Let me let you in on a little secret.   
      
   I was gardening one sunny day before the Pandemic and got up to   
   stretch after a bout of weeding around the roses and there -- hanging   
   in the W sky around 45 deg above the horizon -- was an odd looking object.   
   At first I thought it might be a large grayish plastic bag   
   that had somehow been blown way up into the air and for reasons   
   unknown had just decided to hang motionless up there.   
      
   I watched it for 2-3 mins and it didn't seem to move. From my rough   
   measurements it had visual diam around ~4 deg. But it was -- as usual   
   with these things -- hard to judge how far it was away.  The sky was   
   cloudless blue. The "bag" wasn't even fluttering. It could have been 1 ft   
   across or 100.   
      
   My eyesight these days is not the best -- after a couple bouts of chemo a   
   few years back I was declared legally blind and things haven't gotten   
   better from there -- but I could make out some darker irregular internal   
   structures in the "bag". If it was a garbage bag then someone forgot to   
   empty it before it got up into the sky.   
      
   After watching it a while more, and it still not moving at all, I got a bit   
   bored and went back to the weeding. 5-10 mins after that I looked   
   up again and it was gone.   
      
   I recalled that maybe 1 year before this incident I had seen another   
   grey garbage bag up in (by coincidence?) the same area of the sky.   
   But that one had really looked and acted like a garbage bag. On a day   
   that was a bit grayish and windy at ground level, that time the bag was   
   wayyy up in the sky -- maybe 1 deg in apparent diam -- and was obviously   
   being blowing around. But now I come to think of it, it had managed to stay   
   reasonably close to the same spot in the sky and just seemed to be doing   
   "cartwheels" up there. After a min or 2 I lost interest and had gone   
   onto other things and didn't look for it again.   
      
   I didn't think much more about either plastic bag until another   
   incident happened maybe 6m later (we're up to mid 2019). Third time   
   was the charm. That time I think I was just hanging out under the   
   awning on the patio having a cup of joe, looking out over the small   
   part of the world visible to the N.  Then something came into view   
   roughly over my left shoulder (SW).  It was like nothing I've ever   
   seen or heard of before. I tried to google it up. Nothing. What it   
   looked like was odd enough. But what is was doing was just crazy.   
   Either/or it was an unusual thing.   
      
   Visibly it looked like 2 elongated teardrops joined point to point.   
   Like a horizontal infinity sign with an aspect ratio around 4 to 1.   
   It was flying at apparently constant speed and constant height, the   
   speed of a small plane at fairly low altitude. But, us usual, hard to   
   judge how high it was. There was some fluffy white and dark clouds off   
   to my NW. Maybe at most it was about 1/2 way between that and me.   
   If the shape of the thing and the sheen and the occasional shimmer   
   that showed it wasn't a rigid skin were not enough, it was in a slow   
   constant rate flat spin about the center. It was like the whole thing   
   was some kind of hellicopter. Except as it rotated you could see it   
   had a round cross section and not anything that could reasonably   
   produce lift.   
      
   Upto ~10 deg wide when I first saw it, if it was 1/2 way between me   
   and the clouds over to the NW it could have been 50-70m along its long axis.   
   A bit large for e.g. a broken weather balloon.   
      
   But how/why the H*ll was it turning? It turned around it's center every   
   approx 10 sec. There was the low grey cloud some distance off to my 10   
   o'clock, but as the thing flew horiz and turned it briefly caught the   
   sun every couple rotations somewhere nr the middle of the "infinity".   
   The glints were copper colored.   
      
   The thing proceeded leisurely at constant speed, constant height,   
   constant rotation in roughly a northerly direction until it   
   disappeared from view over 2m high fences, buildings -- homes and   
   barns and whatnot -- toward my north.   
      
   These incidents re-ignited a childhood interest in the non-mundane.   
      
   Which is why I started gathering some numbers and seeing what could be   
   extracted from same.   
      
   At about that time anyway, someone I knew from academia sent me an   
   academic paper on warp drive they were working on. And in between   
   large grabs of esoteric math related to solving GR field equations in   
   strong EM fields the paper mentioned the Nimitz tictac biz from a few   
   years earlier.   
      
   While individual reports might be mistake or hoaxes, it's much much   
   harder for a group of witnesses to see things that form a consistent   
   pattern or strong relationship with other things in the wider world   
   they should not have been able to appreciate.  Like the weather on a   
   given day in the middle of a remote continent or water temperatures in   
   the depths of the Atlantic.   
      
   In my case I only have a handful of one-off events. So fat chance they   
   can be analyzed by themselves at all.   
      
   But the phenomenon of "sky jellyfish", which seemed to be about the   
   only thing that was even vaguely similar, is another apparently   
   growing thing and we can look at that.   
      
   There are lots of explanations from hard scientists that write the   
   phenomena off entirely as sunlight reflecting off rocket exhaust or   
   clouds, or various other "swamp gas" type explanations.  Sure. It   
   could be anything. It could be a combination of broken weather   
   balloons or wind-blown shopping bags. But in a few years of looking   
   fairly carefully at the world it's hard to believe mundane things can   
   behave the way 2 of the objects I saw did.   
      
   But no matter. Let's just "go to the tape" and see whether there are   
   patterns in what other people have reported related to objects that   
   look like jellyfish wandering around the skies of mostly N Am.   
      
   The year-by-year list of reports that mention "jelly" in the NUFORC data   
   looks like:   
      
   Year	#sky jellyfish   
   1972         1   
   2003         1   
   2005         1   
   2006         3   
   2007         4   
   2008         4   
   2009         5   
   2010         6  	<-- max   
   2011         4   
   2012         5   
   2013         4   
   2014         3   
   2015         1   
   2017         1   
   2018         4   
   2019         1   
   2020         5   
      
      
   As with some of similar data we might ask ourselves how we can   
   possibly make anything out of such a small, scrappy set of numbers.   
      
   But we can, of course. We just have to be careful. Or try to be careful. :)   
      
   We can run a set of careful statistical tests to see what variables   
   out there in the world seem to closely predict the appearance of these   
   particular sightings. I.e. what other things happened in the same   
   month, prev month, prev season, last year that seem to predict the   
   number of jellyfish sightings in a given month.   
      
   The AI s/w I am using & developing mostly is oriented to trying to   
   compare things against natural phenomena like the month-by-month   
   average temperature in remote locations, areas of sea ice in the   
   Arctic, or the depth of snow at Vostok at the S Pole. It has a   
   database of literally 1000s of such things that it updated and expands   
   day by day and can notionally (since it uses experience it has   
   previously gained, it sometimes "guesstimates" what variables are   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)