed in the past 2-3
  years. When I first became aware of unusual objects flying across
  the sky in my area they happened mostly between 8pm and 10pm. In
  more recent times the numbers are much less and mostly between 6pm
  and 8pm.
- We note there seems to be a seasonal variation in sighting time of
  lights revealed in the NUFORC database for sightings mostly in the US.
- By putting the month by month most-common-sighting-hour through a
  matching process a program finds the dataset of the 100s of 1000s it
  has on file that "best" matches that behaviour is the position of Jupiter.
  In particular, when Jupiter is near and passes its perihelion --
  that happened late 2021/early 2022 -- it predicts a switch in
  sighting time of lights from "late" to "early" in the evening.


Over the past little while I've become aware of almost nightly
activity our here in semi-rural Australia. I live on the extreme outer
fringe of Melbourne, maybe 50 km from an international airport.  And
that may be the key to seeing during the almost 2y covid lockdown an
increasing number of odd lights buzzing across the local skies at
night, sometimes doing even odder things than just travelling against
the direction of normal satellite orbits.

The lights had the night skies to themselves, pretty much, during much
of the lockdown. Despite being on the approach path for Melb AP
there was no traffic while the lockdown was in effect.  But at the
start of 2022 Australia fed and then state govt's moved to "ignore covid"
and drop almost all health measures. That has had unfortunate effects
on the daily covid death rate, but it's also see a change in the
nightly activity.

When I first became aware of it, various lights and other things
seemed to start up around 8pm local time and continue for maybe 2 hrs.
After about 10pm there was normally nothing going on in the sky AFAIK.

But when Australia rebooted in Jan the local airport opened again and
jets were seen arriving and stacked up late at night across the N and
E horizons.

A new set of unusual players were then noted. At first one, then 2,
then more aircraft seemed to be "on patrol" and apparently on the
lookout for unusual objects in the sky. Mostly civilian-looking but
probably military-operated noisy light aircraft passed by my location
every couple of hours and sometimes were seen orbiting for reasons at
first unknown.

Eventually I saw some unusual interactions between unidentified lights
and the aircraft leading me to suspect the aircraft were there for a
reason -- either to warn off or at least monitor what was going on in
the skies overnight.

Sometimes I would see military-looking choppers buzzing around clouds.
One time I saw a chopper scare out a "red orb" from a cloud.  As the
black-centered object seemed to roll up the side of a fluffy cloud and
over onto the top of it, the chopper seemed to cast about looking for
something. It was only ~1 km from me so I helpfully pointed to the
cloud thinking maybe someone would see me even in the pretty much
pitch dark. But they apparently didn't and headed off at reasonable
speed to the east, leaving the orb to do whatever.

Another time an aircraft "shook the tree" and 1, 2, 3 then 4 very dim
lights streamed out of a cloud and headed over my head and to the E.
The aircraft didn't give chase. Apparently it was mission accomplished.

Over a few months these almost nightly interactions seemed to have an
effect. The lights seemed to stop. For a while there was nothing much
going on in the skies at night except noisy little aircraft apparently
patrolling the region. It got to the point I saw one of them orbiting
down to the south one night. A yellow flash of what I took to be a
meteor was seen high overhead, and the little aircraft immediately
turned and headed for where the flash had happened. Either it was
getting desperate for some action or the meteor wasn't a meteor.

In the past month or so some unusual activity has returned. But it's
at totally a different time of the evening. Initially nothing could be
seen until maybe 8pm. These days the best viewing times are at dusk --
around 6pm. Nothing much is then seen after maybe 8pm. The little
planes of course continue to patrol and I'm pretty sure I hear them
going over well into the early hours of the morning usually on the hour.

So the change in timing got me wondering. Has the harassment caused
the activity to move from 8pm to 6pm, or is there some other reason?

So we have to turn to the data. The NUFORC data shows the sighting
times for "lights" seems to change from season to season.  Looking at
the most common sighting hour for the data from the 1940s to now we find:

Month	Most common time (local hour of day)
	to report sighting "light" UFO
1    	19
2    	19
3    	20
4    	21
5    	21
6    	22
7    	22
8    	21
9    	20
10    	20
11    	18
12    	18


So this was heartening (for some reason :). There is a seasonality in
sighting time that varies from 6pm to 10pm over the year.  At least
for sightings in the US. And maybe Australia. :)

But the next question that crops up. What explains this month-to-month
variation in sighting time? Is it something to do with changes in the
behaviour of the observers -- holidays, work hours, daylight savings
-- or is it something to do with the objects?

Without any data on the subject we would have to presume it's a
combination of these and maybe other things.

To answer more exactly we have to put some data through a little
program.  The program tries to match up a "fingerprint" of a target
dataset against fingerprints from (these days) ~250,000 other datasets
it keeps on file. The object of the exercise is to find the dataset
that matches best beyond a reasonable statistical chance.

The target dataset in this case will be the modal (i.e. most common)
sighting hour for light UFO's month by month. Because of peculiarities
in the NUFORC dataset I normally use I've chosen the period 1990 to
2005 for the data on sighting time versus date.

While the full dataset is too long to include here, a summary annual
avg looks like:

Year	Annual avg of
	max sighting hour for each the 12 m
1990	21.1
1991	21
1992	21
1993	20.75
1994	21.7273
1995	20.6364
1996	20.2
1997	20.6667
1998	20.1818
1999	20.25
2000	20.7273
2001	21.25
2002	19.9091
2003	21.1818
2004	20.75
2005	20.5833


Using the target data the s/w removes any (Earth! -- it doesn't handle
other-planet seasonality yet) seasonality or trend from the data,
assuming any seasonality or change over time is entirely due to
changes in the observers -- e.g.  population growth, work behaviour,
holidays, etc.

It does the same thing (notionally) to each of the 1/4 mn datasets it
has in its database and finds which dataset statistically matches best
against the target.

Not handled at this point is the nauseating problem of daylight saving
time.  Not only does onset and offset of DST change from place to
place but also changes from time to time. There is s/w to handle this
mess but I'll just trust that any variation of +-1 hr (or in some
cases +-1/2 hr) due to switch DST on and off at some location for some
period will act like random noise and not bias the matching process.

I didn't know what to expect from the program and was amazed by the
somewhat emphatic first part of the output:

Suspect		    Lag    Transf    R2            Beta            90% CI
		    (m)
jupiter-v            0             0.89918013      -0.0442709      0.00236766
jupiter-lonecl       4             0.87231609      -0.0441595      0.00269841
jupiter-lonecl       3             0.87145068      -0.0451298      0.0027684
jupiter-lonecl       6             0.86906013      -0.0439068      0.00273111
jupiter-v            1             0.86767606      -0.0443534      0.00273929
jupiter-lonecl       1             0.85083253      -0.0441641      0.00292452
jupiter-v            3             0.84354840      -0.0437198      0.00301724
jupiter-lonecl       0             0.82847438      -0.0433025      0.00310595
jupiter-v            4             0.81957728      -0.0429391      0.00321778
jupiter-v            3       -y    0.81087361      -0.00340751     0.000264602
jupiter-v            4       -y    0.79132297      -0.00337303     0.000278507
jupiter-v            0       -y    0.79089343      -0.00350576     0.000277937
jupiter-v            6       -y    0.78696002      -0.00340134     0.000287468
jupiter-v            6             0.78333300      -0.0425877      0.00358925
jupiter-v            1       -y    0.77596058      -0.00348657     0.000289754
jupiter-lonecl       12      -y    0.76226905      -0.0033777      0.000311804
jupiter-lonecl       12            0.76147721      -0.0421191      0.00384231
jupiter-lonecl       4       -y    0.75893445      -0.0033763      0.000297094
jupiter-lonecl       6       -y    0.75430562      -0.00341141     0.000304948
jupiter-v            12            0.75173712      -0.041636       0.00395516
jupiter-lonecl       3       -y    0.73496119      -0.00336535     0.00031553
jupiter-v            12      -y    0.73072810      -0.00339421     0.000343036
jupiter-lonecl       1       -y    0.70364890      -0.0034163      0.000342902
jupiter-lonecl       0       -y    0.68181276      -0.00335967     0.000353871
jupiter-lonecl       0       -x    0.51620027      -5.307          0.79216
jupiter-lonecl       1       -x    0.50658543      -5.05872        0.772161

The results are ordered by R2 -- the "explanation power" -- of each
model.  In the first line the variable "jupiter-v" is said to explain
almost 90% of the month-to-month variation in sighting times for
lights UFOs.

The output lists 4300 possible matches but the "best" 143 or so are
some form of the location of Jupiter in its orbit.

The "jupiter-v" is the position of Jupiter in its orbit with respect
to its closest approach to the sun (perihelion).  V varies from 0
(perihelion) to 360 degrees (approaching perihelion again).  So the
"universal" -ve value for Beta says the sighting hour (or, more
exactly, the "fingerprint" of the sighting hour dataset) decreases for
each degree in its orbit Jupiter moves past perihelion.

When Jupiter is closest to the sun, of course, it becomes closest to
Earth during that part of the year Earth moves between Jupiter and the Sun.

The Jupiter "lonecl" is a very similar measure. The position of the
planet as projected onto the ecliptic -- the plane of the Earth's
orbit. The planets of the solar system orbit very close to the same
plane, but not exactly. So v and lonecl vary slightly during Jupiter's
10-y orbit.

But, again, the -ve sign on Beta shows that as Jupiter's orbit
continues the sighting hour tends to decrease. When the planet reaches
the "0" of its lonecl (which is not necessarily the same as the
perihelion) the sighting hour returns to its maximum value and cycles
again through medium and minimum values.

So the upshot of this seems to be -- the variation in sighting times
I'm seeing in Melbourne, as well as the data from the NUFORC for
mostly the US and sometimes Canada, both display a variation that
seems to be related to Jupiter, not the behaviour of observers.

When Jupiter approaches the sun sighting times for light UFOs are
generally at their earliest -- e.g. 6pm -- and as Jupiter moves through
its orbit sighting times tend to get earlier and earlier. But sometime
around perihelion they are expected to move into the later evening.

And just by coincidence it seems Jupiter approached perihelion --
where V switches from 359 back to 0 -- sometime in early 2022.
(My computer ephemeris is not quite good enough to tell me the exact date :).

--
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie

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