Blind tests prove: Io looks like a pizza

I've been showing Jorie photos from the web to keep her entertained while she eats her breakfast. Animals are a big hit, but so are some astronomical photos, particularly pictures of the Moon and of Saturn (which she can now identify). I was just showing her pictures of Io, and, unbidden, she identified it as "pizza". Which is the same thing most of the Voyager scientists said.

A strange map: UFO sightings in the US

Strange Maps reproduces a map from the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies showing UFO incidents per capita by county in the contiguous US. There's a spirited discussion of it in the comments.

Assuming that one can take the map at face value (which is a pretty significant assumption), interesting things emerge, but there are possible artifacts. The big red blotches out West are partly an artifact of the bigger counties and lower population density out there. On the whole, it looks as if New Hampshire and Maine are as UFO-happy as many Western areas.

No, the regularity that really sticks out like a sore thumb is that Southerners don't see UFOs. The Southeast, approximately the historical Confederacy (but including West Virginia and excluding Missouri), is barren UFO territory, with rare exceptions like that spot in the Florida Panhandle. The change at the boundary is fairly stark. It's not an urban/rural thing as far as I can tell, though outside the South there may be more sightings per capita in rural areas (it's not clear to me)

Why don't Southerners see UFOs? My first guess would be religiosity, with interest in aliens and the paranormal standing in for conventional religion elsewhere. But I don't think that's an adequate explanation on its own. The maps of church membership I linked to earlier call into question that the South is even unusually religious (though statistics on actual church attendance, I think, might say something different), and highly religious areas like the Plains states and Utah see UFOs at the normal non-Southern rate. Maybe it's the particular type of religion prevalent in the Southeast--Southern Baptist Convention dominance fits the UFO-free region much better. I'd guess it's something cultural, in any event.

Southerners advancing the hypothesis that they're just smarter and more skeptical than the rest of us are free to comment, but speaking as a boy who spent his formative years in Virginia, I think I'd need to see other indices.

Also, standard disclaimers about the distinction between reports of unidentified flying objects and claims of extraterrestrial contact should be assumed--though I'd also guess that people with an interest in the latter would be more eager to report the former.