From: kymhorsell@gmail.com   
      
   I like to start out with a mystery title. But the mystery in this case   
   really can't wait till the last line of the post. That's how I'd LIKE   
   to do it. But I can't this time.   
      
   The opposite of UFO's seems to be shadow people.  We'll get to the   
   statistical evidence for the strange claim down below. But first we   
   have to negotiate a maze or two.   
      
   The little AI programs have been ticking over on a long list of   
   puzzles that either I've given them or they have given each other. One   
   of the general areas of puzzle is -- if these objects are real, and by   
   now we are probably 99.999% sure they are and are not (all) Chinese   
   balloons and not (all) experimental drones being flown out of Nevada   
   -- who are piloting them?   
      
   While some sketchy evidence suggests the answer depends on exactly   
   what kind of UFO you're talking about, there is a long list of   
   suspects from the folklore to start with.   
      
   At some point we'll look at the evidence for some of the things they   
   AI's have come up with. We've already looked a couple of times at   
   "humanoids" and there are also some new developments in that area,   
   too.  But one of the things that has come up and at one point stymied   
   the programs were "shadow people".   
      
   If you haven't gone down this particular rabbit hole the outline is   
   people have seen for many years -- some say centuries -- what appear   
   to be humanoids but they are "blacked out". Usually the sightings   
   happen under low-light conditions, but sometimes people say they've   
   seen these things in more or less broad daylight. Some videos   
   circulating in the paranormal research groups have shown what looks   
   like the old comic book "negative man" moving around people's homes   
   and in one case laying on someone's bed.   
      
   The first problem to test any link between these entities and UFO's is   
   to get the data on "shadow person" sightings.  Unfortunately, it seems   
   very few groups have bothered to get data on these things albeit it is   
   often claimed that sightings of them are lately on the rise. At best,   
   it seemed, you could get the "top 10 spookiest sightings of shadow   
   people" but if you wanted a list of dates when the entities were   
   sighted you had to wait until someone thought to setup a reporting line.   
      
   But the AI programs managed to dream up one way to get a handle on the   
   sightings. I had previously collected an old UK-based "ghost   
   database".  Not much had come of this apart from a brief check that   
   the way ghost sightings in the UK rise and fall over time looked   
   nothing like the way UFO sightings in N America rise and fall over   
   time.  It seemed from prelim statistical tests (general) ghosts and   
   UFO's where not related. One caveat: poltergeist reports in the same   
   database *did* seem to correspond in some way to UFO sightings. So   
   they may be linked in one or other ways.   
      
   But to return to shadow people. It turned out the word "shadow" was   
   mentioned in many of the reports in the ghost database.  So the AI's   
   naturally latched onto this to create the "list of shadow people   
   sightings" on a hunch they would be approx the same thing as the kind   
   of entity being sought.  And it does seem the idea is worth looking at.   
      
   The first thing the program did after making up appropriate data-files   
   was to check which planetary movements the sightings of "shadows"   
   corresponded to, if any. And -- surprise -- Saturn came up dozens of   
   times in the list. Many parameters of the movement of Saturn are   
   strongly linked with "shadow" sightings. The best links seem to explain   
   60% of "shadow" sightings in the UK over the period of the database   
   ~1950 upto now.   
      
   But -- as we might recall -- which Saturn is certainly one of the   
   planets that seems to have "an" affinity for UFO's in general and many   
   specific types of UFO's in particular the best matches are not with   
   Saturn by with Neptune, Uranus and Pluto (approx in that kind of order).   
      
   So upto this point we had kinda verified that a direct comparison of   
   shadows and UFO's did not align very well. But some planet that kinda   
   explained some UFO sightings a little also was a good match for   
   explaining "shadow" sightings. So close. But no close enough.   
      
   Given this situation the AI programs cast around for some kind of   
   model such that the same model explained UFO's and also "shadows".   
   And one thing they immediately found was something that may turn out   
   to be useful in other ways -- whether planets were in "retrograde   
   motion" or not.   
      
   "Retrograde" is the illusion that a planet has moving in the wrong   
   direction across the sky.  Normally, like satellites, planets slowly   
   move across the sky from west to east. The change is only usually   
   visible over many nights where you can see a given planet has changed   
   its position relative to some nearby star(s). As the earth and the   
   planets move around the sun in the same direction, the earth tends to   
   lap the slower outer planets and be lapped by the faster-moving inner   
   planets.  At the point one planet overtakes another here on planet   
   dirt we noticed that planet has stopped moving in the normal direction   
   across the sky and appeared to have selected reverse gear and be   
   moving from east to west for a while. Retrograde.   
      
   It's usually the case *some* planet is in retrograde motion every day   
   of the year. But when more than one is in retrograde it's slightly   
   unusual. And today -- so a post from some yoga magazine told me today   
   -- 7 planets are in retrograde now.   
      
   So the AI's made up a model of predicting UFO sightings and another   
   model predicting "shadow" sightings based on how many or which   
   planets were in retrograde at and given time.   
      
   And it turned out the models worked fine. But more interestingly, it   
   turned out the model for UFO's was "the opposite" of the one for "shadows".   
      
   Without going too deep (again) into the way these things get modelled,   
   the output from the UFO model looked like:   
      
   VARIABLE     COEFFICIENT    STAND. ERROR     T - VALUE     P - VALUE   
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------   
    date                  6.97060         0.75838       9.19145       0.00000   
      x1                -41.79969        32.51585      -1.28552       0.19899   
      x2                -33.28293        43.59285      -0.76350       0.44540   
      x3               -122.52172        43.00866      -2.84877       0.00450   
      x4                296.87747        38.13225       7.78547       0.00000   
      x5               -121.72609        35.10668      -3.46732       0.00055   
      x6                -42.10958        31.18896      -1.35014       0.17736   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)