Incomplete UAP Sighting Datasets
This most recent SCU report is great, but it’s only as good as the data they’re analyzing. The total number of incidents for 1947 and 1954 are substantially too low, by at least 3x. Many 1947 NICAP records are seemingly lost, and the USAF/Blue Book data was biased. Good data here is very hard to find.
To put it simply, something is wrong with these datasets. The number of incidents for 1947 and 1954 are way too small, by large amounts:
Notice the # of NICAP incidents in the above graph for 1947 is around 100.
I’ve been slowly compiling, normalizing, and analyzing all these datasets, as well as gathering lost reports from newspapers, books and publications. Unfortunately each dataset has problems — some quite serious.
The description for the book Wayword Sons — NICAP and the IC, by Jack Brewer, paints an interesting picture:
“Why did key personnel leave the Committee over the next year, and was it related to a former CIA officer on the Board of Governors? Did the CIA destroy the organization, or is the NICAP story more complex than that? From the very outset, NICAP was shrouded in cloak and dagger mystery. Its initial director quickly resigned. A Frenchman with apparent CIA ties served as an organizer.”
This is the org where the NICAP dataset originated.
To get an idea how incomplete or distorted the NICAP dataset analyzed by SCU is, see the book Investigating UFO’s by Kettelkamp, page 48. It says NICAP catalogued 850 sightings just for the summer of 1947. (A plausible amount, given the # of summer of 1947 reports compiled by many researchers, and the 21,000+ newspapers.com database hits for flying saucer/flying disc related phrases for just June-July 1947.)
So how many NICAP sighting records have I found for the entirety of 1947 on the web? Only 101 — something is wrong. Notice the number of NICAP incidents in the above graph from SCU’s paper is also only ~100.
If you look at other UAP incident compilations (or newspaper databases, which are now online and easily searchable), you’ll quickly notice that 1947, 1952, and 1954 are the peak years in terms of the raw number of reports. 1957 and 1966–1967 are also major years.
Any datasets that don’t show these historical peaks are likely incomplete, or biased, in some way. Of course, any analysis based on these datasets will be incomplete, greatly downplaying the phenomenon's scale.
To give you an idea how much the USAF and NICAP datasets downplay the phenomenon’s scale: The curated Hatch dataset has 85–90 sightings for just a single day in 1947 (July 7):
This graph, from Report of the 1947 UFO Wave by Ted Bloecher and Dr. James E. McDonald (1967), has >160 sightings for just a single day in July 1947!
There are more 1947 graphs here.
Other published graphs showing the large 40’s-50’s reporting spikes are in the book Challenge to Science — The UFO Enigma by Jacques Vallée and Janine Vallée:
Note this 1954 histogram is for worldwide sightings, not just the US. (SCU’s report was just for US sightings.) There were many French reports in 1954. Nevertheless, this does help demonstrate that focusing just on US isn’t ideal, considering this is a worldwide phenomenon.
