Seen a UFO recently? Don’t blame COVID
First of all, because we know you’re going to be thinking it in a minute, no, we did not make this up. With COVID-19 still hanging around, there’s no need for fabrication on our part.
Jat AM/Pixabay
The pandemic, clearly, has caused humans to do some strange things over the last 3 years, but what about some of the more, shall we say … eccentric behavior that people were already exhibiting before COVID found its way into our lives?
If, like R. Chase Cockrell, PhD, of the University of Vermont and associates at the Center for UFO Studies, you were wondering if the pandemic affected UFO reporting, then wonder no more. After all, with all that extra time being spent outdoors back in 2020 and all the additional anxiety, surely somebody must have seen something.
The investigators started with the basics by analyzing data from the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network. Sightings did increase by about 600 in each database during 2020, compared with 2018 and 2019, but not because of the pandemic.
That’s right, we can’t pin this one on our good friend SARS-CoV-2. Further analysis showed that the launches of SpaceX Starlink satellites – sometimes as many as 60 at a time – probably caused the increase in UFO sightings, which means that our favorite billionaire, Elon Musk, is to blame. Yup, the genial Mr. Muskellunge did something that even a global pandemic couldn’t, and yet we vaccinate for COVID.
Next week on tenuous connections: A new study links the 2020 presidential election to increased emergency department visits for external hemorrhoids.
See? That’s fabrication. We made that up.
This article was updated 5/15/23.