The moon has been blamed for bar fights, mental health problems, increased fertility, and more. But new research casts doubt on the belief that the lunar cycle influences human psychology in an observably negative way.
A study published in the February issue of the Journal of the Null Hypothesis failed to find evidence that lunar phases or lunar distance significantly impacted the rate of search and rescue incidents in Canada.
For their study, researchers Andrew P. Billyard, Talia J. McCallum, and Irene A. Collin examined 16,315 search and rescue incidents that occurred between 1994 and 2004 in conjunction with lunar data from NASA. The search and rescue information was provided by the Canadian Coast Guard, which maintains its own comprehensive database known as SISAR.
“We used celestial mechanics and established ephemerides to carefully assign the specific lunar phase and distance to each event and conducted a statistical analysis on each of these two sets of measures,” the researchers explained. “We found no correlation with any particular lunar phase, which seems to corroborate many of the previous ‘lunacy’ studies wherein no correlation was found with the full moon.”
The researchers did find that more search and rescue incidents occurred when the moon was farthest away from Earth, but there is a rather simple explanation.
“The moon spends more time further from the Earth than near it,” they explained, and consequentially “there will be more random events occurring when the moon is farther away.”
The researchers also found that more maritime non-distress search and rescue incidents occurred during the full moon and 3rd quarter phases. This could be the result of an increased rate of boating due to the extra light at night. However, since the researchers didn’t have water traffic data, they couldn’t say one way or the other.
But they’re pretty confident that the moon is not to blame.
“Either the full moon exerts a negative psychological influence on human behavior but never in a way that generates incidents requiring search and rescue help, or the SAR data indicate that there is no such influence from the full moon,” the researchers wrote.
“Given the large span in time and geographical span of the comprehensive SISAR data examined here, it is hard not to side with the latter conclusion.”