Same Time Next Year Syndrome

Beyond mere curiosity value, could it be important to study the UFO phenomenon by calendar date? It's possible, indeed likely, that there exists an important signal in the noise that might be isolated by taking this approach. What we do know is that similar experiences happen on the same day. Although it is too early yet to apply any statistical tests to the data, it seems at first blush that these similarities occur far too often to be due to coincidence alone. Below is a revised version of my article on the topic from the Ohio UFO Notebook, included in issue no. 24, the 2003 Membership Issue, published by William Jones and MUFON of Ohio.

I have sifted through tens of thousands of UFO reports from many perspectives, and one impression I have gained is that there is something remarkably strange about the similarity of UFOs encounters that occur on the same month and day, in different years!

I haven't yet come up with a good working hypothesis for the cause of this phenomenon, which I have nicknamed the "same time next year" syndrome. But I am reasonably sure I may be onto something important. I would like to invite you to judge whether I am deluding myself.

Here is some of the wild speculation that I have briefly entertained as a possible cause for what I have been seeing in the data:

1. Perhaps with UFOs we are dealing with some kind of time traveling phenomenon that winks out in one year and comes back in future years. It may not actually be "gone" in the spatial sense, only in the temporal sense. This sounds very far-fetched, but I can cite you instances of places (so-called UFO hotspots) that have the same or a similar object show up on the same date over multiple years, and engage in the same type of behavior.
2. Perhaps UFOs are indeed extraterrestrial in origin, and because planetary orientations need to be correct for travel, similar events tend to occur at the same time of the year, maybe within a day or so each year.
3. Or perhaps we live in a "multiverse." The UFO phenomenon may be a manifestation of a "many worlds" phenomenon--one in which the UFO occupants come from different versions of parallel Earths, but some constants or spatial invariants are necessary for passage from one world to another. One restraint might require entering and exiting parallel worlds from the "same location" to avoid materializing in an adverse situation or solid rock.
4. Or we might be dealing with a psychological response to some external stimuli in our environment. We humans may be predisposed to react to the same seasonal or geomagnetic stimuli that cause, in at least some of us, a similar set of hallucinations, delusions, or even psychic phenomena. This external trigger may be natural, caused by some poorly understood electrical phenomenon, or artificial, such as due to government mind control experiments popular in some conspiracy theories.

As Mark Twain once quipped, Science is wonderful. You can get such a wholesale return of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact! But I have looked at a LOT of data--probably a good deal more than most of you, my esteemed colleagues--so I am going to be presumptuous and tell you that my hunch is a hunch, but at least it is an educated hunch.

If you are skeptical about my assertion, so much the better! Act as my sounding board and check it out for yourselves. To this end I have been writing a daily report of incidents that occur on the same calendar day, regardless of the year. Due to time pressures some reports may be incomplete and shorter than others, but I am doing my best to develop a report on the anniversary of each calendar day.