A strange map: UFO sightings in the US
Nov. 6th, 2007 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
That little hotspot
Date: 2007-11-07 05:53 am (UTC)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
Date: 2007-11-07 01:48 pm (UTC)White people see UFOs.
That just leaves Tennessee, Kentucky, and New Mexico as anomalies.
Re: heywaitaminute
Date: 2007-11-07 02:16 pm (UTC)Re: heywaitaminute
Date: 2007-11-07 03:50 pm (UTC)Re: heywaitaminute
Date: 2007-11-08 01:48 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-07 06:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-07 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-07 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 06:13 am (UTC)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.