Humans have long reported seeing many strange things. We put such sightings into categories, and over time many such categories have become normalized, by acquiring widely accepted explanations. These included eclipses, sea monsters, meteors, auroras, ball lightning, sprites far above thunderstorms, and sleep paralysis. But other categories remain strange, including ghosts, poltergeists, precognition, cryptids, and religious visions,

For at least eighty years, a key category of strange sightings has been UFOs (= UAPs). Some have hoped to normalize this category entirely in terms of lies/hoaxes or honest mistakes re planets, planes, balloons, bugs, swamp gas, and secret development projects. But a subset of these sightings has stubbornly resisted such assimilation. Two other hopes for normalization have been

• A) random fluctuations may eventually show some very clear events, and

• B) careful record-keeping may let us eventually see clear patterns across many cases.

Yet, alas, more clearer events and richer records have not so far normalized UFOs.

I’m now on the White House UAP Science Advisory Council, where the two main hopes for normalization today seem to be

• C) parts of the US govt have been hiding and suppressing dramatic clear records, which they might be soon reveal, and

• D) more widespread automated event recording systems might show very clear events.

I’ll put some hope on these, but base rates make it hard for me to muster great hopes.

Which leads me to suggest another approach: opaquely collect very detailed data on random spacetime regions, and also on what strange things people nearby report about those regions. If these reporters couldn’t have reasonably guessed that their regions would be so heavily documented, they will behave much like those not in very documented regions.

With enough such data, we could fit statistical models to the distributions of events near people reporting strange events, models we could then apply to strange reports outside this dataset, to infer details near strange events they report. This could help us not only to better estimate events near UFO sightings, but also near many other still strange types of sightings, like ghosts, and also near unusual events relevant for legal trials, like murders. Humanity might then have greatly stepped up its game re its ability to collectively infer what actually happened near testimony of strange events.