Saucer Country
A recent article has tracked mention of UFOs across US social media during the year 2015, and while fun, I don't know that it's telling us anything all that interesting or important. The one big caveat to the article is the fact that so many sightings still go unmentioned that not only can we not use it as a gauge of the total sightings that took place in 2015, but we can't even trust the general distribution of sightings. Just my interest in the subject matter tells me that the sixteen sightings attributed to Wisconsin in 2015 is a wildly inaccurate figure. There are over one hundred reported sightings for Wisconsin on the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) website alone, and I'm certain that's just a fraction of the actual number that occurred. I'd be interested to see what the level of social media integration is per state, too. Do people in Nebraska tweet as often as people in California? What about Wisconsin? I imagine that the statistics skew pretty heavily in favor of socioeconomically advantaged, urban, young people.
So, with so much about it that can't be trusted, what good is it? Well, I think it points out one often overlooked change in how the subject is approached. People are actually talking about it, and in a very public way. And I think that's great. I think that the internet has given a platform to those of us who thought we existed on the fringes, and we can finally challenge the prevailing paradigm. If for nothing else. then. this article is at least useful for reminding us of that.
Yours in Impossibility,
Tobias