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September 1, 2008 6:32 PM

Here’s something that you wouldn’t necessarily have expected to see. Via an economics blog, Anti Dismal, comes a New York Times piece by Peter Leeson, guest blogging at the Freakonmics blog. It uncovers a jaw-dropping fact:

Graph from Freakonomics

The relationship is strong and positive. States with more U.F.O. sightings also have more Bigfoot sightings. In fact, six of the top ten U.F.O. and Bigfoot states are the same: Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Alaska, Wyoming, and Colorado. Two states, Washington and Oregon, are among both categoriesʼ top five.

The author, who does not believe in bigfoot in the slightest, uses this information to cast doubt that there is any validity to the UFO phenomenon either.  But how do we read this information? If bigfoot and UFO sightings are so well correlated, this suggests a relationship. How would this fact be explained?

UPDATE: Taking a look at some of the reactions to this on the NYT blog, I ran across some startling things. One commenter said:

Maybe one should become slightly less sure that Bigfoot is not real, bumping up the subjective probability slightly on the thought that Bigfoots travel in UFOs (possibly as pets) and that goes a long way toward explaining away the lack of physical evidence (they donʼt leave much behind).

And another said:

The commonality of these witnesses is gullibility, ignorance, and a desire to be someone more important than they are. What the states with high incidences of “sightings” have in common is high incidences of the aforementioned human. What’s most startling is that there were any comments like the first one, and that there weren’t more like the second.

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