FOTOCAT has Published a New Paper

[Christopher O'Brien]

Vicente Juan Ballester Olmos has published an Update to FOTOCAT an in-progress project from the Anomaly Foundation, managed by Olmos, with the purpose to create a catalog of world-wide UFO photo events. His visual database is the world's largest public accessible database of visual UFO evidence.

Olmos writes: "It includes a new Project publicaction, the pdf paper: AN APPROACH TO UFO PHOTOGRAPHS IN FRANCE.I hope you will find some information of interest in this edition."

To read this update www.fotocat.blogspot.com The complete 38 page .pdf report can be found HERE:

 

[Kandinsky]

Vicente Juan Ballester Olmos has published an Update to FOTOCAT an in-progress project from the Anomaly Foundation, managed by Olmos, with the purpose to create a catalog of world-wide UFO photo events. His visual database is the world's largest public accessible database of visual UFO evidence.

Olmos writes: "It includes a new Project publicaction, the pdf paper: AN APPROACH TO UFO PHOTOGRAPHS IN FRANCE.I hope you will find some information of interest in this edition."

It's a great blog that somehow slips my mind until I'm directed there again, so thanks. The report is interesting in the statistics. A couple of months ago I was neck deep in the stats of the major Western databases (NUFORC, U and Rutkowski etc) and analyses of the figures by guys like Poher, Teodarani, Phillips and Vallee. I was looking to see some indication that UFOs had some core essence of predictability after a comment by Dr Haines in his Paracast interview way back. There's 'something' in the numbers, but the data needs to be less noisy was my conclusion...

With that in mind, the French stats table of reports 1950-2004 are interesting. There's a popular uber-skeptic myth that UFO reports are a product of what's on TV or a major Sci-fi movie release. The thing is, western stats don't really support this notion. When Star Wars and Third Kind were released there wasn't a huge spike in UFO reports. IIRC there's a large spike in the year preceding the release and one gradually built up in late 78/early 79.

So I find it interesting that the French do have a large spike in 1977 as well as the same extra large spike seen in the Americas in the preceding years. Likewise the '52 US wave appears to hit France some two years later in '54.

The combined graph of Spain and France shows some pattern similarity and yet is still markedly different. If the uber-skeptic explanation that cultural media drives reports is accurate...we're looking at different cultural causes to explain the different timings of waves. As Ballester Olmos discusses, there is the appearance of a pattern in the figures that's still lost in the noise of cultural drivers. Rocket tests, media, hoaxes and bad data need to be accounted for and removed or at least identified.

My own adventure through the statistical jungle of UFO reports and databases came to the same conclusion as the guys I mentioned above. There's lots and lots of data, but is it 'good data?' Is it enough to encourage conclusions? Is there a hint of some pattern in there? I think there is, but until we can trust the quality and accuracy of the reports we're stuck with the probability of 'garbage in; garbage out' that science is always wary about.