I noticed a huge drop in UFO reports after 2014

I was looking through old government data on the FAA's website about pilot sightings. From 2000 to 2013, there were an average of about 150 reports a year from commercial and military pilots. After 2014, that number fell to under 30 a year and stayed low. The change lines up almost exactly with when the Navy updated its reporting guidelines to be more formal and less public. Makes you wonder if the drop was because things stopped happening, or because the reporting system got changed to keep things quieter. Has anyone else tracked a specific data shift like this that seems tied to a policy change?

3 comments

3 Comments

river_wright1d ago

Is it just me or does that data shift look like one of those "whoops we forgot to tell the public" things? I once tried tracking my own spending and "accidentally" stopped recording it after I got a new credit card, so I totally get how changing the system changes the numbers. @robert_bennett29 said it best about the reporting rules changing the results, which makes me wonder if the pilots are still seeing stuff but the reports are just disappearing into a black hole now. That Navy update feels like a "we'll handle it internally" move, not a "nothing to see here" one. I've seen similar drops in other government stats after they tightened up the reporting criteria, like how my grocery receipts dropped after I stopped writing them down.

rowanp152mo ago

Yeah, that line about the reporting system change is key. I read an article a while back that made the same point as robert_bennett29, how the new rules basically made it a closed loop inside the military. So pilots might still see things, but the reports just don't hit the public databases anymore. The drop in the public numbers feels less like a drop in activity and more like a drop in transparency.

robert_bennett292mo ago

The FAA's own data shows that drop, and it lines up perfectly with the Navy's new reporting rules. In my experience, when you change how people report things, you always change the numbers you get back.

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