Newsgroups: alt.ufo.reports
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: noticed some missing data for Pioneer 11

[uploaded 30 times; last 17/10/2024]

*** UPDATE
    Since this article was written I've come across a note in some
    related file saying -- in effect -- the P11 probe in the period
    before rendezvous with Saturn had an uncertain position and
    trajectory. Whatever that means, exactly. It was out there
    somewhere near Saturn and we couldn't get a good read on its
    position from the on-board or Earth-side instruments, so we pulled
    the screwy data we did have from the database.
    The same kinda thing might have happened to New Horizons as it
    made an asteroid fly-by.

I've previously noted that some databases I tend to visit seem to be
"lightly edited" to remove stuff that "might be relevant to national
security". E.g. you tend to see images from telescopes significantly
thin on the ground the day before a mass UFO sighting.  It seems
person or persons unknown goes back and pulls images that may have
been set for release to the public "in case" they contain things the
public is not ready to see. The public here means even scientists
working in related areas.

And in the past couple days the AI's have alerted me to another
possible footprint in a "public" database.

Avi Loeb mentioned something about the Pioneer probes in a recent
piece to The Debrief. So I decided to point at the dataset and tell
the programs to go look at it. And they dutifully did.

But downloading some of the data gave an unexpected error.  An error
even the software at the relevant institute could not handle.  If the
data has a "regular gap" I've noticed the software at the web site
just notes that and you get some of the data before or after the gap
and you have to make do with interpolating across the missing stuff.

But in this case even the web site software did not expect whatever
it found in the dataset and choked with a "memory dump".  Essentially
the whole year of data tracing the path of Pioneer 11 meeting Saturn
was unexpectedly MIA.

In other database encounters I've found files present in the database
but the contents mysteriously blacked out. Normally you might expect
if something was not available then no file pretending to have the
information would be stored at the relevant web-site. It's just a waste
of disk space even if disks are large these days.

It all just sounds so Men In Black. :)

But if the data is missing then perhaps with what remains around the
gap we can see what was being hidden.

And so I patched together the data on Saturn and the data on the
position of Pioneer 11 and ran some statistical tests, just ignoring
the 1y gap in the middle.

And this is what the programs found:

dsatp11 0.01109251  -0.149659 +- 0.190957      ttest 90% CI ranktest 5% sig
p11r    0.00612584  0.0511833 +- 0.0881014     ranktest 1% sig
p11th   0.00477826  0.00306197 +- 0.00597168   ranktest 1% sig
satr    0.00103022  0.272704 +- 0.956722       ranktest 1% sig
satth   0.00098001  0.00224045 +- 0.00805915   ranktest 1% sig

These 5 runs compared the relevant data with NUFORC sightings data for
the same period on a day by day basis. The program does a robust
regression, taking into account some peculiarities of time-series.
(Essentially, data sorted by date or time can have "inertia" whereby
certain variables don't want to move from where they were in the past;
and this can screw up normal statistical tests and over-estimate how
much the input variable "x" affects the output variable "y" that both
also depend on time).

The 5 series relate to the distance of P11 and Saturn from the sun
(the "r" data), the ecliptic longitudes (how many degrees from a
reference point they have moved in their orbits), and the distance in
AU between the 2.

It seems the distance between the 2 is the most statistically relevant.
It passes 2 tests at high significance; the others only pass 1 test.
While it means is UFO sightings seem to be "somewhat" related to the
position of Saturn and the position of the probe on its mission but they
are REALLY dependent on the distance between the probe and Saturn.

It's not like we haven't seen this before. I posted some time back some
analysis of the 2 Voyager missions. As they one or both converged on
certain planets there were statistically-related changes in UFO reporting
(aka activity). It turned out that Saturn was different from other
planets the probes visited.

In the runs above we find the beta for the distance (dsatp11) shows
-ve. There is a big interval for possible values of beta but the stat
test is 90% sure it is supposed to be -ve.  I.e. the closer the probe
came to Saturn over those years incl the missing 1979 the more UFO
sightings were reported day by day to the NUFORC.

Now this might, of course, relate to the interest generated by the
news that P11 was approaching Saturn. Some people might listen to the
news, run out into their back yards and look at the sky for an hour
and spot some odd cloud, Chinese weather balloon, or patch of swamp
gas, and run to the telephone to report a UFO.

But our journey with the NUFORC dataset has shown us while many of the
entries may have a dubious relevance to anything real (and the
curators do a reasonable job of pointing out Space X sat trains and
likely hoax calls), there is a solid kernel of "something else" in the
numbers. Exactly what the proportion of "data" to "noise" might be is
still an open question AFAIK.  But it isn't 0.

So we have some evidence that as P11 approached Saturn there was an
"actual" up-tick in UFO activity across N America.  And that might
help explain why a year of the data is missing. Like some telescope
images are missing or blacked out. It is not in the public interest,
so the official message might be, for anyone to know the details.  It
would cause a panic. Or it would just worry people and we have enough
on our plates worrying about everything else we see on the nightly
news. So there. Aren't we being considerate?

We might all speculate what the data that's missing might actually
look like or suggest. I've plotted the paths of P11 and Saturn in
those last 3 years before contact. It seems before the gap P11 is
intersecting Saturn at (let's say) "right angles". After the gap P11
is flying parallel with Saturn.  Pretty neat turn! Did it need help?
Did it go temporarily MIA and stop answering the phone only to turn up
working fine later with no memory of what had happened? OK. The jokes
are possibly endless.

But the problem with what may be secret censorship of scientific
information is -- the missing bits of data will affect conclusions
drawn in all kinds of research, and the taint will tend to radiate
outward and snowball. Sure, it may slow some "big secret" getting out,
but a lot of the science that gets done before the inevitable happens
and everyone actually knows the secret will be wrong in sometimes
subtle and sometimes very important ways. And we don't know when the
errors will bite us in the collective bum.

--
Upcoming events:
10 Apr 2023 11am EDT: NOAA's Billion Dollar Disasters 23Q1

Most Sun-like stars formed billions of years before the Sun, a time lag
much longer than the time it takes chemical rockets to cross the Milky
Way disk. If only one out of the tens of billions of Earth-Sun systems
in the Milky Way galaxy gave rise to a peaceful, space-exploring
technological civilization over the past 10 billion years, and if that
civilization launched probes at an annual cost of 2 trillion dollars
for a million years, then there would be ten thousand objects from this
spectacular civilization within the solar system now.
-- Avi Loeb, "The Allegory of the Cave: An Interstellar Interpretation",
The Debrief, 15 Mar 2023

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