Magical days for UFOs and witches

Sometimes when you do research, you stumble across strange factoids that you file away, not knowing when you'll need to pick it back up, but feeling like it's a valuable piece of info.

Last week, while I was making some notes in my zettlekasten, I stumbled across a note from a couple months ago, when I started reading Thieves in the Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions by Joshua Cutchin.^[1]

It was a sort of throwaway note about how in Hungarian culture, witches were considered more likely to roam around on Tuesdays and Fridays. This was such a interesting and random piece of information that I wrote it down, even though I wasn't sure what to do with it.

I still am not sure that I would say that I know exactly what to do with it, but it struck me as especially interesting because I'm currently reading Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel, and he goes into great detail about when people are most likely to see UFOs. I think it's fairly well known these days, in my corner of the paranormal community at least, that Wednesday nights are supposed to be the best time to see UFOs.

John Keel's Wednesday phenomenon

Keel's "Wednesday phenomenon" was the impetus behind the WUFO live streams that the Liminal Earth folks run, which was inspired by a mention of the Wednesday night phenomenon in The Mothman Prophecies (chapter 11 of the book is called "If This Is Wednesday, It Must Be a Venusian").

I was excited to see that Operation Trojan Horse also goes into detail about the phenomenon, as well (which was interesting, because it came out five years before The Mothman Prophecies).

Here's what Keel has to say about the best times to spot a UFO based on the data that he collated while preparing Operation Trojan Horse. This data is from the 1960s; I think he based it off of 10,000 news clippings and reports that he received in 1966:

As soon as I had organized the sightings by dates, the first significant pattern became apparent. This was that sightings tended to collect around specific days of the week. Wednesday had the greatest number of sightings, and these were usually reported between the hours of 8 to 11 P.M.

Day Percentage of Total Reports
Wednesday 20.5
Thursday 17.5
Friday 15.5
Saturday 15.0
Monday 13.5
Sunday 11.0
Tuesday 7.0

UFOs pay attention to state lines

Keel writes about how it's interesting that UFOs seem to have knowledge of our calendar, since they also apparently have some knowledge of our cartography, because UFOs pay attention to state lines in ways that make no sense except if they knew the arbitrary lines on our maps.

John Keel talks about how a lot of UFO flaps happen within the borders of a particular state. For example, he gives the example of a flap in Arkansas, where on August 16, 1966, hundreds of people reported seeing UFOs. However, there were no reports from Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, or Louisiana for that day, which suggests that the visitors were aware of the borders that are drawn on our maps.

That’s interesting, because it potentially dispels the idea that we are being visited by entities who know nothing about our world, or don’t know much about our world and want to learn more. Instead, the idea is that whoever is visiting knows our maps well enough to only appear in certain areas and to respect those boundaries, for whatever mysterious reason they might have.

Just a correlation

Tempering his Wednesday phenomenon theory, Keel says that it (of course) isn’t as if every Wednesday, UFOs fill the skies. But when there's a big flap, it’s just more likely for it to happen on a Wednesday night.

He also mentioned that it’s interesting that so many more UFOs are seen on Wednesday nights, because you would think that people would see them more on Saturday nights, since that’s when people are outside late doing things.

To bring this back to the Hungarian belief in witches roaming on Tuesdays and Fridays, it was particularly interesting to me to see that Tuesday, according to Keel's research, was the least common day to see a UFO. Friday was about in the middle of the pack.

Now, these aren't huge numbers. After all, it's only about three times more likely that a UFO might appear on a Wednesday than a Tuesday.

Do UFOs and witches get along?

But still, that makes me wonder: When UFOs roam, do the witches stay in, and vice versa? (And of course, to be clear, this is about folkloric, historical beliefs about witches—not witches in the more modern sense.)

It struck me as especially interesting, though, because of all of the similarities between fairies and UFOs (pointed out in Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee and still a popular idea today).

If fairies and UFOs may be part of the same phenomena, then are the faeliens like oil and witches like water? Do they repel each other? Do they not get along? What is it about a human endowed with magical powers that's different than a magical being like a fairy or an alien?

Closing thoughts

Or am I making too much hay about the folkloric beliefs of one specific culture in Europe compared to UFO sightings compiled by an American researcher? Is it unfair to compare the two?

I'm not sure, but this felt like an interesting enough connection to at least put out there.

I'll be keeping an eye out for other days of the week that are supposed to be more or less paranormal. (And I know there's a lot of connections I could probably make about the etymological origins and metaphysical properties of each day. Maybe I'll do that another time.)

But I'm very curious if anyone else has done this research, connecting different types of paranormal phenomena to different days? I'm also curious whether other cultures' folklore has days associated with witchy activity.

^[1] I'm still working through it. I'm a slow reader and am always reading many books at once.