Regular readers know I have been predicting our return to the 1970s (here and here). Not directly, you understand. There will be no bell-bottom pants or leisure suits, but only because fewer people wear suits of any kind so there nothing left to leisure from. I mean return in the sense of wonderment about the world. Not quite the Age of Aquarius, but certainly religious, mystical and looking outward.
This was not an especially difficult prediction to make. An even easier one is UFO reports. They will increase, surge, even. But perhaps in a different way than before.
The 70s were huge in UFOs. Not just sightings, but the occasional close encounter:
“Close Encounters of the First Kind meant UFOs seen at a close enough range to make out some details. In a Close Encounter of the Second Kind, the UFO had a physical effect, such as scorching trees, frightening animals or causing car motors to suddenly conk out. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, witnesses reported seeing occupants in or near a UFO.”
Soon to be a major motion picture. About which more in a moment.
Crop circles, cattle mutilations and especially abductions were more common after the 1970s, it’s true, but the speculation about what UFOs were, driven my whom, weaponized by which country and so forth came first. Chariots of the gods and all that.
Historical Numbers
The National UFO Reporting Center database has data on UFO reports going back to 1400 anno Domini. (Incidentally, the switch to “CE” from “AD” is like the switch to “UAP” from “UFO”. I’ll stick with both the early versions.)
Apparently, in June of 1400 (a not uncommon month, as you’ll see) somebody somewhere reported a UFO. The next is September 1639. I don’t know quite what criteria that group uses to include such reports, but it’s not crucial, because the reports don’t really take flight until the Twentieth Century. There are only 22 reports before 1900. There are 159,638 after, with 138,970, or 87%, coming after 2000 AD.
Doubtless at least some of this increase is coming from greater reporting ease, now that everybody carries tracking devices everywhere they go, and the Man and the people recording everything they possibly can. We look at this claim below.
Many of the reports in the database starting on or about 2023 have more detailed investigations, sometimes concluding sightings were drones or the like. See this. They break down reports by craft shape, like triangle, orb, only light, or, my favorite, cigar. But the reports before this are largely just numbers. So let’s look at counts.
Here is the data itself, summing monthly reports over each year, starting in 1930 (there are only 36 total reports from 1900 through 1929):
Note the log-10 scale. The drop-off at the end is because data only goes part way through April 2026: the eventual total will be higher. (Much higher!)
Roswell’s aftermath shows up, as does a flower-power surge in the 60s. The 70s bump is there, as expected, but it’s almost two orders of magnitude smaller than the swell in the oughts. Part of the increase tracks, to an extent, with the increase in population: the more people there are, the more reports. There were also certain technological changes.
Thus another way to look at it is the number of yearly reports by million USA population (with a strong caveat noted below):
It seems reports in the database can come from anywhere, so dividing by the USA population only gives us a rough idea of how increasing population and reports go together, which works because USA population is reported to increase linearly from 1950. Any linearly increasing series would show a similar shape, and it’s the shape that interest us, the relative changes, not the precise numbers. But they’re likely to be not far off, either, because by far most UFO reports are from the States. In any case, the 2010s put the 1970s to shame.
Cellphones
Cellphones plus social media availability (the two are close enough to nowbe treated the same) have to account for at least some of the huge increase. This plot is some evidence (but not proof) for this:
The blue line is reports as above, with a simple linear extrapolation of the linear trend in gray (don’t forget the drop off at the end is because 2026 is incomplete). This doesn’t use population, but only the reports, and just those from 1930 to 1990. The extrapolation is a reasonable guess of what we would see if increasing population alone was responsible for the increase in reports.
Reports begin to soar in the 1990s, the same time cellphones were blooming. To report a UFO pre-cellphone, hence pre-most social media, required real work, actual effort, efforts that could easily go unrewarded. Now we click a button: from picture to post is seconds.
The red line, and scale to the right, are estimates of the number of cellphones in use in the States (from this and this source; note the log scale). There’s some plus of minus to this, of course, but these are good ballpark figures. In 1985 there were only a few hundred thousand mobile phones. Today, says Pew, 98% have one (presumably if old enough).
Again, we’re interested in the shape here, and not training to predict exact numbers. To do that, we’d have to know where each report came from, how made, or at least the local population and local cellphone use, and the number of users on social media and that sort of thing. A real project.
Surely this is enough evidence that cellphones and social media are, as claimed, driving some, and likely a lot, of the increase in reports.
If all this holds, then we are in a report deficit. Evidenced by the drop off after 2020. Which deficit, I predict again, we are about to make up.
Monthlies
This next one shows the fraction of each month to its year, plotted one year on top of another, but here I started in 1960, otherwise we’d have too many 100% (early years had few or only one month of data):
Obviously, June is the best month to report UFOs, with July second. Perhaps because these are the longest days of the year. Or maybe aliens take their annual vacations to North America in June (unlike the French, who do so in August). When it’s cold and lonely, like January and February, there are far fewer reports. Which is odd, because it’s darker and easier to see bright lights in the skies.
June probably aren’t meteors; the Perseids, which are more plentiful, peak in mid-August or so. Though the June Bootids are usually less, reports say “occasional outbursts produce a hundred or more meteors per hour.”
Take Me Away
Similar data doesn’t seem to exist for abductions. There are various lists of abduction stories, but dates are not readily available online, like this table at Wiki Data. The numbers aren’t big anyway, so not much can be learned by any date analysis.
It is curious, though, that abduction reports don’t mirror UFO reports in number. Perhaps because it’s easy to report a UFO, an event which carries little or no stigma, and is even on the exciting side. But report being abducted? Well, that’s when the probing jokes begin. You have to have a lot of guts (left) to report being beamed aboard ship. Or (be honest) you have to be crazy.
And then a lot of abduction reports often come by hypnosis or therapy. Neither of which is generally common, and both regarded with skepticism.
They Still Make Movies
Could be the UFOs don’t need any more samples. All of us humans look alike to them, the bigots. Or they could be going after minds. That’s where the new Stephen Spielberg movie comes in. He, of course, was there surfing the last UFO wave, and he’s back at the start of our new 1970s with Disclosure Day. Did not The Trump himself announce last week he was disclosing the Epstein UFO files? This will surely lead to great numbers of reports.
And, incidentally, so will all the rumors around the missing and dead “scientists”. See What Are The Chances Of All These Scientists Dying, Killed, Or Going Missing?
I’ve found only rumors about what Spielberg’s movie is about. One site said:
Creepy sentient elk, cryptic crop circles, weird red birds, dilated pupils, Emily Blunt’s Kansas City meteorologist mumbling clicking gibberish while live on camera, intense car-smashing chases, body swapping, Josh O’Connor insisting on revealing some truth to the planet, and Colin Firth hooked up to the wires and mouthpiece of a VR machine.
If this turns out to be anything like the UFOs are already here and walking among us and slipping us the mickey, or they are in low-earth orbit and controlling minds with rays that can penetrate even tinfoil, or, best of all, if they have some kind of fell telepathic powers, then we will, I predict, see a relatively large increase in abduction-like encounters.
But not beamed-up and probed encounters. I mean vivid dreams, eerie feelings, psychic dread in forms similar to whatever is in the movie. Not only will reports be current, but past encounters will be reinvestigated and found to fit the pattern. These are a lot easier to report, and justify to others, than physical abductions. Somebody with more wherewithal than me ought to set up a database now to count these.
The 70s boost in reports lasted a decade. A bit longer than the previous one. This implies we’ll at least live through a few years of fun.
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