Is there any lunar-phase effect on sighting reports?

Pre-registered 2026-09-13 · readout no earlier than Wed Sep 01 2027 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) · status: registered

The question

A persistent folk belief holds that strange reports cluster around the full moon. Does the reporting data show it?

Hypothesis, stated in advance

No association. We expect to find nothing, and are registering it so that the null is on the record rather than quietly dropped.

What would count as support

No significant association between lunar illumination fraction and daily cluster-opening counts.

Method

Daily cluster-opening counts in the cryptids, hauntings and Sky & Earth beats regressed on lunar illumination fraction, with day-of-week and a smooth time trend as covariates. Single pre-specified test; no subgroup exploration.

Data

thestaticwire.clusters
computed.lunar-phase

Known confounds

Written down before the result, so they cannot be discovered conveniently late.

Moonlight genuinely affects night-time visibility, so any positive result has at least two readings and would not support the folk belief on its own.
Reporting date is not sighting date.

Result

Not yet. Data is still accumulating and the readout date has not been reached. Whatever it says when it arrives — including nothing at all — will be published here.

Data access

/api/v1/analyses returns this register as JSON, including every entry that found nothing.