The U.F.O.-Bigfoot Connection

Over at the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, Peter Leeson has written up a guest post entitled “The X-Files, Economics Edition.” In it, he proposes an economic approach to the U.F.O. phenomenon:

Could the tools of economics help us get to the bottom of the U.F.O. phenomenon? That’s what fellow economist Claudia Williamson and I are hoping in our latest project that uses economics to analyze the American flying saucer phenomenon.

We’re still in the early data-collecting stages of our project; but in doing so we’ve come across an intriguing pattern. The figure [above] plots total U.F.O. sightings in the U.S. for each state (per 10,000 residents) between 1997 and 2007 against total Bigfoot sightings in each state (per 10,000 residents) for the same period.

Link to Leeson’s post.

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