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As academia drifts further and further from the dubious qualities it once assumed, academia’s match-like descent into murky realms of dense speculation continues unabated. Displaced, reconstituted, in ever-fading cycles, the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute once again saw fit to deprive its students of the peace and comfort of banal rationality through this fourth annual Halloween lecture.
Lacking new insight, this year’s lecture revisits the chilling implications of humanity’s contact with unexplained air and sea phenomena, drawing from the faintest whispers of ante-historical history to the shimmering echoes of statistical reasoning. How do visitors from outside the void enter our night sky? What subtle deceptions underlie their visible geometries? What values underlie their special interests in certain uncomfortably privileged regions?
Despite all safeguards and despite countless barely noticeable currents opposing such efforts, this event was recorded, stored and released to a world still cruelly unprepared to face its findings.
More details and the underlying code for these findings can be found – for those inattentive enough to look – in the series of entries beginning here.
Halloween lecture from the Oxford Internet Institute
Bayes vs. the Invaders (Redivivus): A Bayesian Analysis of 70 Years of UFO Sightings
Prof. Joss Wright
Oxford. October 2025The scorching heat of summer retreats, cools, fades and surrenders its vitality to the flickering uncertainties of autumn. Nights draw closer, like dimly remembered friends gathering in our dreams. The spring leaves abandon their green dance as they age, wither and drift in a reddish-brown swirl of skeletal, wind-swayed fragments.
The dying seasons return, dragging with them old fears and uncomfortable rumours, gathering around these darkly dreaming spiers in a morass of primal superstition. The painfully fragile certainties of modern enlightenment, our desperate faith in the gossamer structures of scientific progress, falter as we are confronted with primal horrors lurking inexorably in the darkness.
In these dark days, when confidence in our valuable insight is waning, it is once again time to turn our faces fully toward the darkness. Halloween, which tends inexorably to our minds, forces us as scholars to gather our methods, our theories, our data, our knowledge; and gather as much light as possible from the primordial glints of the unknown.
Unidentifiable air and sea phenomena. Impossible lights in the sky. Patterns of visitation and terror. Treacherous influences from the hadal pockets between the stars. Who-what-dives and soars through the inky nights of our world, probing and testing our structures, our societies, our minds? From barely remembered history, to early reports of impossible objects, to vaguely documented documentation, records of flying arcane observations have grown and twisted along with our ability to uncover them, subject them to analysis, and interrogate their secrets.
In this year’s OII Halloween lecture, we will look back tremblingly on a Bayesian analysis of seventy years of UFO sightings, drawn from a data set collected by the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Skepticism, fear, doubt and the most accepted standards of statistical accuracy will be cast aside in our unyielding and unsettling pursuit of an uncompromising truth.
2025-bayes_vs_invaders-recycling
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