A new low in UFO debunkery from The Economist, with the chart above suggesting that UFO sightings are simply a function of people drinking too much alcohol.
[T]he National UFO Reporting Centre, a non-profit, has catalogued almost 90,000 reported sightings of UFOs, mostly in America, since 1974. It turns out that aliens are considerate. They seldom disturb earthlings during working or sleeping hours. Rather, they tend to arrive in the evening, especially on Fridays, when folks are sitting on the front porch nursing their fourth beer, the better to appreciate flashing lights in the heavens (see chart). The state aliens like best is Washington—a finding that pre-dates the legalisation of pot there. Other popular destinations are also near the Canadian border, where the Northern lights are sometimes visible. UFOs tend to shun big cities, where there are lots of other lights, and daylight hours, when people might think they were just aeroplanes.
The numbers obviously have nothing to do with the fact that ‘drinking hours’ strangely coincide with the time of day that most people would notice something in the sky (night-time), but are not yet asleep. I totally expected that the highest number of sightings of things in the sky would be when people are asleep in their bedrooms… (/snark).
