In the absence of fresh insight, this year’s lecture revisits the chilling implications of humanity’s contact with inexplicable aerial and marine phenomena, drawing from the faintest whispers of the ante-historical record through to the shimmering echoes of statistical reasoning. Through what means do visitors from beyond the void encroach on our night-time skies? What subtle deceptions underpin their visible geometries? What values lie behind their peculiar interests in certain uncomfortably-favoured regions?

Despite all safeguards, and in the face of numerous barely-perceptible currents opposing such efforts, this event was captured, stored, and released into a world still cruelly unprepared to face its findings.

More details, and the underlying code, for these findings can be found–for those unwary enough to look–in the series of entries beginning here.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Oxford Internet Institute Halloween Lecture
Bayes vs. the Invaders (Redivivus): A Bayesian Analysis of 70 Years of UFO Sightings
Prof. Joss Wright
Oxford. October 2025

The searing heat of summer retreats, cools, fades, surrendering its vitality to the flickering uncertainties of autumn. Nights draw close, like dimly-remembered friends clustering in our dreams. The spring leaves abandon their verdant dance, as they age, wither, and drift into a russet swirl of skeletal, wind-stirred fragments.

The dying seasons return, dragging with them time-hallowed fears and uneasy rumours, pooling around these darkly dreaming spires in a mire of primal superstition. The agonizingly brittle certainties of the modern enlightenment, our desperate faith in the gossamer fabrics of scientific progress, falter in the face of primal terrors that lurk implacably in the gloom.

In these darkening days, as faith in our treasured understanding dims, it is yet again time to turn our faces fully to the darkness. Halloween, slouching inexorably towards our minds, impels us as scholars to gather our methods, our theories, our data, our knowledge; and glean what light we can from the primordial glimmers of the unknown.

Unidentifiable aerial and marine phenomena. Impossible lights in the sky. Patterns of visitation and terror. Insidious influences from the hadal voids between the stars. Who–what–swoop and glide through the ink-black nights of our world, probing and testing our structures, our societies, our minds? From barely remembered history, to early reports of impossible objects, to blurrily evidenced documentation, data concerning flying arcane observations has grown and twisted, along with our capacity to lay them bare, to subject them to analysis, and to interrogate their secrets.

In this year’s OII Halloween Lecture, we will tremblingly revisit a Bayesian analysis of seventy years of UFO sightings, drawn from a dataset collected by the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Scepticism, fear, doubt, and most accepted standards of statistical rigour, will be cast aside in our unyielding and disquieting pursuit of an uncompromised truth.

This third OII Halloween Lecture sinks bodily into the tortured mass of data concerning cryptozoological sightings in North America. Drawing on over a century of shadow-haunted sightings documenting the curiously repellant presence of the North America Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, we aim to identify the factors associated with its presence, delineate the confounding presence of other dread manifestations, and cast our minds globally for a faded glimpse of its remote and scarcely-conceived brethren.

In what can only generously be considered an act of gross negligence, this lecture was stored, at great risk to both its author and its audience, digitally. Technology has, once again, brought us closer than we might care to dread to secrets that we were never intended to taste.

A sharper, more visceral presentation of the baroque thinking underpinning these materials will follow, in an ever-spiralling series of posts on this site. Until then, however, incautious travellers may solemnly consider the below.

OII Halloween Lecture
Sasquatch Distribution Modelling: Investigating patterns of Bigfoot sightings in North America.
Prof. Joss Wright
Oxford. October 2024

The nights grow ever closer. Streetlights flicker, shrouded in the mists, striving to pierce the gloom. The warm certainties of summer give way to the cold, dark ambiguities of autumn. Rumour, myth, and legend rise, primeval, from the shadowed recesses of our collective consciousness, undermining our faith in the fragile congruities that structure our lives.

As summer surrenders to the inexorable tread of autumn, our resolve falters against the unknown horrors residing in the tenebrous peripheries of the world. As scientists, as scholars, our duty is to cling resolutely to our methods and our ideals in the face of encroaching darkness. Our tools may seem fragile in the face of the seething irrationality of the night, but we are called to peer, however tremulously, wherever our inquiries may lead us.

Lights streak across the sky. Stories are woven of twisted faces in the darkness, half-glimpsed creatures in ancient forests, strange encounters in the wilderness. From the earliest stirrings of humanity, to the patterns of complex arcana that silently control our lives today, folklore and legend have long reported phenomena that rebel against mundane description or understanding. As our technologies evolve, and our ability to collate, scrutinise, and manipulate data spiral beyond all restraint, we are ever more capable, if not indeed obliged, to bring the lens of science to bear on these harrowing mysteries.

To embrace this dark season, you are invited to the annual Oxford Internet Institute Halloween Lecture.

This year we will pursue one of the world’s most notorious cryptozoological phenomena, investigating over a century of data regarding sightings of the Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, of North America. In which regions are these cryptic precursors of humanity most commonly observed? What factors, whether environmental or physical, create habitats most suitable for the Sasquatch to thrive, hidden from the encroaching pressures of humanity? Where, were we bold enough to look, might we seek other populations of these elusive creatures?

In this lecture we will examine some of the history surrounding sightings of Bigfoot, and related cryptids. We will impetuously apply statistical methods to derive underlying patterns from reported sightings, and heedlessly strive to uncover their meaning and implications. What can we learn from the accumulated data about the habits of cryptic species living on the fringes of our world? Is the beast, as ever, closer to us than we wish to believe?

This second OII Halloween Lecture drew on the twisted meanderings we travellers have taken through the cryptic verbiage of the Voynich Manuscript. We aim to establish the dread authenticity of the text, by rousing its very statistical bones from the inscrutable fasciae of its pages. Walking a tightrope between careful statistical exploration and ever-burgeoning insanity, we further explore the structures that arise from the text, separating the untranslated knowledge in the book into coherent bodies for future study.

In yet another, almost criminially negligent, oversight, the OII’s 2024 Halloween Lecture was captured, frozen in space and time, for the detriment and despair of the unexpectant world.

For those not driven to blissful negation by the tortured ramblings of the above, the underlying materials for the talk are presented, with neither hope nor tremor, here.

In pursuit of such necessarily painful revelations the Oxford Internet Insitute at the University of Oxford — the unwitting host on which the investigations here parasitise — recently hosted an inaugural Halloween lecture. This oration drew on several years of dark explorations chronicled in this blog, to inculcuate into a new generation of unprepared and curious minds the horror and necessity of subjecting our reality to the insidious power of statistical science. Through what seems a dangerously careless oversight, this brief glimpse of truth was recorded and made available for posterity.

For the terminally inquisitive, the archival materials on which this work was drawn are presented here.