EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
- A recent article has raised questions about the connection between
lightning and UFO sightings.
- We would expect there to be some connection with some types of UFO
sightings but not all. Maybe not even most. The AI s/w I'm
developing picks Fireball and Sphere UFO types (as described by
NUFORC reports) as the ones most connected with lightning strikes in
the region during the same month. But the connection is strong
only in a few states. In several more it is weak. But in most states
there seems to be no link.
- The AI further picks out those states showing a strong link (in UT
it explains 90+% of Fireball and "orb" sightings) is
precipitation. States with low precip in Dec and Jan and also low
variation in prec month to month are the states with a strong
connection between lighting and Fireball UFO sightings.


I noticed a recent piece in The Debrief on the connection between
lightning, specifically ball lightning, and at least some of the
observed UFO activity. Certainly some of the YT vids showing orbs
floating down mountainsides does suggest something not under the same
kind of control as giant dark pyramids tumbling around in the sky over
the Pentagon.

And many of us old enough will remember the relevant appendixes on the
Condon Report that linked some UFO reports with the enigmatic ball
lightning phenomenon, ironically itself having been viewed as a
fantasy only a matter of a couple decades before the Report came out.
One of the stories in the appendix in question related how a key
physicist was on a plane travelling to a conference to debunk the whole
idea of ball lightning when the plane he was travelling in was hit by
lightning and a fuzzy glowing ball proceeded to travel at least part
of the length of the isle. Sound shedding paper.

And similar if not the same phenomena is where I started my
exploration of UFO's with the "mountain lights" seen in parts of
Norway. At the time I discovered the pattern of sightings had a very
strong climate link. As the years warmed the number of sightings were
predicted to grow less and less. And, surprise, I recently revisited
one website that had been promoting study of the lights to find it was
mostly abandoned with no-one answering emails; even college students
that had received degrees from projected related to recording the
sightings which apparently dropped to near 0 a few years back.

So it's worth trying to determine how many UFO sightings in N Am
"might" be related to lightning.

My database already has a large collection of datasets that relate to
US lightning storms. Over the past decades it seems such storms --
given commercial considerations -- have become an active area of
study and prediction. So some data is now even not available for free download. But the NOAA maintains a set of data that record daily or
monthly number of lightning strikes using several different types of instruments. E.g. a network of radio stations listens out for lightning-generated static. Even GPS satellites can detect lighting
strikes -- after a fashion -- on the territory they fly over. There
are other methods.

So we can use this data and use it to predict various "types" of UFO
sighting and try to find which types of sighting are best predicted by lightning activity, and how well.

I mostly use the NUFORC database and I do that here. These data
consist of details entered by observers via a web form. So all data is
highly questionable. :) Many sightings are entered years and sometimes
decades later, so expecting people to remember the date and time of a
signing from 20y ago is a tall order. In addition, the folks at NUFORC
also give each report a light once over and add in a couple
classification fields to each sighting. One is the "shape" field.
Oval, Triangle, Sphere, etc. are included in the list of shapes. But
we can also search each sighting for keywords in the body of the text. Appropriate to lightning or ball lightning is a keyword not included in
the official "shape" field -- the term "orb".

So we can go through each "type" of UFO sighting (incl the term "orb")
and decide in which states lightning seems to predict UFO activity of
that type within the state. We don't really expect lighting in TX to
be correlated in some interesting way against the totality of US UFO
sightings within a given month. But it might be informative of the
strength of the link to compare lightning in TX against UFO sightings
in TX with the word "orb" in the report. &ct.

So we can run all these regression models -- throw away all the
results that are not statistically significant using at least 2
different tests (essentially we have to be 99% sure the result cant
just be due to some lucky pattern in the particular data we're using)
and we can count up for each UFO type how many states of the US see a
link between lighting and those kinds of UFO sightings. Order from
largest to least.

UFO type Number of states that see
a strong link between lightning strikes
and UFO sightings within each month
Fireball 13
Light 13
Circle 11
Sphere 11
Unknown 8
Cigar 7
Formation 7
Oval 6
Triangle 6
Changing 5
Disk 5
Other 5
orb 5
Diamond 4
Cylinder 3
Rectangle 2
Teardrop 2
Cone 1
Cross 1
Flash 1
Chevron 0
Egg 0

The "types" that start with the capital letters are the official
NUFORC sighting classification terms. The "orb" is our addition to
count reports that contain that word as " orb " or " orbs " (note the spaces).

At the top of the list we see "Fireball" UFO's seem to fit the bill as
a phenomenon at least partly related to some king of unusual
lightning science. "Light" UFO's too. It seems in 13 states there are
strong connections between lighting and the relevant UFO sighting types.

It also turns out to be the case in "most" states there is absolutely
no connection between lighting and any kind of UFO sighting. There
seems to be some other element that is key to whether or not the 2
align at least some of the time. I suspect at this point it is
"elevation". Maybe at higher altitudes there is a stronger connection
that at MSL. We'll look at that in the future, depending on what the
Big Report in June says about UFO's and humanity's status in the universe. :)

But one funny thing we might note. "Triangle" UFO's seem to be related
to lightning too. How can a triangle be mistaken for some blob of
light that was created by a lightning bolt?

A second funny thing which may be key -- the "orb" UFO type seems to
be much less related to lightning than some classic UFO shapes. How
can this be? "Orb" was supposedly the normal way people that saw a
ball lightning or similar phenomena should describe what they saw.
Yet it isn't.

The solution is likely to be -- our idea that links how widespread
lighting/UFO links are by counting states is the wrong metric to
decide how strong the link is. We need a new measure.

So the next thing we might try is using the average "explanation
power" (R2) of the link in each state multiplied by the number of
states where the R2 is significantly positive. If the link is very
string (R2 near 1) in a FEW states it is likely showing a stronger
association than a bunch of very small R2 over a larger number of states.

Plonking that metrics into out comparison program we get:

UFO type #states * avg(R2) (== sum of R2s)
Fireball 3.85569
orb 3.20574
Sphere 3.17438
Diamond 2.32742
Cigar 2.28911
Circle 2.20659
Cylinder 1.97731
Changing 1.73072
Unknown 1.71972
Formation 1.46869
Light 1.44085
Other 1.24844
Oval 1.06086
Cone 0.874993
Cross 0.874185
Rectangle 0.842907
Disk 0.814893
Teardrop 0.692572
Triangle 0.680881
Flash 0.268754
Chevron 0
Egg 0

Excellent! The new metric still shows Fireball and Sphere are most
connected with lightning, but now "orb" is jammed in between them at
position #2. Much like we expected when we put in in the list!

So now we know "orb", "Sphere", "Fireball" are most-linked with
lightning. How much is it linked? Does lightning statistically explain
most Sphere sightings or only a tiny minority?

Let's look at the best predictive models across all the states for
these 3 key UFO types and order them by their R2 value.

Best links between monthly lighting events and monthly UFO sightings of
types Sphere, Fireball and "orb":
State/Type R2
IN/orb 0.98421267
UT/Fireball 0.91041213
MT/orb 0.88752409
RI/Sphere 0.87024033
WA/orb 0.62927635
SD/Fireball 0.60176630
NE/Fireball 0.59625340
ME/Sphere 0.46841011
IN/Fireball 0.42825421
PA/orb 0.39988382

So it seems UFO's described by observers as "orbs" in Indiana are
"98%" connected with lighting events in the same month. When there is
more lighting there are more of those type of sightings; when there is
less lightning there are fewer orb sightings. This says nothing about
any OTHER type of sighting, and we can deduce by the relatively weak
links *on average* it is likely other types of UFO sightings even in
Indiana have no statistical link with lightning strikes.

The table above is the top 10. We see even at the 10th line the link
has rapidly dropped to only 40% of "orb" sightings in Pennsylvania.
IOW for most UFO sightings in most states lightning likely explains
less than 40% of those sightings. It is a "major factor" in some
locations but is a minor factor most places and for most types of UFO sighting.

Finally, we can ask what factor related to each state explains why
some states see bigger links between lighting and e.g. "orb" sightings
are some don't.

Here's the complete table for "Fireball" sightings (the list of "orb"
cases is too small to analyze with technique I'm using here):

Links between monthly lightning strikes and Fireball UFO sightings:
State R2
UT 0.91041213
SD 0.60176630
NE 0.59625340
IN 0.42825421
MN 0.35341019
LA 0.22022736
MD 0.18959832
KY 0.11689561
NJ 0.11535397
AZ 0.10069822
WA 0.08268267
OR 0.07939861
WI 0.06073642

Is there something that explains why Utah is at 91% and Wisconsin is
at only .06?

This is where using AI's comes in handy. They can just shuffle through
their toolbox and experience log to figure out to answer any
off-the-wall question. Sometimes their answer even makes sense!

Although my AI is currently a bit weak in the state-by-state data is
has to run its tests, it immediately spits out a table like:

Suspect R2 Beta (+- 90% CI)
pre12 0.33393964 -0.000598472 0.000484434
pre1 0.32851147 -0.000615761 0.000504573
sdpre 0.29939100 -0.00177829 0.001473

IOW there is only 1 statistically strong suspect. "Pre12" is AI speak
for "Dec monthly precipitation". The major explanation -- quite
reasonably -- is those states with more rainfall esp in Dec and Jan
("pre1") are those states with weaker links between lighting and
Fireball UFO sightings. Drier states == stronger link. (The "sdpre"
suspect means the variation between summer and winter precipitation --
it seems the more variable rainfall is across a state the lower the
connection between lightning and Fireball UFO sightings; ball
lightning seems to like dry climates and dry most of the time).

It seems Fireball UFO's are most likely a product of "dry lightning"
which is apparently relatively common in Utah and much less common in Wisconsin. Precipitation only explains about 1/3 of the
state-to-state variation in lighting/Fireball connection -- there are
other factors. But the AI's databased presently doesn't include
anything that it otherwise picks up. And "average altitude" is already
in there. It isn't likely to be one of these other factors.


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