UFO Heat Maps Compared to Military Locations and Population

One of my favorite Google Maps mashups is also one of the most unusual – the UFO sightings mashup that draws data from the National UFO Reporting Center to present a sort of heat-map showing the most recent areas with UFO sightings in the United States.

Anyone who has followed my past research knows that I love trying to explain patterns in data by correlating that dataset with matching patterns in seemingly unrelated data, similar to the bigfoot sightings that I analyzed back in 2012.

Using a similar approach, I decided to take a closer look at the UFO sightings Google Maps mashup to see if the patterns in that map could be matched with the same patterns in other heat maps like Census data, population, education levels or military base locations. What those patterns revealed in this analysis was actually pretty interesting.

Taking a Look at UFO Sightings

In this analysis, we looked at data for North America, but this same approach could be attempted with sightings databases anywhere else in the world. The National UFO Reporting Read more…