A recent analysis by
Scientific Reports details that the United States of America has substantially taken over as the league leader of UAP and UFO reports from all over the world. By sighting the
National UFO Reporting Center with its data base of over 170,000 + UFO Sighting Reports for over forty nine years.
Notice that the included maps within the article shows all the significant cities of dysfunction by the provocateurs of the
DNC.
Also
California tops the list for UFO sightings since 2022
TOP 10 UFO SIGHTINGS OF 2023
Dec 16, 2023
Sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) have been reported throughout history. Given the potential security and safety risks they pose, as well as scientific curiosity, there is increasing interest in understanding what these sighting reports...
www.nature.com
Published: 14 December 2023
Abstract
Sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) have been reported throughout history. Given the potential security and safety risks they pose, as well as scientific curiosity, there is increasing interest in understanding what these sighting reports represent. We approach this problem as an important one of the human experience and that can be examined through a geographical lens: what local factors may increase or decrease the number of sighting reports? Using a Bayesian regression method, we test hypotheses based on variables representing sky view potential (light pollution, tree canopy, and cloud cover) and the potential for objects to be present in the sky (aircraft and military installations). The dependent variable includes over 98,000 publicly reported UAP sightings in the conterminous United States during the 20-year period from 2001 to 2020. The model results find credible correlations between variables that suggest people see more “phenomena” when they have more opportunity to. This analysis is one of few investigations of UAP sighting reports at a national scale providing context to help examine individual reports. Given that these objects are labeled unidentifiable in the personal sense, there are many natural and/or human based explanations worth exploring.
Introduction
There has been growing interest by the United States government in Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Given the new focus on this potential security threat and the operational safety risks posed by these objects, the UAP Task Force was initiated on August 4, 2020
1. This task force had a limited scope, authority, and resources to address the issue and was temporary in its duration. The Deputy Secretary of Defense gave direction to transition the UAP task force into the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) on November 23, 2021
2. Congressional legislation, however, overtook that direction and today’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established on July 20, 2022, as the single authoritative UAP Office with the DoD and tasked with leading and synchronizing a whole of government approach to the issue
3. The mission of the AARO is to: “synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and, as necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security. This includes anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects”
3. Supporting these efforts, this research team explores spatial patterns of publicly reported UAP sightings (analogous to UFO sighting reports in this research) from an open-source online dataset.
In the public 2021 Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report, research on UAP sighting reports between 2004 and 2021 leaves most of its 144 government-based reports unexplained, due to limited data. Only one sighting report was explained with high confidence and was found to be a deflating balloon
4. The follow-up 2022 DNI report indicates the number of governmental sourced reports rose to 510, with nearly half still unexplained. The DNI states that there is no single explanation for these UAP, with potential sources including clutter, commercial drones, national security threats, and other unexplained phenomena. Other early incarnations of government-based UFO research efforts (e.g., Project Sign in 1948, Project Grudge, then the most popular, Project Blue Book led by Dr. Allen Hynek in the 1950-1960s
5, and the following Condon Report funded by the U.S. Air Force and conducted at the University of Colorado) ended with about 5% of unidentified sightings
6. UAP research is often inconclusive, and our ability to explain these events seems to have become less easily resolved as our sensor technology has advanced and our air activity has increased.
Here, we ask three foundational research questions: (1) What is the viability of publicly offered data on UAP sighting reports? (2) Are there credible spatial patterns to these reports? and (3) If so, can these patterns be explained by physical and/or built environment factors? To answer these questions, we use UFO sighting report data from the National UFO Research Center
7. We model the total count of these reports over a 20-year period from 2001 to 2020, using environmental explanatory variables—light pollution, cloud cover, tree canopy cover, airports, and military installations. This model is intended to represent both the available view of the sky as well as the potential for airborne objects. We hypothesize that (a) factors limiting visibility will be negatively correlated with sighting reports, and (b) factors related to air traffic will be positively correlated, or simply that people will report sightings of UAPs where they have the most opportunity to see them. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to understand how spatial variation in reports is linked to environmental variables. This analysis represents one of few attempts to examine this phenomenon at the national level and offers a starting point for a similar approach to be applied to U.S. Government data on UAP activity to help identify possible sources.
History of UAP sighting research and Environmental Explanations
Materials and methods
Explanatory variables
Results
The results from a hotspot analysis (Fig. 3) show a strong trend with many more population standardized sightings (i.e., county reports per 10,000 people) reported in the Western U.S. and in the very Northeast, along with some isolated areas including the tri-state border region of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, surrounding Evansville, Indiana, and the area surrounding Washington D.C. Clusters of low sighting reports are found through the central plains and in the southeast.
Discussion and conclusions
We recall here our initial research questions: (1) What is the viability of publicly offered data on reported UAP sightings? (2) Are there credible spatial patterns to these sighting reports? and (3) If so, can these patterns be explained by physical and/or built environment factors? For question 1, the publicly available data from NUFORC online are useable data; however, they require substantial processing for spatial analysis. These data could be used for finer resolution (city level) research, rather than county level used here.
The main concern of these findings is, are these volunteered data valid? The short answer is that it is likely that some are and some aren’t. However, we suggest that if the data were entirely invalid (assuming homogeneous psychological and sociological distribution of submissions), the sighting reports would exhibit little to no spatial pattern and are unlikely to follow a pattern that can be explained by first-order visibility indicators. Another data question is, are there any temporal and/or geographic errors? Likely, because some entries into this dataset are reported retrospectively, not always in the first person. We attempt to limit this by using data from 2001-present, but that does not completely resolve the issue. Geographic errors were limited by upscaling the data to the county level. A final issue we consider is that these reported cases require knowledge of NUFORC and access to communications. The authors found the website and organization while searching for data. Some may find the website while searching for an organization to report to. Still, there is likely bias in who has knowledge of this resource since it is not widely advertised. In all, we posit that this dataset has value in understanding these sighting reports; that either this indicates people are seeing things they can’t explain (or that they don’t want to explain with more logical explanations), or this indicates where people are thinking more about UAPs. Both are important and have physical/social implications.
For questions 2 and 3, there are credibly identifiable patterns to these sighting reports, and these patterns relate to environmental characteristics. The explanatory variables are intended to represent both (1) the opportunity to see something and (2) the potential for something human constructed to be in the field of view. We have not considered satellites or drones, which are likely important factors, nor the fact that airplanes (and helicopters, etc.) do not only fly around their takeoff and landing locations. However, around the locations we use, aircraft are likely to be closer to the ground, more visible, and more frequently present. Using the military installation data, we hope to capture, not only aircraft, but also nighttime training activities that might use, for example, tracer rounds, drones, and other forms of illumination in relatively desolate areas.
If we assume that most sighting reports here are representative of true sightings that people determined to be unidentified, then our results have interesting implications. Our model shows that the majority of standardized sighting reports are in the western parts of the U.S. and in the very northeast. We hypothesize that the higher rate of western sightings could be due to (1) the physical geography of the West (i.e., the lack of vegetative canopies and wide-open spaces), (2) cultures of outdoor activity (e.g., recreation and other activities enjoyed in more temperate weather throughout the year), and (3) cultures of paranormal ideation (e.g., impacts of Area 51, Roswell, New Mexico). There are also some isolated counties throughout the rest of the country that warrant further investigation to identify what properties may generate relatively more UAP attention. In these results, however, cloud cover is not credible, possibly related to higher rates of sighting reports in both the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest (relatively clouded) and desert regions of the Mountain West (relatively clear). We initially expected cloud cover to be credibly related to reports, as clouds can cause light to scatter and by doing so, obscure reflective or illuminated things that are moving within or above them and create patterns that some might consider unexplained. However, that was not the case. All other variable relationships are as expected and align with our initial hypotheses, that people report more sightings where they have a better view of the sky. The question now is why? This research begins to answer this question by considering how much human made airborne activity is occurring. The highly credible relationships with air traffic and with military activity suggest that people are seeing, but not recognizing, things that are human made. As an example, a hot air balloon seen from a far enough distance can look unexplainable, especially if it is seen by someone who has not seen one before. Drones, which we did not test specifically for, can seem to fly erratically in areas where people aren’t used to seeing things moving in the sky. It is unlikely that events, such as ball lightning, seismic based lights, insects, or other natural occurrences are responsible for more than a small portion of these reports, as they are rare events themselves.
While these results provide an initial assessment of factors linked to the reported sightings of unidentified or unexplained phenomenon, they also generate further questions. We find credible relationships and spatial patterns that require further investigation. Why, for example, are the rates of sighting reports low in California, when they are high in many of the surrounding states? Why do the rates of reports fluctuate across time? Our future research will include temporal considerations (e.g., variation over time) to hopefully address some of these questions. We further note that our covariates represent average conditions, and while these clearly explain much of the first-order pattern in sighting reports, additional factors may be identified by exploring the remaining pattern in the spatial errors (SI Fig.
1) or by considering changes over time or individual events.
Some patterns in the reported sightings might be explained by sociocultural factors. For example, are there spikes of reports after Hollywood attention is given to movies or TV shows on aliens? Are some cultures more likely to see UAPs, because of their belief systems? Have some U.S. regions/places been given more attention to historical UAP sighting reports? There is no question that geography and “place” influence people’s belief systems and behavior. In some places, the expectation of what you are supposed to see may influence what you actually see. In a process termed
motivated perception, people may bias their perceptions to arrive at expected conclusions that meet their goals or offer rewards
48,
49. If your goal is to see a UAP, you may very well see one given the opportunity. However, it is important to point out that there are many sighting experiences which people are reluctant to report. There are many who fear stigmatization and attacks from the public, and others who previously had no belief in UAPs, but had an experience that convinced them of the opposite.
We approach this problem with caution, because of both the complexity of the topic and the sensitivity of available data. The U.S. Government position is that “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security”
4. For national security issues, uncertainties and unknowns are never good, and it is the job of intelligence efforts to minimize the unknowns. Regardless of what people are seeing, and whether they are military pilots, civilian pilots, or general bystanders, there is a potential threat. That threat grows as our uncertainties grow. Although based on a noisy, crowd sourced dataset, our results can provide a context for how sighting reports of unidentified objects vary in space, the factors linked to these, and may offer a step towards understanding these threats.
This problem is relevant on many fronts, including anthropological and sociological (i.e., understanding the human/social experience). The stigma given to this area of research, if it is explored scientifically, should be over. We make no hypotheses about what people are seeing, only that they will see more when and where they have opportunity to. The question remains, however, as to what these sighting reports are of. Further examination of regions where the model performs poorly, temporal trends, and reported details of each reported sighting may help further elucidate this.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available online from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) at
National UFO Reporting Center; however, these data are not geocoded. Geocoded data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.
References (Within)
Comments
The rate of UAP distribution for each state has been done many times over. The rate of distribution for each county (there are 3143 of them) seems to have been calculated for the first time. However, the distribution of UAP closely follows the distribution of intraplate seismic activity and could be fairly well estimated from the distribution of intraplate seismicity. The five UAP in February 2023 ( 4 in North America and 1 in China) appeared near the centers of intraplate seismicity. A number of unexplained or poorly explained airplane crashes/explosions appear to be also related to seismicity. It looks like the vast majority of people writing about UAP are either believers in ETs or believers that UAP are an optical illusion.
December 3, 1994 Frank, Laura, V__ Q: Hello. A: Hello. Q: (L) Who do we have with us tonight? A: Wasanna. Q: (L) V__ had an incident at school where a small pile of powder appeared on her books after she had put her head down on them. What was this? A: Materialized thoughts passed...
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