Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: phantom airships have same patterns as modern ufos

[uploaded 26 times; last 17/10/2024]

An email from someone that maintains a paranormal site got me thinking
about the old phantom airship phenomenon.  Back before flying disks
were a thing there were a couple of "flaps" where people across the
US, Europe and even New Zealand reported what was usually described as
"airships" flying over their cities.  As reported in newspapers it was
even claimed the airships were typically manned by people. In some
extreme cases the airships supposedly tied up to local buildings and
pilots came down, asking to borrow buckets of water. They sometimes
supposedly claimed to be from Mars.  And a whole fantasy array of
other things were reported to have been seen by witnesses up to and
including perspiring men powering the machines using pedal power.

Some researchers have written the whole thing off as total fabrication
by the newspapers of the time. One theory goes that reporters of the
1890s wrote a bunch of rubbish to fill the pages on the understanding
with the readership that most of what they read was for entertainment
only, and didn't need to make sense.

But some paranormal researchers are not so sure. Maybe "airship" was
just the mental model people in the late 19th cent had for unusual
things flying around the sky in much the same way as people in the
1940s talked about "phantom rockets" crashing into lakes in
Scandinavia.

Maybe it's all a big jolly joke perpetrated by person or non-persons
currently unknown to science. Maybe it's a big test. Can organised
science handle complex things they can't drag back to a lab and stick
in a hard vacuum and prod and poke at will? Can scientists have enough
faith in what the mass of the population says it's seeing to actually
look seriously at whatever it is? Well, of course, we know the answer
to that one. :)

Well my contact sent me some data and I promised to throw it to the
AI programs to see what they made of it. It was pretty much
suspecting the data would be too little and too noisy to get anything
out of.  "Noisy" is a technical term for what they publish in
newspapers even now. Maybe moreso in the 1890s.

The data I have looks like:
Year Mon Day #sightings
1890 1 22 1
1890 8 21 1
1890 11 24 1
1891 9 5 1
1891 9 6 1
1891 9 7 2
1891 9 8 1
1891 9 9 3
1891 9 10 1
1891 9 11 1
1891 9 12 1
1891 9 19 1
1891 11 26 1
1892 1 18 1
1892 3 4 1
1892 3 26 4
1892 3 28 2
1892 3 31 2
1892 5 18 1
1892 6 10 1
1892 9 10 1
1893 7 3 1
1893 12 31 1
1894 9 29 1
1895 9 4 1
1895 9 6 3
1895 9 7 1
1895 9 10 1
1895 11 16 1
1896 11 18 1
1896 11 19 1
1896 11 22 1
1896 11 29 1
1897 2 2 1
1897 4 10 1
1897 4 13 1
1897 4 16 1
1897 4 19 2

Fresh off the production line the AI's say the data has exactly the
same hallmarks as modern UFO data. From the numbers supplied -- from
newspaper and magazine reports from various countries in the 1890s --
they find predictive models based on the position of key planets at
least predict a good chunk of them month to month.  The number of
sightings in any given month in the 1890s is predicted to within +-.4
given the stddev of the sightings is almost +-.6 per month. I.e. the
prediction is "skillful".  (Below we multiply the per month rates by
12 to get per annum rates that are in a batter range for some s/w to
manipulate).

Moreover, they can come up with a planet that is "most likely" linked
to the airship phenomenon, and we know it well from prev posts --
Neptune.  While all the outer planets are linked in some way to the
rise and fall of "airship" sightings over the period 1890-1900,
Neptune predicts the data the best. Pretty much just like modern UFO
activity.

The demonstration is long and probably boring, but an outline goes like this.

For the given dataset create predictive models based on the data for
each planet in turn. In this exercise only 2 types of data were looked
at -- the distance of the planet from the sun and the speed it was
moving with respect to the sun for each month between 1890 and 1900.

To build the predictive model we use a validation technique.
I.e. part of the data is used to estimate model parameters (here we
build mostly linear models like "y=a+b*x" where x is a planetary value
and y is the monthly airship sightings count -- so the parameters are
"a" and "b"). Later we use the "withheld" part of the data to
calculate the error that model predicts without having see those
numbers before. We try some different combinations of factors to try
to push the model building program to its limits to see if it will
fail. Given it doesn't fall we can -- at the end -- assemble all the
successful models are decide e.g. which planet best estimated the
airship counts in the months it was not allowed to see when it was
building the models.

It all sounds incredibly tedious, right? Yea. Well I'm a data
scientist and that's my mother you're talking about!

But the summary data shows for each planet and all combination of
factors how well the "average model" involving just that planet was
able to estimate the airship activity for the "unseen" part of the
data.

Planet	Avg error in unseen part of data  
neptune 5.05608
jupiter 5.10431
pluto 	5.9523
saturn 	6.099
uranus 	6.21247

For comparison, the stderr for airships sightings for the period was
around 7.  I.e. if we just use the "average number of sightings" to
guess how many sightings will happen next month then we would be out
on average around 7 sightings + or -. But the average model using
Neptune's position and speed with respect to the sun is only out +-5
per month -- a considerable improvement on using the average (aka
"just guessing").

This simple evidence is enough to convince us -- OK, some of us :) --
that Neptune was "most likely" involved in 19th cent "phantom airship"
sightings and that in many cases (when not actual fabrications by the
newspapers or "witnesses") actually corresponded to what witnesses
would call UFO's now.

--
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts,
foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that
is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market
is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- JFK

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