UFO AI Analytics

During the great French wave of autumn 1954, hundreds of reports arrived in only a few weeks. The writer and science journalist Aimé Michel plotted them on maps. In Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery (1958), he argued that sightings on the same day fell along straight lines. He called this orthoteny. Its most famous example was the so-called BAVIC line from Bayonne to Vichy.

Later statisticians showed that such alignments appear by chance in dense data, so orthoteny did not hold up. But the idea behind it did. Michel moved the question from "what did this witness see?" to "what shape does the whole wave make?" That change in method is the starting point of UFO analytics.

Jacques Vallée was trained in astronomy and computer science, and he corresponded with Michel. He took the next step: he put case data into a computer. Working with J. Allen Hynek, he built early machine-readable sighting catalogues. In Passport to Magonia (1969), he published a chronological catalogue of 923 landing reports.

With these catalogues he studied waves over time, daily timing patterns and a striking "law of the times," where reports rise late at night when few people are awake to see them. He concluded that the phenomenon could only be understood in aggregate, across cultures and centuries, and not through any single dramatic case. This lab is built on that idea.