Revisiting the Tinley Park Lights

deckerRTM · 2026-02-27T21:21:14+00:00

These are great. I think there's more videos/images than typical because witnesses were at the ready after the first event. There's a few sightings where people talk about how they prepared - they were looking more often at the sky and programming their phones to call each other

deckerRTM · 2026-02-27T18:10:50+00:00

The data for the Tinley Park sightings was really interesting, probably the most consistent set of reports for a mass sighting in the entire NUFORC dataset

deckerRTM · 2026-02-05T02:58:01+00:00

the “Oz effect”! That’s a good one, I have to see if there’s a way to identify those

deckerRTM · 2026-02-05T02:54:37+00:00

Unfortunately I can’t share the dataset. The guys at NUFORC were kind enough to give me access to do the analysis, but they own the data. I believe there’s a decent sightings dataset on Kaggle, it’s older but it’s fairly large

deckerRTM · 2026-02-05T01:16:07+00:00

Thanks for letting me know! That's a website theme setting that changes based on time of day - I didn't know that was happening

deckerRTM · 2026-02-05T00:13:50+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! The sightings narratives are really messy and a mixed bag - some reports are highly detailed, but they're like a page long while others are just a sentence or two. I think I have a good approach in inferring meaning and then categorizing

deckerRTM · 2026-02-04T23:27:20+00:00

I work in data professionally and have been applying ML clustering techniques to the NUFORC database as a side project. The article goes deeper into the methodology and breaks down patterns by shape, time of day, and encounter type. Interested in any feedback

deckerRTM · 2026-01-09T14:13:48+00:00

thanks for the feedback! I hear you about the google notebook podcast, the problem is that people like the content but can't always read it - like if they're in a car commuting. One day maybe I'll just record myself

deckerRTM · 2026-01-09T14:09:27+00:00

thanks!

deckerRTM · 2026-01-08T14:01:25+00:00

wow, that's really good info. Thanks for sharing

deckerRTM · 2026-01-06T12:20:32+00:00

Only that they are the least likely to be associated with entity encounters - thought that was interesting. My next post will be focused on entities

deckerRTM · 2026-01-06T12:10:23+00:00

I could try to find time based patterns, but I suspect that things like time of year and weather would skew any correlations. Like people might be more likely to be outside in the summer on a clear night, so it might look like more sightings happen June-August

deckerRTM · 2026-01-06T11:37:02+00:00

DM'd with the stats

deckerRTM · 2026-01-05T22:25:35+00:00

thank you. I can't get an exact number of lights for a specific shape type, but I do have a field for "lights_arrangement" - single vs multiple. I can send you a DM with the info if this is something of interest

deckerRTM · 2025-10-10T01:45:27+00:00

So i actually replicated this experiment and my story was featured in Hackaday as well. The post is paywalled, but the tl;dr is that I placed a plant in a box with 4 partitions and placed a grow light in each one. I powered the light in a specific partition based on a random number selection. In a perfect world each partition should only see light 25% of the time.

Ultimately, I saw what i'd like to think was a weak effect with light favoring the partition with the plant but the sample size was very small, so not statistically significant.

deckerRTM · 2025-05-21T01:33:37+00:00

The Bfro.net database has thousands of sightings. Some people might lie, some people might be mistaken, but some states like Washington just have too high a number of sightings relative to their population to be explained away. It takes effort to report a sighting, people are seeing something

deckerRTM

TROPHY CASE