A strange map: UFO sightings in the US

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

That little hotspot

[notr.livejournal.com]

in southeastern NY is precisely Stormville. I saw them land in our church's ball field once.

I don't know what makes the Plains different from the South, but religion certainly doesn't conflict with UFO belief in Utah, where they're all supposed to get their own whole planets.

heywaitaminute

[notr.livejournal.com]

What's a bigger difference between the South and the rest of the country than religion? And between SoCal and NoCal?

White people see UFOs.

That just leaves Tennessee, Kentucky, and New Mexico as anomalies.

Re: heywaitaminute

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I considered that already, and it's probably true, but I'd think that would only explain about a factor of 2 or 3 at most; the difference is bigger. Maybe you need a critical mass of whiteness.

Re: heywaitaminute

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Now, recent research apparently seems to imply that melanin can capture energy from gamma photons, so aliens may be scanning potential landing areas for larger concentrations of melanin as an indicator of heightened radiation levels, and avoid landing in those areas.

Re: heywaitaminute

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I suspect there's some racial-cultural differences in reporting rates for this sort of thing.

What would a similar map of, say, Virgin Mary sightings look like? Non-catholics don't even look for the Virgin Mary, or for virgins much at all, I suspect.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

The spot in the Florida panhandle coincides neatly with Eglin AFB, and UFO reports do tend to cluster around airports. Obviously the aliens know they can blend in easily with normal air traffic.

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

Maybe the aerial phenomena - whatever they actually may be - are interpreted as UFOs in the more secular areas but as angels in the more religious ones? Therefore the talk should be more about "phenomena reported as UFOs".

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I remember reading a claim by a skeptic that UFO sightings are more common along faultlines or near volcanic activity, which prompted him to suggest that lights in the sky = piezoelectric activity, not aliens. I seem to remember him specifically mentioning that the South isn't earthquake territory.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't entirely buy that as an explanation; for one thing, the sharp boundaries here are more political/cultural than natural ones.

For another, it's pretty well-known that a large number of UFO sightings are things a lot more mundane than piezoelectric activity, like planets, airplanes and mountaintop beacons; many people just aren't very good at identifying things they see in the sky, and, as Jim Macdonald recently pointed out in the article on the Hill case, sleep deprivation probably often plays a role.