If you grew up watching The X-Files TV show, you most likely wondered and questioned many things about UFOs and possibly Aliens. Since it’s Halloween, let’s talk about UFO sighting incidents from a data analytics perspective!
Official Press Release:
Since the release of official UFO videos from the U.S Navy and Military – see below video from CNN(2019)- a lot of people started to become curious about this phenomenon. I personally started wondering and asking the analytics questions below:
1- Which state in the US has had the highest number of reported UFO sightings? 2- Which year has had the highest number of sightings? 3- Which month has the highest number of reported sightings per year ? 4- Could we leverage existing data to forecast future UFO sightings ?
Video:
To answer the above questions, I collected data sightings from The National UFO Reporting Center, while the data structure was mainly via HTML, I was able to organize it, sort it, then run it through multiple processes using Tableau, and below are the results and answers to our four questions:
1- Which state in the US has had the highest number of reported UFO sightings?
Based on sightings data recorded from 1950 till 2019 from The National UFO Reporting Center, below are the results:
Sightings by State, from 1950 to 2019
Analytics per State:
California State came first with 13,811 sightings in total, then Florida with 6,727 views, closely followed by The state of Washington and Texas with 6,037 and 5,064 respectively, and New York with 4,814 views.
2- Which year has had the highest number of sightings?
The year 2014 is by far the year with the highest number of sightings ever seen since 1952. There has been 8,701 reported sightings.it’s incredibly surprising though that the sightings did not continue to rise since 2014, the reported sightings continuously diminished ever since, going a bit higher this year, 2019.
reported sightings per year
3- Which month has had the highest number of reported sightings per year ?
Aggregating the recorded number of sightings per month from 1950 till 2019, July ranked as the highest month of reported UFO sightings, followed by August, June and September. This could in fact be related to people being outside during the warm weather, possibly increasing their chances to stumble across a sighting. When it comes to the winter and fall, they seem not to be far from each other in terms of reported UFO sightings, below are the results:
sightings aggregated by month
4- Could we leverage existing data to forecast future UFO sightings ? Since The National UFO Reporting Center has recorded UFO sightings since a long time, I tried to utilize a specific forecasting techniques available within Tableau, per their description(2019): “Forecasting in Tableau uses a technique known as exponential smoothing. Forecast algorithms try to find a regular pattern in measures that can be continued into the future”(p. 1). The results are as below:
Projection of sightings using Tableau
While the graph shows a trending up notion till 2029, the prediction based on the algorithm used is restricted within the shadow area, which could either go up or down in the upcoming years.
Conclusion
In conclusion, data without visualization can be hard to interpret and understand, or to even extract information from it. What’s your thoughts about this data and insights ?
References: How Forecasting Works in Tableau. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/forecast_how_it_works.htm.
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