MAGONIA Supplement
No. 61 17 May 2006
http://www.users.waitrose.com/%7Emagonia/ms61.htm
EDITORIAL
When Joe McGonagle, Gary Anthony, Andy Roberts and David Clarke recently announced the forthcoming release of a Ministry of Defence UFO study, the usual suspects on UFO UpDates immediately had their usual fits of hysteria and showed their usual amazing ability to produce detailed criticisms of a document which they had not yet had the opportunity to read. When it was suggested that they should wait for the document to become available before denouncing it as worthless, unscientific and, yes, "disinformation" they became even more hysterical.
Martin S. Kottmeyer
A CATASTROPHIC HURRICANE hit and decimated New Orleans and the Gulf coast on August 28, 2005. In the days and weeks subsequent to the disaster a humanitarian crisis arose that the government failed to adequately handle. The duty to rescue victims was fumbled, starting too slowly and showing disorganisation. People were dying from the lack of medical attention. Many people lacked drinking water and food. There was looting. Thousands were believed dead.
The perception that the government had badly bungled was widespread. The words of shame and insult turned up on all the Sunday political talk shows - Face the Nation, Meet the Press, Chris Matthews - on 4 September. Political protests also arose, recycling signs saying "Shame" that were originally being used for protesting against the Iraq war. One photo shown here, is taken from the 8 September Democracy Cell Project website. This was also seen on national news coverage of the 8th. Local news, polling randomly in the street, caught people expressing the thought that the spectacle made them ashamed to be Americans.
The government's failure at rescuing residents from flooded New Orleans led to FEMA director Michael Brown resigning on 12 September. On the 15th President Bush gave a nationally televised speech that outlined plans for the reconstruction of New Orleans. Over the next few days, another hurricane named Rita was being tracked and led to the evacuation of the Texas coast. Before it hit, highways were jammed with cars and there were concerns this might turn into another debacle. Rita made landfall at 3 a.m. on 24 September. By the next day it became clear that Rita claimed no lives due to lack of emergency response. Government officials pointed to this as evidence that lessons had been learned from the Katrina tragedy. One can of course dispute how valid the reasoning is. New Orleans after all was a bowl of land below sea level quite unlike the Texas coast. But, emotionally, Rita did dispel the pall of Katrina both in the sense of distracting attention and as a symbol of government getting it right this time or at least better than the last time.
Chronologically, the shame of the Katrina debacle was reasonably well-defined. While some tragedies like the Iraq conflict drag on interminably, the emotional punch was sharply delivered and was over fairly quickly. There was also little ambiguity about the presence of shame. There was no way to rationalise it or gloss over it via political chutzpah. Masses of people were dead and, unlike the fall of the World Trade Center, there was no external enemy to blame it on. There would be no flag-waving patriotism connected to this crisis.
Although I confess discomfort 'using' this tragedy as a datum for ufological research, I was keenly curious about whether this event would create a UFO flap in the United States. On one level, I felt this was an almost ideal stimulus with which to test the hypothesis that flaps are a manifestation of collective shame. (Story 2001) There were, however, a series of doubts nagging at me. NUFORC collects hundreds of reports every month, but when you chart them the results do not look like charts made from Blue Book data. There are ten-fold variations in monthly figures during the Blue Book period. NUFORC is lucky to get two-or three-fold variations over its base trendline. E-mailing a believer's computer database does not provoke the same set of anxieties and emotions as deciding whether to report a UFO experience to law-enforcement, military authorities, or media.
Present-day UFO beliefs also have different mixes of emotional concerns than during the Blue Book era. Nobody thinks of UFOs as Soviet spycraft any more. Fewer people think of UFOs as sources of danger. When was the last time you heard of a UFO chasing somebody's car as happened so often back in the Sixties? Are flaps of similar magnitude even possible if UFOs are not regarded as threats in the same degree as was possible in the middle of the last century?
One other thing worried me. Some flaps seem to involve beliefs attached to specific cases that gain prominence. Would the 1952 flap have been a fifth as big without the Washington National radar cases insisting that UFOs were intruding on the nation's seat of government? Would the 1957 flap was been anything more than a flurry of cases without the Levelland car-stopper case to set fire to anxieties started by Sputnik? While there was plenty of paranoia about the cause of the levee breaks in New Orleans - see Remnick's New Yorker article - nothing arose suggesting UFOs were a possible cause. No particular UFO report came to general attention to crystallise anxieties around.
With such doubts and a healthy respect for how often predictions connected to UFO phenomena fail, I kept my wondering and expectations mostly to myself. But I absolutely would need to check on the possibility.
Enough time has passed that my question can now be explored with confidence over enough data having been collected to draw conclusions. On 7 December 2005 the National UFO Reporting Center's event database was accessed and material gathered over the span of July to November. As the test involves national shame over Katrina, I filtered away reports from foreign countries. No effect would be expected there and they would distort percentages. NUFORC's database includes some events that involve multiple reports of a single event. On 30 September and 1 October there are respectively 37 and 30 reports involving objects seen over Tinley Park, IL and vicinities. In the chart they are treated as two reporting events. On 22 September there were 21 reports involving a Vanderburg missile launch. There are also fireball cases and a Utah school case involving multiple reports that NUFORC states involve probable hoaxers. They were also reduced to single increments.
The resulting chart is here:
Just by visual inspection, we can see there was increased reporting in the period between Katrina and Rita. Perhaps significantly, it does not increase in anticipation of Katrina's landfall or even on the day of the hurricane itself; things you might expect if anxiety, stress, fear or threat were primary determinants of increased UFO reporting. Things start firing up on 1 September as the chaos involving the Superdome and Convention Center becomes obvious with government officials blatantly lying. 2 September sees Bush praising FEMA director Michael Brown, "Brownie you're doing a heck of a job." It tracks with the recognition of massive incompetence.
Next, let's put on the table some numbers - a total for each month and the average per day.
July 316 10.2
August 227 8.4
September 362 12.1
October 314 10.1
By the standards of some ufological studies, a month with 362 reports would certainly count as a flap. For example UFO Sweden's study "Peak Months in Worldwide Waves" includes a month with a figure as small as 65 as a wave. It lists 38 months as peaks of waves that have monthly numbers smaller than 362, so we have plenty of precedent from that angle. In the statistics of Blue Book, 362 is a bigger monthly total than any of the important flaps of the Sixties, including the swamp gas flap of March-April 1966.
It would also fit Bullard's definition of a wave as "any notable and temporary increase in sighting reports above the usual rate." Let's use some different numbers here. Between Katrina's and Rita's landfalls there were 318 reports. Divide this by 28 days and you get an average of 11.4 reports per day. Immediately before Katrina from 1-27 August, the average was 7.4 reports per day. This is a 54% increase. This is literally a temporary increase and above the usual rate. 'Notable' is a more subjective matter, but if anyone wants to argue 54% isn't 'enough' then we can fall back to saying this is a 'modest surge.' Vocabulary isn't really that critical; the fact of an increase is ultimately the thing of interest.
It is conceded in advance that most of the monthly figures in the NUFORC database since 1998 would be called flaps if one used an absolute measure instead of a relative measure. It also conceded that the 54% increase hardly resembles the ten-fold spiking of numbers seen during the 1952 and 1957 flaps. As already stated, there have never been swings of that magnitude in NUFORC's monthly figures between 1994 and 2005.
The content of some sightings can be discussed to add a polish to the argument. One report showing some awareness of the ongoing social backdrop is this one from Conroe, Texas on 22 September:
"I was evacuating from the hurricane Rita down the conterflow of I-45 highway. I had been driving several hours and decided to jump the curb and park in a parking lot to try to rest. As I looked out the car window, I saw a large black triangular aircraft flying very slowly from South to North off the counter flow highway flowing I-45 pathway. My first thought was the government was taking pictures of the blocked traffic on I-45. I noticed a fluoresce tube light that was also shaped like a triangle on the bottom side of the craft. Then I realized triangular shaped American craft fly very swiftly while this one glided very slowly and silently along."
When the media covered this traffic jam, there were concerns expressed about how the government was not able to evacuate populations smoothly. What might this mean if a terrorist attack by chemical, radiological, or biological means forced evacuations elsewhere. This particular report could be interpreted as paranoia expressed as a 'delusion of observation.' Possibly it indicates the government is in surveillance mode, watching the population, in implicit shame at its handling of Katrina. They are worried they are in trouble yet again. Black triangles are familiar to most people as a form of Stealth aircraft, in some degree an icon of government secretiveness. (NUFORC, 22 September 2005)
There are other curiosities suggesting some social reflexiveness. One is a case where a bright light is seen hovering over a refinery in Lemont, Illinois. It is felt by the percipient to be getting a good look at something there. (NUFORC, 1 September) Given the reduction of refinery capacity caused by Katrina, one wonders if this indicated fear of terrorist opportunism. One guy in Henniker, New Hampshire saw a bright light with a halo of light around it that seemed like it was being blown by a light wind. He didn't know if it was an alien ship, but admitted, "I also thought maybe it was a weather monitoring device, but didn't understand why it was covered in lights "(NUFORC, 12 September). One woman in Meadville, Mississippi reports seeing a "star that just decided to just take off and do a strange dance." t was a herky-jerky wiggling followed by a funny loop thing. She concedes the craziness of the sight but, "with all the Hurricane Katrina upset I certainly wouldn't be writing this if it weren't true." (NUFORC, 6 September) One guy in Miami taking digital pictures of clouds in advance of Rita finds an object in two of them that he sends to NUFORC. (19 September, Miami) Another Floridian indicates he usually sees fireballs during hurricanes and passed along the fact that such a fireball had made the news. (16 September, Edgewater, FL)
Most of the hundreds of cases of September, though, lack any overt sign of the Katrina context. It should not be necessary to say it, but the bulk of the cases seem transparently soluble in terms of standard misinterpretations - airplane lights, meteors, balloons, and the like. I especially liked one (24 September; Stratford, CT) that is a veritable textbook (Printy 1998) case of Sirius scintillating a few degrees above the horizon. It is pretty much obligatory that we are dealing with earthly social behaviour, rather than extraterrestrial tourism.
So, is this a good confirmation of the shame/paranoia theory? If one was hoping for a major league 'classic' Blue Book era flap, clearly this isn't all that impressive. Yet, making allowances for the absence of a catalysing UFO event and the various caveats described, it looks acceptable. There is a flurry of increased activity starting at what seems to be just the right time. I will content myself with the observation that it is at least not a failure of the sort that crisis theory had in its test against the 9-11 tragedy.(Kottmeyer 2003)
Sources
Thomas E. Bullard, "Waves" International UFO Reporter, 13, #6 November/December 1988, pp. 15-23
Martin Kottmeyer, "Did the Nine-Eleven Tragedy Increase UFO Reporting?" Magonia Supplement #46, 17 March 2003, pp. 1-2
National UFO Reporting Center, Event Database, accessed December 7, 2005
David Remnick, "Letter from Louisiana: High Water" New Yorker 3 October, 2005
NUFORC database sighting reports #S46001 (1 September 2005; Lemont, IL); #S46078 (6 September 2005; Meadville, MS); #S46207 (12 September 2005; Henniker, NH) #S46424 (19 September 2005; Miami, FL), #S46508 (16 September 2005; Edgewater, FL) and # S46871(22 September 2005; Conroe, TX) # S46476 (24 September 2005; Stratford, CT)
Tim Printy, "When Stars Become Ufos" 1998 on his personal website "UFOs: A Skeptical View"
Time, Hurricane KATRINA: The Storm That Changed America Time, Inc., 2005
"Waves" - entry in Ronald Story, ed. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters: A Definitive Illustrated A-Z Guide to All Things Alien, New American Library, 2001, pp. 646-60
UFO Sweden, "Peak Months in Worldwide Waves" UFO evidence website
No. 61 17 May 2006
http://www.users.waitrose.com/%7Emagonia/ms61.htm
EDITORIAL
When Joe McGonagle, Gary Anthony, Andy Roberts and David Clarke recently announced the forthcoming release of a Ministry of Defence UFO study, the usual suspects on UFO UpDates immediately had their usual fits of hysteria and showed their usual amazing ability to produce detailed criticisms of a document which they had not yet had the opportunity to read. When it was suggested that they should wait for the document to become available before denouncing it as worthless, unscientific and, yes, "disinformation" they became even more hysterical.
Martin S. Kottmeyer
A CATASTROPHIC HURRICANE hit and decimated New Orleans and the Gulf coast on August 28, 2005. In the days and weeks subsequent to the disaster a humanitarian crisis arose that the government failed to adequately handle. The duty to rescue victims was fumbled, starting too slowly and showing disorganisation. People were dying from the lack of medical attention. Many people lacked drinking water and food. There was looting. Thousands were believed dead.
The perception that the government had badly bungled was widespread. The words of shame and insult turned up on all the Sunday political talk shows - Face the Nation, Meet the Press, Chris Matthews - on 4 September. Political protests also arose, recycling signs saying "Shame" that were originally being used for protesting against the Iraq war. One photo shown here, is taken from the 8 September Democracy Cell Project website. This was also seen on national news coverage of the 8th. Local news, polling randomly in the street, caught people expressing the thought that the spectacle made them ashamed to be Americans.
The government's failure at rescuing residents from flooded New Orleans led to FEMA director Michael Brown resigning on 12 September. On the 15th President Bush gave a nationally televised speech that outlined plans for the reconstruction of New Orleans. Over the next few days, another hurricane named Rita was being tracked and led to the evacuation of the Texas coast. Before it hit, highways were jammed with cars and there were concerns this might turn into another debacle. Rita made landfall at 3 a.m. on 24 September. By the next day it became clear that Rita claimed no lives due to lack of emergency response. Government officials pointed to this as evidence that lessons had been learned from the Katrina tragedy. One can of course dispute how valid the reasoning is. New Orleans after all was a bowl of land below sea level quite unlike the Texas coast. But, emotionally, Rita did dispel the pall of Katrina both in the sense of distracting attention and as a symbol of government getting it right this time or at least better than the last time.
Chronologically, the shame of the Katrina debacle was reasonably well-defined. While some tragedies like the Iraq conflict drag on interminably, the emotional punch was sharply delivered and was over fairly quickly. There was also little ambiguity about the presence of shame. There was no way to rationalise it or gloss over it via political chutzpah. Masses of people were dead and, unlike the fall of the World Trade Center, there was no external enemy to blame it on. There would be no flag-waving patriotism connected to this crisis.
Although I confess discomfort 'using' this tragedy as a datum for ufological research, I was keenly curious about whether this event would create a UFO flap in the United States. On one level, I felt this was an almost ideal stimulus with which to test the hypothesis that flaps are a manifestation of collective shame. (Story 2001) There were, however, a series of doubts nagging at me. NUFORC collects hundreds of reports every month, but when you chart them the results do not look like charts made from Blue Book data. There are ten-fold variations in monthly figures during the Blue Book period. NUFORC is lucky to get two-or three-fold variations over its base trendline. E-mailing a believer's computer database does not provoke the same set of anxieties and emotions as deciding whether to report a UFO experience to law-enforcement, military authorities, or media.
Present-day UFO beliefs also have different mixes of emotional concerns than during the Blue Book era. Nobody thinks of UFOs as Soviet spycraft any more. Fewer people think of UFOs as sources of danger. When was the last time you heard of a UFO chasing somebody's car as happened so often back in the Sixties? Are flaps of similar magnitude even possible if UFOs are not regarded as threats in the same degree as was possible in the middle of the last century?
One other thing worried me. Some flaps seem to involve beliefs attached to specific cases that gain prominence. Would the 1952 flap have been a fifth as big without the Washington National radar cases insisting that UFOs were intruding on the nation's seat of government? Would the 1957 flap was been anything more than a flurry of cases without the Levelland car-stopper case to set fire to anxieties started by Sputnik? While there was plenty of paranoia about the cause of the levee breaks in New Orleans - see Remnick's New Yorker article - nothing arose suggesting UFOs were a possible cause. No particular UFO report came to general attention to crystallise anxieties around.
With such doubts and a healthy respect for how often predictions connected to UFO phenomena fail, I kept my wondering and expectations mostly to myself. But I absolutely would need to check on the possibility.
Enough time has passed that my question can now be explored with confidence over enough data having been collected to draw conclusions. On 7 December 2005 the National UFO Reporting Center's event database was accessed and material gathered over the span of July to November. As the test involves national shame over Katrina, I filtered away reports from foreign countries. No effect would be expected there and they would distort percentages. NUFORC's database includes some events that involve multiple reports of a single event. On 30 September and 1 October there are respectively 37 and 30 reports involving objects seen over Tinley Park, IL and vicinities. In the chart they are treated as two reporting events. On 22 September there were 21 reports involving a Vanderburg missile launch. There are also fireball cases and a Utah school case involving multiple reports that NUFORC states involve probable hoaxers. They were also reduced to single increments.
The resulting chart is here:
Just by visual inspection, we can see there was increased reporting in the period between Katrina and Rita. Perhaps significantly, it does not increase in anticipation of Katrina's landfall or even on the day of the hurricane itself; things you might expect if anxiety, stress, fear or threat were primary determinants of increased UFO reporting. Things start firing up on 1 September as the chaos involving the Superdome and Convention Center becomes obvious with government officials blatantly lying. 2 September sees Bush praising FEMA director Michael Brown, "Brownie you're doing a heck of a job." It tracks with the recognition of massive incompetence.
Next, let's put on the table some numbers - a total for each month and the average per day.
July 316 10.2
August 227 8.4
September 362 12.1
October 314 10.1
By the standards of some ufological studies, a month with 362 reports would certainly count as a flap. For example UFO Sweden's study "Peak Months in Worldwide Waves" includes a month with a figure as small as 65 as a wave. It lists 38 months as peaks of waves that have monthly numbers smaller than 362, so we have plenty of precedent from that angle. In the statistics of Blue Book, 362 is a bigger monthly total than any of the important flaps of the Sixties, including the swamp gas flap of March-April 1966.
It would also fit Bullard's definition of a wave as "any notable and temporary increase in sighting reports above the usual rate." Let's use some different numbers here. Between Katrina's and Rita's landfalls there were 318 reports. Divide this by 28 days and you get an average of 11.4 reports per day. Immediately before Katrina from 1-27 August, the average was 7.4 reports per day. This is a 54% increase. This is literally a temporary increase and above the usual rate. 'Notable' is a more subjective matter, but if anyone wants to argue 54% isn't 'enough' then we can fall back to saying this is a 'modest surge.' Vocabulary isn't really that critical; the fact of an increase is ultimately the thing of interest.
It is conceded in advance that most of the monthly figures in the NUFORC database since 1998 would be called flaps if one used an absolute measure instead of a relative measure. It also conceded that the 54% increase hardly resembles the ten-fold spiking of numbers seen during the 1952 and 1957 flaps. As already stated, there have never been swings of that magnitude in NUFORC's monthly figures between 1994 and 2005.
The content of some sightings can be discussed to add a polish to the argument. One report showing some awareness of the ongoing social backdrop is this one from Conroe, Texas on 22 September:
"I was evacuating from the hurricane Rita down the conterflow of I-45 highway. I had been driving several hours and decided to jump the curb and park in a parking lot to try to rest. As I looked out the car window, I saw a large black triangular aircraft flying very slowly from South to North off the counter flow highway flowing I-45 pathway. My first thought was the government was taking pictures of the blocked traffic on I-45. I noticed a fluoresce tube light that was also shaped like a triangle on the bottom side of the craft. Then I realized triangular shaped American craft fly very swiftly while this one glided very slowly and silently along."
When the media covered this traffic jam, there were concerns expressed about how the government was not able to evacuate populations smoothly. What might this mean if a terrorist attack by chemical, radiological, or biological means forced evacuations elsewhere. This particular report could be interpreted as paranoia expressed as a 'delusion of observation.' Possibly it indicates the government is in surveillance mode, watching the population, in implicit shame at its handling of Katrina. They are worried they are in trouble yet again. Black triangles are familiar to most people as a form of Stealth aircraft, in some degree an icon of government secretiveness. (NUFORC, 22 September 2005)
There are other curiosities suggesting some social reflexiveness. One is a case where a bright light is seen hovering over a refinery in Lemont, Illinois. It is felt by the percipient to be getting a good look at something there. (NUFORC, 1 September) Given the reduction of refinery capacity caused by Katrina, one wonders if this indicated fear of terrorist opportunism. One guy in Henniker, New Hampshire saw a bright light with a halo of light around it that seemed like it was being blown by a light wind. He didn't know if it was an alien ship, but admitted, "I also thought maybe it was a weather monitoring device, but didn't understand why it was covered in lights "(NUFORC, 12 September). One woman in Meadville, Mississippi reports seeing a "star that just decided to just take off and do a strange dance." t was a herky-jerky wiggling followed by a funny loop thing. She concedes the craziness of the sight but, "with all the Hurricane Katrina upset I certainly wouldn't be writing this if it weren't true." (NUFORC, 6 September) One guy in Miami taking digital pictures of clouds in advance of Rita finds an object in two of them that he sends to NUFORC. (19 September, Miami) Another Floridian indicates he usually sees fireballs during hurricanes and passed along the fact that such a fireball had made the news. (16 September, Edgewater, FL)
Most of the hundreds of cases of September, though, lack any overt sign of the Katrina context. It should not be necessary to say it, but the bulk of the cases seem transparently soluble in terms of standard misinterpretations - airplane lights, meteors, balloons, and the like. I especially liked one (24 September; Stratford, CT) that is a veritable textbook (Printy 1998) case of Sirius scintillating a few degrees above the horizon. It is pretty much obligatory that we are dealing with earthly social behaviour, rather than extraterrestrial tourism.
So, is this a good confirmation of the shame/paranoia theory? If one was hoping for a major league 'classic' Blue Book era flap, clearly this isn't all that impressive. Yet, making allowances for the absence of a catalysing UFO event and the various caveats described, it looks acceptable. There is a flurry of increased activity starting at what seems to be just the right time. I will content myself with the observation that it is at least not a failure of the sort that crisis theory had in its test against the 9-11 tragedy.(Kottmeyer 2003)
Sources
Thomas E. Bullard, "Waves" International UFO Reporter, 13, #6 November/December 1988, pp. 15-23
Martin Kottmeyer, "Did the Nine-Eleven Tragedy Increase UFO Reporting?" Magonia Supplement #46, 17 March 2003, pp. 1-2
National UFO Reporting Center, Event Database, accessed December 7, 2005
David Remnick, "Letter from Louisiana: High Water" New Yorker 3 October, 2005
NUFORC database sighting reports #S46001 (1 September 2005; Lemont, IL); #S46078 (6 September 2005; Meadville, MS); #S46207 (12 September 2005; Henniker, NH) #S46424 (19 September 2005; Miami, FL), #S46508 (16 September 2005; Edgewater, FL) and # S46871(22 September 2005; Conroe, TX) # S46476 (24 September 2005; Stratford, CT)
Tim Printy, "When Stars Become Ufos" 1998 on his personal website "UFOs: A Skeptical View"
Time, Hurricane KATRINA: The Storm That Changed America Time, Inc., 2005
"Waves" - entry in Ronald Story, ed. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters: A Definitive Illustrated A-Z Guide to All Things Alien, New American Library, 2001, pp. 646-60
UFO Sweden, "Peak Months in Worldwide Waves" UFO evidence website