In the spring of 2013, I walked into the office of Syracuse New Times editor-in-chief Larry Dietrich. We had a 20-minute conversation about UFOs, and at the end of the chat he invited me to show him five PowerPoint Pitch slides. Afterward, he agreed to try my New York Skies UFO blog-column for a month. At the end of the month, he told me I was doing great and to keep doing what I was doing.
Since that time, I have authored more than 250 articles focused on UFO sightings, history, sighting statistics, and of course, the topic of disclosure. The Syracuse New Times will be closing with a final issue on Wednesday, June 26, 2019.
Over the past two years, we in the UFO community have witnessed a slow dip of disclosure information. On Jan. 19, 2017, The New York Times published a story about the CIA declassifying millions of documents and posting them with the National Archives. Among those archives was a quantity of UFO-related materials.
On April 24, 2017, The New York Times published a story about two ladies in Syracuse who had done statistical research about UFO sightings and published an all-encompassing book on the topic. That book was UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001-2015. The authors were my wife Linda and I. The New York Times was impressed with the 121,000 UFO sightings analyzed in the book.
On Dec. 16, 2019, The New York Times and Politico broke the big story that the Pentagon had a secret program called AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), which was studying UFO/UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) that were buzzing the naval fleets of the world. After that, it seemed to be a constant drip of information.
Then in May 2019, it was like somebody turned on a faucet. Suddenly, leak after leak and revelation after revelation, the truth started coming out in stronger doses and with more credible sources.
The smart money says that 2019 is going to be the Year of Disclosure.
I think the bittersweet truth is that this newspaper is closing and I won’t be reporting the news of the impending story of the disclosure in the Syracuse New Times online edition and perhaps in its printed edition.
A thousand thanks to William C. Brod, publisher/CEO for supporting the New York Skies project.
I wish to thank my editors-in-chief Larry Dietrich and Bill DeLapp for supporting this journalist effort. As well my many thanks to my gracious digital editors over the six years of this blog/column: Ty Marshal, David Armelino and Kira Maddox.
What’s next for me?
Linda and I hope to publish an updated and more extensive edition of our UFO Sightings Desk Reference.
Interestingly, the two of us are going to be involved with the production of a new national television program about UFOs with a pilot episode set to be being filmed in Central New York near the end of July. Who knows: We might be coming to a television network that you well know in the not-too-distant future.
To the readers of New York Skies, wherever in the world you are, thanks for being fans!
For more than 70 years, our government has been tight-lipped about the nature of UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence among us.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, the great fear was that the revelation of the truth about off-world beings would instill fear upon the vast majority of our population. In those days top government officials only needed to point to Orson Welles’ 1938 The War of the Worlds radio broadcast that terrified a lot of people.
There was also great fear in government circles that the truth about other realities and extraterrestrial beings would impact the world’s religious belief systems. Likewise, after World War II, the masses were war-weary and certainly not ready for UFO disclosures during that era.
I think groups like the Robertson Panel (a scientific committee formed in 1952) and the Majestic 12 (MJ-12, an alleged secret committee of scientists, government officials and military leaders that was formed in 1947) probably had everybody’s best interest at heart. The idea was put forward wisely that our world’s culture needed time to acclimate.
So Hollywood did its part by immersing us in science fiction fantasy to teach us about the unimaginable possibilities, with television programs like Star Trek, Doctor Who, Lost in Space and Farscape and motion pictures including Star Wars, Independence Day and Transformers. Aliens in the 1940s and 1950s were portrayed as scary bug-eyed monsters, but these days aliens in entertainment lore are revered characters. Cartoon renderings of grey aliens decorate ordinary greeting cards.
Related: Blog | UFO Data: What it has and doesn’t have on what’s out there
UFO accounts have become family heirlooms and are now intergenerational stories handed down within families. For more than 50 years, our society has been carefully familiarized to the notion of extraterrestrial life. In 2012, a National Geographic poll indicated that 80% of our U.S. population thinks the government is not being honest with taxpayers about what they know.
In December 2017, an article in The New York Times revealed that the Pentagon was indeed studying UFOs in their Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. AATIP is a secret investigatory effort to study unidentified flying objects that have been pestering our Navy fleets and loitering around our other sites of advanced technology and research.
As a result of that article, the UFO research community has been seeing exciting things happening. There have been calls for congressional hearings on the topic both from inside and outside of Congress.
Mainstream magazines have been calling UFO researchers for information, perspective and opinions. A noted political magazine recently called me for updated UFO statistics information. That was a call I never dreamed I’d get!
The History Channel’s Project Blue Book dramatic series was a smash success and has been renewed for a second season. And almost every major network and streaming service has been scrambling to get their own UFO/ET-related program produced and delivered to a public hungry for more information. On Friday, May 31, 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., the History Channel will be releasing its new highly anticipated series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation; featuring Luis Elizondo, who ran the AATIP program for many years.
But a troubling issue still lingers in terms of a grand public disclosure by the Pentagon. The AATIP was supposedly shut down. Why?
In December 2017, KLAS-Channel 8 in Las Vegas reported that former U.S. Senator Harry Reed had told them one factor in the closing of AATIP was that some intelligence officials feared the findings would end up on the front page of a newspaper. He also said some officials had religious objections to the AATIP unit.
AATIP was established to gather scientific data about these unidentified crafts that are buzzing our naval fleets. That makes great sense! Not releasing all the information the defense establishment knows also makes good sense from a national security viewpoint.
What I object to concerns religious objections. I’ve made extensive inquiries to find out what biblical principle this religious hysteria is based. The notion seems to be that UFOs are being flown by Satan’s demons and that we should have no interaction with them!
Apparently, the God-fearing and demon-fearing senior intelligence community officials seem to feel that the New Testament passage Ephesians 2:2-4 applies to the extraterrestrials:
Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in.
(It was explained to me that “prince of the power of the air” in their minds implies Satan.)
Related: Blog |‘Fallen angels,’ ‘demonic entities’: Encountering extraterrestrial xenophobia
For the past 40,000 years, there has been significant evidence that some advanced species of beings have been visiting our world on a regular basis. Almost every religious tradition speaks of great beings from above, or the Sky Gods, as some have called them. There’s visible evidence that they have guided our development, our fledgling culture, laws, and essential technologies such as healing arts and agriculture.
If the extraterrestrials wanted to wipe out humanity, they could have stomped us out like bugs many millennia ago. There has been abundant evidence that they’ve been trying to protect us from our own nuclear weapons foolishness by shutting down missile silos in the 1960s, the 1970s and perhaps to this present day.
Some present-day medical researchers have stated that there is remarkable evidence that extraterrestrials have been performing healing procedures on some individuals. But they use techniques that are similar to present-day medical technology.
Likewise, it seems that most people who are abductees-experiancers are turning into very spiritual folks, no matter whether they were hardened bible thumpers or agnostic.
Rey Hernandez of the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation told me recently. “The ETs seem to be turning people into mystics.”
From the vantage point of our tiny blue planet, we can look into the night sky and view the magnificent creation that seems to go on forever. We as humans need to start considering extraterrestrials as neighbors in the boundless celestial expanse the Great Maker has given all beings everywhere.
Which brings to mind another good reason for full disclosure and for our species to reach out to ET, from Matthew 22:39:
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
So this guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, Costa! You’ve got no PROOF of real alien craft coming here.”
I told him I have 147,801 eyewitness accounts. “So what!” he replies. “Some percentage is bogus.”
“OK, let’s take 25% right off the top,” I proposed.
“Nope!” He says, “So much more is bogus.”
Related: Blog | UFO Data: What it has and doesn’t have on what’s out there
I thought about what he said and then offered, “Dr. Jacques Vallee says roughly 80% is noise. Cheryl and Linda Costa suggest 70% is noise. Is a 70% cut in the numbers good enough?” The young man indicated that it was satisfactory.
Then I explained that the remaining 30% totaled some 44,040 sighting reports. Spread over 18 years, that equals about 2,447 per year. The 2,447 spread over 12 months equals about 204 exotic non-terrestrial events per month across the United States.
Suppose we take that 204 per month and divide it equally across all 50 states? Our result suggests that each state in the union averages about 4.08 exotic non-terrestrial events per month. Statistically speaking, each state probably experiences about one exotic non-terrestrial event per week over the past 18 years. The young man stood there speechless and wide-eyed!
Which sighting reports of the 146,801 are those once-per-week exotic events? I certainly cannot tell you. That’s up to trained field investigators and their analysis to tell you, so it’s not my area of expertise.
But numbers tell a story, and these numbers are eye-opening and enlightening. Consider this essay your personal UFO/ET Disclosure Briefing! Welcome to A.D. (After Disclosure)!
I realize for some of you that numbers aren’t enough. I truly do understand. Some of you need a high-ranking government official to hold a press conference and tell you that it’s real. Others seem to need a Khausian Joka Class scout ship cracked up in the mall parking lot or a dead, bleeding alien on the pavement for your proof.
If that’s the case, I’m afraid that you’ll have to ask someone else. I only deal with statistical numbers.
Related: Blog | How many people actually report UFO sightings? A reality check
Recently I was a speaker at the weeklong immersion event UFOMegacon in Laughlin, Nevada, where I spoke with lots of attendees and other speakers. One of the things I noted in these conversations and was the UFO Comfort Factor.
For the past six years, I have shared UFO sighting stories in this blog. One element that we tracked was the receptivity to some of the subject matter.
If we posted a UFO sighting story from the late 19th or early 20th centuries, the account received an enormous response considering the many page views and comments. The response was also huge when it concerned a sighting story from the 1940s through the 1970s. But sighting stories from the 1980s to the present day were received with much less enthusiasm.
It seemed evident that people were more comfy with the notion that lots of UFO activity only really happened after World War II and during the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s. But sighting accounts spanning the last 50 years, especially the past 30 years, seemed too close for comfort for a lot of people.
Related: Talking about UFOs amid polite society, a reflection
During the banquet dinner festivities, we were treated to an onstage live event as American television investigative journalist George Knapp interviewed David O’Leary, executive producer for the Project Blue Book TV series.
O’Leary shared how the dramatic series was pitched and researched. He also explained how they had to walk a fine line between an excellent dramatic series story while trying to be faithful to the real history elements conveyed in each episode. He also pointed out that people seemed to be “comfortable with UFO stories from the 1940s and 1950s.”
Knapp asked O’Leary how the revelations of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program affected the production staff. O’Leary indicated that The New York Times’ Dec. 16, 2017, report of a modern-day government UFO tracking project had frankly rattled the crew. The production team’s response was something like, “What? This stuff is still going on?”
After the interview, I went backstage and gave O’Leary a copy of my UFO Sightings Desk Reference book. I explained that in the 15 years of the book (2001-2015) there were 121,000 reported sightings and that as of 2018 we had 147,000 reported sightings in the database. For a moment he seemed speechless and became wide-eyed!
Later during a photo-op with the convention speakers, O’Leary told me he was planning on putting the UFO Desk Reference book in the writers’ suite.
As I told David O’Leary, UFO sightings are as plentiful as ever. The off-worlders are here as they have been throughout human history.
One event speaker explained to me that there was a grand meeting in the early 1960s between world diplomats and perhaps a half-dozen off-world space-faring species. I’m told that many of the human diplomats couldn’t believe the reality that was right there in front of them, and have never got over the experience.
Perhaps when disclosure comes, we’ll all be a little bit better acclimated to the reality of an off-world extraterrestrial presence among us.
On the Road in 2019
As a UFO researcher and journalist, folks frequently ask me about when people observe UFOs. I usually smile and reply, “That’s not an easy answer.”
After Linda Miller Costa and I built the UFO sightings database which we used to create our 2017 book, UFO Sighting Desk Reference, we began a process of analyzing the raw data on a relatively superficial level. In 2017 we could tell you that UFO sighting reports were generally driven by three principal factors: population, temperate weather and leisure time.
Since 2018, we’ve had the opportunity to dig deeper into the data, which now totals 146,800 sighting reports. By utilizing some creative algorithms, we’ve been able to refine our understanding of the UFO sighting phenomena. And there are more factors: population, regional seasonal weather, daily/seasonal activity, and time of day.
Whenever I publish a listing of the top states for UFO sightings, I get a flood of social media responses that inform me that the reason California is No. 1 because of its population. In-depth examination of the data reveals that California is a unique situation. California crosses nine lines of latitude, which makes the state a complex model.
As an experiment I constructed a pseudo-California, using East Coast states, with the same lines of latitude and similar land mass. California’s population in 2018 was 39.56 million. By comparison, our pseudo-California represented 52 million people. Guess what?: The East Coast model had far less UFO sighting reports.
Related: Blog | Is ‘The 37th Parallel’ really the UFO Super Highway?
The kneejerk opinion that a state’s population is the sole driver for the volume of UFO sighting reports also doesn’t hold up. In the other top 10 states we find vast contrasts. Florida has 21.3 million people, and Texas has 28.7 million. However, Florida has 13 percent more UFO reports than Texas.
In another example, Washington has about half the population of Pennsylvania, but the states have nearly equal UFO sighting numbers. New York has more population than Washington and Pennsylvania combined. However, New York has UFO sighting volumes similar to both of these other states. So population isn’t the sole driver.
Linda discovered when she was laying out the 2017 book that monthly UFO sighting numbers were significantly different between northern states, middle states and the Deep South states. In the northern states, the peak months for UFO sighting reports were July, August and September. The remainder of the year seemed to have a sustained minimal baseline of UFO sighting reports, which has been attributed to day-in, day-out observers such as smokers and dog walkers.
Many MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) investigators frequently search the monthly CMS database for the keywords “smoke” or “dog.” Many investigators consider these people reliable observers because they are outside every day, precipitation or sunshine, year-round. These folks are familiar with their local environment and know when something is unusual.
As we move further south to the middle latitude states, coast to coast, we observe that the peak sightings in July, August and September start to flatten toward the sustained minimal baseline of UFO sighting reports.
As we move into the southern states that summertime peak pretty much disappears into a unique baseline for that state. For the most part, monthly UFO sighting numbers are statistically flat. The odd thing that some have noted is that for some southern states, summer numbers might be slightly depressed because of the excessively hot weather. but I must say it’s not a hard and fast rule.
We have observed variations of UFO sighting reports in some states that suggest seasonal influxes of people who might be sun seekers and snowbirds. States like Hawaii and Florida hint evidence of this type of activity. Likewise, monthly UFO reports in many New England states seem to reflect the annual fall leaf-watchers tourist season. This is a loose correlation, but our mantra is “Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation.”
We did note, however, that February seems to be the universally lowest month of UFO sightings. We haven’t a clue why beyond the conventional wisdom that February is a month of crappy weather for everybody in the United States. Remember, it’s not about the UFOs; it’s about the observers.
Related: Blog | UFO Data: What it has and doesn’t have on what’s out there
Day-of-the-Week enters into this issue. The late John Keel wrote about the trend as “The Wednesday Phenomenon.” After analyzing perhaps about 800 UFO sighting reports from 1966 to 1968, Keel made the determination that the “greatest number of UFO sightings are reported on Wednesday, and then they slowly taper off through the rest of the week.”
Fifty-five years ago the only people to apply statistical analysis to UFO sighting was the U.S. Air Force and John Keel. Unfortunately, Keel’s data was limited in size and perhaps regionally skewed.
Using 21st-century data with 146,801 UFO sighting reports, we’ve determined that Saturday is the peak sighting day for 39 states, or 76.4 percent of the country. But for 11 other states the peak UFO sighting day is not Saturday: two states are on Friday (3.9 percent), four states on Wednesday (7.8 percent), two states on Sunday (5.8 percent), one state on Thursday (1.9 percent) and two states on Tuesday (3.9 percent). And no states had Monday as its peak UFO sighting day.
It has been suggested that most of these states are from middle America or the Deep South, so the alternate UFO sighting day might be correlated with nights of Bible study. At first, we were amused at the notion, but there’s some science to suggest that this notion might hold water.
In the United States, 72.6 percent of UFO sighting reports generally occurs in the hours between 4 p.m. and midnight, with a peak between 9 to 10 p.m.; in essence, bedtime or that last smoke outside or walking the dog. The hours between midnight and 4 p.m. represent 27 percent of the typical day’s UFO sightings. We’ve noted that after about 5 a.m. the daily UFO sighting volume is relatively flat at about 12.5 percent of peak hours.
In most states the daily sighting curve is pretty much as stated, but there are some regional variations. For some states the evening sighting window is slightly narrower, between 6 p.m. and midnight, but the ratios between day and night shift barely 5 percent to 8 percent.
Related: Blog | Why do extraterrestrial visitors come to our small planet?
Before 2018, Las Vegas was the No. 1 city for UFO sightings in the United States. We did a spot time study of hours of the day for Las Vegas. Typically in the hours after midnight, there is steep falloff in UFO sightings to the low daytime numbers. But in Las Vegas, there is a sighting bump between 3 and 5 a.m., and there are other bumps at 8 a.m., 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Who knows what day-to-day activities drive these bumps.
Finally, when people see UFOs in Alaska, the peak months are in the dark winter months and in the months with measures of light and dark days. But in May, June and July, the UFO sighting reports are rock bottom. Those summer months are mostly all daylight all the time, or “white nights” as they are sometimes called.
Linda and I, “The Mothers of UFO Statistics,” hope you have enjoyed this exploration into the deeper numerical patterns of America’s UFO sighting data covering the first 18 years of the 21st century.
On Nov. 6, 2016, USA Today published an article by Jon Swartz titled “The 37th Parallel makes a strong case for UFOs.”
When Ben Mezrich’s book The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway was released, Linda Miller Costa and I were deep into crunching data related to our UFO Sightings Desk Reference book. Our first impression about Mezrich’s book: “It’s an interesting theory.”
At various UFO conferences where I’ve spoken over the past two years, the question keeps coming up from audience members: “What about this whole 37th Parallel super highway thing?”
I could only shrug my shoulders and offer guesswork based on my familiarity with the states and counties in various regions of the United States. My gut opinion has been that I didn’t think the claim would hold up to statistical science.
Over the past month, I’ve been preparing charts for my nationwide speaking engagements. While crunching the 2018 UFO sighting data for the United States; I went to the time-consuming step of adding latitude information for the thousands of reporting municipalities in our 2018 database.
The combined 2018 data from both UFO reporting services, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), totaled 6,929 of reported UFO sightings. For the latitude measurement, I removed 284 sightings records where municipal locations weren’t specified, or about 4 percent. This left 6,645 UFO sighting reports with measurable locations.
The result, as I long suspected, was that some 10 other latitude parallels in the United States have many more UFO sightings reported. Many of these other parallels have nearly double to triple the UFO sightings reports than does the 37th Parallel.
Of course, there are those who will want to point out, as the book did; that there were instances of cattle mutilations and paranormal activity along the 37th Parallel.
Yet if we google “cattle mutilation and specify a state,” we quickly find that just about every state has some degree of livestock mutilation activity. Interestingly, I couldn’t find any evidence of a cattle mutilation database; this surprised me, especially when you consider that so many folks are supposedly studying the phenomena.
I also did a similar exercise regarding paranormal issues. Simply browsing the subject matter “paranormal for any state or county,” you get a robust list of the most haunted places and scariest hiking trails.
I’m not trying to shoot holes in UFO sightings. After all, we’ve had 146,850 UFO sightings reported over the past 18 years. What I am shooting holes in is this much-hyped 37th Parallel notion. On the surface it sounds cool, but it doesn’t stand up to statistical analysis.
It’s high time that some of these UFO folk myths get tested by measurable data about where UFOs are really being reported and where they aren’t.
In the United States, there are about 3,242 counties. In 2018, only 1,033 counties reported UFO sightings; these counties represent 2,996 reporting municipalities of all sizes.
The top states are the usual suspects, while the top counties have changed a little bit but nothing earthshaking. The list of top municipalities for UFO sighting reports had some surprises that I didn’t expect, but I’ll save that story for another article.
When Linda Miller Costa and I published our UFO Sightings Desk Reference book in spring 2017, a curious thing happened. We began receiving email and social media commentary asking why we only measured the UFO sighting magnitudes from 2001 through 2015. Many communications asked “Why didn’t you go back 40 years?
For the record, prior to the early 1990s, most UFO sighting reports were filed with newspapers, radio stations, law enforcement and private sighting collection groups. The U.S. government also collected such data from 1952 to 1969 through Project Blue Book, a program that was terminated in 1969. For years the only way to report a UFO sighting was through phone calls, faxes and mailing news clippings to someone who collected such information.
Related: UFO columnist’s reference book presents hard data on controversial subject
In the 1980s, with the availability of early internet communication services such as CompuServe and America Online (AOL), knowing where to report became easier and online email did make things faster.
In 1969, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) began collecting sighting report information. As their T-shirt says: “Doing the Air Force’s job since 1969.” But for years all those reports sat in bankers’ boxes in a warehouse in Texas. Only in recent years has there been an effort to get all that sighting data into MUFON’s database.
In 1974, the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) was established. They put in service a 24-hour hotline number for people to report UFO activity that had occurred within the past week. In 2005, NUFORC expanded its operation to include one fax machine, one telephone, and an online web presence supported by a single webmaster. Their overall service has improved greatly since those early days.
These days there are also a small number of independent reporting sites.
With regard to UFO statistics; I get significant requests for data on a regular basis. People ask for many pieces of information, most of which just do not exist.
For example, when we started working on the UFO Sightings reference book, we painfully found out that while NUFORC does collect city and state UFO sighting reports, they do not collect county information. And while MUFON does collect county information, frequently the entry is wrong or the reporting individual doesn’t enter the county’s name.
We’re just about finished cleaning and crunching the 2018 UFO sighting data from both services. Of 6,929 total sighting reports filed with both services, a solid 4 percent of reports had no city entry.
The MUFON data was the most incomplete. Of 3,891 sighting reports, 264 reports or 6.8 percent lacked a city of the sighting. While sometimes these sightings are out in the middle of nowhere, give us a mile marker from the road, or the name of the country road. NUFORC was considerably better: Of the 3,038 sighting reports, 11 reports or .4 percent lacked a city of the sighting.
Another issue that has impacted research is the reported time of the sighting. NUFORC collects the date and time of the sighting and the report.
The MUFON system collects pretty much the same information, albeit with an odd quirk: If the reporting individual doesn’t enter a time of the sighting, the system defaults to midnight. So when we had requests for a time study of UFO sightings, we could only use NUFORC data because the MUFON default of midnight artificially skewed the results.
Many serious researchers have also asked us for latitude and longitude information and the gender and ages of observers for each one of the 146,805 sighting records in our database. Our answer was simple: “In your dreams.”
Too many researchers have this idea that there is a grand excess of data sitting in these UFO reports. The truth is many times the reporting person wants privacy, so we have no way to call them up and ask for more detail. All too often the sighting description is something like this: “I was out for a smoke and saw a glowing sphere heading west. WOW!”
On the rare occasion I get questions from the media, it usually defaults to “Where are the aliens from?” or “What do they look like?”
Related: Will the Hudson Valley catch another UFO wave?
But we have happily learned a great deal about the general UFO phenomena that we didn’t know before. Using epidemiology-style techniques, we and others have found unique UFO sighting patterns.
We know where they were and where they were not. In New York state in 2018, there were counties overflowing with sightings and other counties where there wasn’t a single report.
We know that 70 percent of the sightings occur between 5 and 11 p.m.; that the vast sighting pattern differences depend on the latitude you live in; and that while the heaviest sighting reports come from major metropolitan areas, some smaller counties and communities occasionally have rare cluster sighting events. We’ve developed forensic algorithms to identify these clusters. But that is a story for another day.
The lesson of this article: Just because you want a statistic, it doesn’t mean it’s out there.
Readers who follow the yearly UFO sighting trends here at New York Skies are probably aware that reports have been falling off rather steeply. From a high of 13,985 in 2014 to a measly 6,933 in 2018, that translates to a clear 50 percent decline in incremental amounts over the past four years.
Of course, we’ve been here before: 12 years ago in 2007, when UFO sighting reports were on the rise. Many of us were pleased by the leveling off but still climbing numbers; it was reassurance that UFO sighting activity was huge. Those of us who study these trends expected there would be a downturn as part of a classic six- or seven-year up-and-down cycle.
Related: Blog | Examining the decline: Another look at the data on UFO sighting reports
I thought the upward bump in sightings would eventually drop down and level off in the yearly range of 8,000 to 10,000 sighting reports per year. I was wrong.
So let’s look back at the 2018 sighting data. The combined National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) haven’t been in the 6,000-per-year sighting ranges in 12 years. Experts at both reporting agencies have noted the steep decline, while a cadre of independent researchers like myself have been wondering, “What the heck is up?”
Naturally, I’ve been buried in social media responses, ranging from “Space Force scared them away” to “We humans aren’t fun to watch any more.” Here is my favorite reason: “The alien’s grant funding ran out!”
But a very popular notion has also been proposed; “Perhaps we’re really close to official disclosure.” Who the heck knows at this point?
Everybody also wants to know what states are tops for UFO sighting reports. California, Florida and Texas lead the list, as usual, while Washington state and Arizona have inched back into the fourth and fifth slots, and New York state has slid to sixth place. The rest of the top 20 states have seen minor changes in position; notably, Nevada has moved from 26 to 20.
Regarding the top 20 cities for UFO sighting reports, Las Vegas is again in first place and Phoenix, Arizona, ranks second. What’s interesting is that Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Vancouver, Washington, have both moved into the top 20, suggesting perhaps some cluster sighting activity. Both these municipalities have always hovered just below the top 20 cities.
The huge surprise for me was the strong showing of Newington, Connecticut: It has never been in the top 50 before, and now it sits in the 11th slot.
However, just because the 2018 national UFO sighting report numbers are half what they used to be doesn’t mean there aren’t revelations and astonishments waiting to be found deep in that data. This researcher can’t wait to compile the national county level data over the next couple of months for even more secrets.
The Hudson Valley has a long history of strange paranormal occurrences. Most notable was the UFO wave of the 1980s, which began with sighting reports of boomerang-shaped UFOs in 1981. The wave of various UFO sightings peaked in 1983 and 1984 with many thousands of reports, followed by many books and documentaries about the subject.
Legendary author Whitley Strieber had his alien abduction experiences during the mid-1980s near Middletown, New York, which he wrote about in his well-known book Communion. The wave also led to the establishment of the Pine Bush UFO Festival in Crawford Township, which straddles Ulster and Orange counties.
Many sightings during the 1980s wave spanned the known inventory of UFO shape profiles, with boomerang and triangle shapes dominating the reportages. Yet it seems that the vast majority of eyewitnesses never formally reported what they saw to authorities. After all, services like the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) weren’t established online until nearly two decades later.
Recently, science and environment reporter-editor Linda Moulton Howe said that she was getting reports that suggested UFO sightings were on the increase in the Hudson Valley “and on the scale of the 1980s.” So I spent a Saturday morning crunching numbers for key sighting counties in the Hudson Valley.
The drawback for working with UFO statistics is that you’re always dependent on past reports and recorded information. So if people don’t report their sightings to a major UFO reporting service, folks like me can’t crunch the numbers.
The 2018 NUFORC reports for New York state were only 57 percent of 2017’s numbers and 36 percent of 2015’s numbers. New York seems to be part of a serious falloff in UFO sightings being reported nationally.
Likewise, the reported UFO sighting numbers in the southern Hudson Valley were significantly off the key counties of Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester.
In 2014 and 2015, the NUFORC sighting sum for those counties was approximately 35 sightings per year, or about 31 percent tracking with the state. The same counties in 2018 logged only 11 sightings to NUFORC.
In a recent phone conversation with Hudson Valley UFO and paranormal investigator colleague Dr. C.S. Matthews, she indicated that she has received 12 reports during the past couple of weeks, and that none of them were reported to a national UFO reporting service. The UFO shapes ranged from multiple triangles, a few boomerangs, and formations of fireballs and spheres.
So the big question: Is 2019 going to be a banner year for UFOs in the Hudson Valley? This reporter can’t wait to talk to local folks at the 2019 Pine Bush UFO Festival on May 18.[snt]
If you have a UFO sighting to report, visit the National UFO Reporting Center website, nuforc.org. NUFORC absolutely respects confidentiality.
In the spring of 2017 just prior to the release of our book UFO Sightings Desk Reference (co-written by Linda Miller Costa), I reached out to about 60 television, radio and press outlets in the principle cities of the top 10 states for UFO sightings as of 2015. I presented the editors and news directors with unique regional statistical information about UFO sightings history in their news markets. I was met with mostly silence.
Only two newspapers covered the book’s release: The articles in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The New York Times provided huge visibility. What I found startling was that several news outlets I had approached later carried the Post-Intelligencer or New York Times’ wire stories.
Early in 2018, I went through a similar pitch with press outlets in major cities in New York state. I had figured that with the huge media coverage about the Pentagon UFO research program in December 2017, perhaps they would be more receptive. I received either silence or was laughed off the phone in two instances.
Related: Blog | Talking about UFOs amid polite society, a reflection
Recently I chatted with several newspaper editors and asked their perspective. One editor told me his former bosses seriously feared the “ridicule factor” that they, as credible professionals, might face for publishing a story about the UFO topic.
Another editor simply said to me, “What brand of tinfoil do you wear, Cheryl?”
And another editor expressed the notion that “the existence of UFOs doesn’t seem proven. Even when it’s an intriguing story, where’s the proof?”
From my perspective, what does this editor want for proof? Does he expect to see an extraterrestrial spacecraft cracked up in a mall parking lot and the bodies of dead aliens littering the pavement?
I have presented some very serious evidence at prestigious UFO conferences that would make for one heck of a feature story. But you’ll never see a news director or senior editor at a major UFO conference to get perspective. In the minds of many journalists, the UFO topic is painted in conspiracy theories and less-than-credible individuals.
A few months ago a news director asked if I would support local television news teams from stations owned by his parent national media group. As I was one of the co-authors of the most notable book of national UFO statistics to date, I agreed to support them, without charge.
The idea was that more than 100 stations in the media group would all run a story about the huge quantities of UFO sightings in their area. The target was November Sweeps Week in order to get a bonanza of great ratings for their news units. After all, UFO stories do bring in the viewers, if teased in advance of the newscast. Likewise, when the video of the story is posted on the television station’s website, usually the page views are impressively high.
Related: Blog |Coming Distractions: Skeptics still persist that UFOs don’t exist
I made some adjustments to my UFO statistics database with an algorithm that would enable me to give any station, in any television market in the country, their specific UFO sighting statistics. What a gem of an opportunity to any news team.
Sadly, only three television stations participated: the home station of the news director who pitched me, plus two other stations that used the story from the first station, but weren’t interested in their own local story.
Would we be a step closer to official disclosure if 75 to 100 television stations in that one media group had done a Sweeps Week blitz about UFO sightings in each of their viewing areas? We’ll never know.
A senior editor recently remarked to me that, in his opinion, “The Fourth Estate has violated its trust with the American people by not properly covering and reporting on the UFO-ET topic matter.”
Why are extraterrestrials here? It’s the most common question I get asked during media interviews, at UFO conferences, and from just everyday people who know I write about the subject.
The answer isn’t easy because Earth humans don’t have a clue regarding the extraterrestrials’ interests. In our own culture we all have different motivations, be it fame, fortune, family life and other influences. We’re certainly not all the same in terms of our needs, desires and pursuits.
Cultural aspects play a big part in our interests and outlook. I’ve met people who have told me they’ve never seen Star Trek or Star Wars. I’ve also known others who have never read Harry Potter books or seen the movie adaptations. Just these few dissimilarities alone define a vast difference in western cultural perspective.
So when it comes to extraterrestrials, too many people try to interpret them from a specific human cultural viewpoint.
Why are extraterrestrials here? I tend to think humans are interesting to watch and study. I suppose that might be the extraterrestrial xenoanthropologist’s viewpoint.
If you are a follower of the Ancient Astronaut theory, there seems to be a huge preponderance of evidence to suggest that extraterrestrials have been visiting during human evolution. They seem to have been teaching our ancient forbearers’ arts and sciences, as well as nudging us as a species toward technologically being capable of leaving this planet in the far future.
Related: A First Contact Event: Examining the human response to alien life
Then there’s what I call the extraterrestrial protector and nanny caretaker aspect. On the morning of April 14, 1561, the citizenry of the German city of Nuremberg awoke to a massive aerial battle going on in the skies over the city. It happened again five years later in Basel, Switzerland, on July 27 and 28 and Aug. 7, 1566. Was this a clash between an off-world aggressor species and another caretaker species?
Of course, Nuremberg and Basel were long ago, so how about something a bit more modern? In July and August 1945 the United States detonated three nuclear weapons: one in the New Mexico desert, followed by nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly afterward, strange crafts in our world’s skies became a major topic of discussion.
In June and July 1947, there was a massive wave of “flying saucer-type” craft reported from 39 states via the wire services of the day. There was an exhaustive study in the 1960s by NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) author Ted Bloecher in his book Report on the UFO Wave of 1947.
Did our nanny off-world caretakers realize that our war was like primitive species playing with a box of nuclear matches? Perhaps this set off concerns with the nanny ET caretakers.
Evidence of this is well documented in Robert Hastings’ book UFOs and Nukes. Hastings interviewed more than 80 former Air Force missile officers; he heard accounts that during the Cold War unknown craft hovered over and disabled nuclear missiles and their control facilities at various times during the mid- to late-1960s. But that was 50 years ago, so what are our nanny ET caretakers concerned about these days?
In February 2018 I interviewed intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, the former director of the top-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). He told me that the “UFOs seem to be interested in our most advanced military technology.”
Another answer seems to come from two sources. First, author Thomas Conwell, who has a series of THEY Are Here books, has spent several years studying the cluster patterns of certain types of UFOs, He has noted a trend where the nanny ET caretakers seem acutely interested in our polluted areas, strip mining and waste areas.
Second, studies of abductees and experiancers seem to indicate that the nanny ET caretakers keep telling these humans a common message: “Take care of your planet!”
So why are extraterrestrials here? I think the best answer is to protect the Earth’s human species from aggressor off-world species who would subjugate us or destroy us. The other answer seems to be to protect and guide humans from destroying itself and this lovely blue planet we live on.
Police officer Lonnie Zamora was on patrol on Friday, April 24, 1964, at about 5:50 p.m. in the outskirts of his jurisdiction in Socorro County, New Mexico, when he witnessed the approach of an egg-shaped craft where he was driving. The craft was spewing great amounts of flames just before it landed in the desert. The UFO sighting and landing event was thoroughly investigated back in the day by the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, the FBI and various civilian groups. To this day, it’s a famous event in UFO history.
In recent years the case was reopened and carefully re-examined by Virginia’s chief Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) investigator Ben Moss and fellow investigator Tony Angiola. They mounted their project in 2014 after meeting Ray Stanford, the original National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) investigator at Socorro in 1964. Ben and Tony’s forthcoming book on their investigation is still a work in progress, and I suspect it’s going to be eye-opening.
Related: Diversity in UFO Statistics: The Truth is in the Shapes
What I find fascinating is the fact that egg-shaped UFOs are exceedingly rare! Between 2001 and 2017, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., logged at least one sighting of the egg-shaped UFOs. But the total for the period was a measly 1,263 reported sightings, barely 1 percent of the 139,876 national all-types sighting reports for the period.
With such small national numbers, is it any wonder that only 583 counties of 3,242 nationwide reported sightings, or about 18 percent of the nation’s total counties. In terms of egg UFOs sighting reports at the local level, only 906 towns and cities or 6 percent reported egg UFOs of the 15,295 municipalities listed in our data base. Nationally, there are 16,519 local municipalities or 92 percent are represented in our data base.
As can be seen by the chart, egg UFOs have had a minimum of sightings in 2003 and a maximum of sightings in 2017, with an average of about 74 yearly. With such tiny sighting report numbers, some readers may surmise, what’s the big deal? So please make note of the peak years and the increasing sighting volumes: 2004, 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2017.
Many social media readers have asked me to “show them a trend.” OK, note the black line suggesting more than a 300 percent increase of these egg UFO sightings in the past 17 years. It’s something to think about, especially when you consider that of 28 of the known UFO shape categories, 25 are in steep decline these past three years.
Related: The mystery of Changing UFOs: The prize is hiding in the details
That said, Saturn, Teardrop and Egg are on a steep increase.
Finally, with regard to New Mexico, where the Socorro event took place. In the 17 years of my study; New Mexico had 1,707 total UFO sighting reports representing all known UFO shapes. During that same period the state only had only 20 egg UFO reports. These egg UFO sightings were in the following counties: Bernalillo, 5; McKinley, 3; Dona Ana, 3; Santa Fe, 3; Chaves, 2; Luna, 1; Catron, 1; Rio Arriba, 1; San Juan, 1.
When I first started writing New York Skies in 2013, I made a point of attending a number of UFO conferences for research purposes. At that time, notable speakers and seasoned UFO aficionados told me that roughly one-third of Americans thought that UFOs existed. National Geographic’s 2012 polling data supports the deduction that one-third of American adults think UFOs are very real.
The other notion was that there were huge numbers of UFO sightings, but only 1 in 10 persons actually reported them. I accepted both those notions because I had nothing else to go on.
The 1-in-10 model was based on the fact that numerous national UFO speakers would ask their audiences to raise their hands if they had seen a UFO. The majority of the audience raised their hands. Then the speaker would ask how many actually reported the sighting. Most of those hands went down and then someone counted the number of hands still up. The general result was about 10 percent of the audience indicated that they had reported their UFO sighting.
Several years later, when my co-author and I were compiling the data for the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, I began to have my doubts about the 1-in-10 model. My first thought was that these UFO speakers were usually addressing an audience at a UFO conference; in my thinking, that’s preaching to the choir and leads to a biased sample.
So I decided to explore the numbers in several ways. The following hypothesis uses average numbers. Census tells us that the U.S. population is about 325 million. Strip away children and we have about 245 million adults, who are the ones most likely to report something.
For the past 10 years, from 2008 through 2017, the combined NUFORC and MUFON sighting data yielded an average of 10,840 reported sightings per year. If we divide 245,000,000 by 10,840 we get 22,601 — or 1 in 22,601 persons in the adult U.S. population reported a UFO sighting. That number still nagged at me as not being accurate, either. Perhaps we must take into account only that portion of the population who say they experienced a UFO sighting.
A 2017 Fox Pictures poll indicated that 16.74 percent of Americans say they’ve had a UFO sighting. Of course we have no time frame. For the sake of our discussion, let’s assume all their sightings were in the past 10 years. So 245,000,000 adults times .1674 equals 41,013,000; in essence, 41 million persons say they had a UFO sighting. So if we divide 41,013,000 people by 10,840 in average UFO sightings; we get 3,783. This suggests that 1 in 3,783 — or roughly 1 in 4,000 — persons actually reports what they see, on average.
Read: Examining the decline: Another look at the data on UFO sighting reports
Obviously, for this model I’ve made certain reasonable assumptions. I could way off or be dead on; but given the known data. I think that ¼,000 is much more realistic than 1 in 10 as is preached in UFO conference circles. Our national speakers need to stop using such a simplistic model to explain such a complex question as observed sightings vs. reported sightings.
The truth is, until some national polling service asks the right polling questions referencing UFO sightings within a specific time frame we really won’t know. Remember: Just because we want a statistic doesn’t mean that it exists. Data must be gathered and analysis must be made.
Perhaps after disclosure, maybe the Census department will make an effort to more accurately measure the UFO issue within the American population.
During a writer’s workshop held last summer, I was part of a nonfiction mentoring track. I was having evaluations of selected pieces from a memoir I’m writing. The judging was on the mark, and I was very appreciative of the critiques.
Also during the event, the attendees were asked to pass a talking stick around, with each author sharing the topics they had already published. Each person’s declaration was greeted with smiles and sometimes light applause from other authors of similar genres or those who were familiar with their work.
When I received the talking stick, I explained that I had published a collection of one-act plays and had been a contributing author to three volumes of a popular upstate mystery compilation. Then I mentioned that I had published a book about the statistics of UFO sightings.
The room broke into loud, boisterous laughter. Almost everyone thought the notion of writing a book about UFOs was somehow silly and laughable.
A workshop facilitator could see my pain, and then asked me to reveal how many copies had been sold. When I shared the sizable amount of books that had been sold, the gathering of authors quickly became quiet.
During some socializing after the event, I was inundated with juvenile remarks about alien probing, the silliness of the UFO topic matter, and challenged with numerous rude questions about my sanity or sobriety.
The crassest of all the sharp jabs and sarcastic questions concerned the topic of alien abductions. It seemed as if the people were feeding off each other. Was this a mob mentality I was witnessing?
A workshop facilitator expressed his regrets to me about the way I was treated. I did my best to be gracious. Then while driving home, it dawned on me that more than 50 percent of those questions regarded alien abduction and experiencers.
That’s when I realized that the UFO topic somehow caused a trigger reaction. At previous UFO conferences, it has been suggested that people who have suppressed experiencer or abduction events buried in their subconscious often act out when a related topic is mentioned.
Several notable UFO researchers have told me that the actual number of experiencers around the world is probably huge. One investigator further suggested that if a significantly large number of experiencers were to come out of the “closet” all at once, their personal truths would blow the top off the topic of UFOs.
It’s Halloween season, or as some call it, the Season of the Witch. As I walk through stores selling seasonal decorations and costumes with the stereotype of the wart-covered old crone witch, I cringe. Whenever Halloween comes around, the age-old question comes up: “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” as was asked by Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. My answer is easy: “I’m a good witch!”
What is witchcraft? It’s a form of spirituality and a religion with many sects, like any other faith.
Witchcraft, in one form or another, is one of the world’s oldest spiritualities. The craft has been with us since pre-biblical times in various forms. It was during medieval times when the Catholic Church, in its lust for conversions, power and control, labeled witches as devil-worshiping baby-stealers.
This political rhetoric fueled the great witch hunts of pre-Renaissance Europe. It wasn’t until the age of Enlightenment that the horrors of these burning times ceased. But because of the inquisition, the indigenous practice of witchcraft was driven underground.
Witchcraft traditions survived secretly in European families for hundreds of years, as the practices were handed down through the generations. The only people who knew this fact were cultural anthropologists like Margret Murray, who published her studies on the topic.
The problem was that although the witch burnings had more or less ended in the 18th century, anti-witchcraft laws remained on the books until the 1950s. In fact, those laws were creatively used by British intelligence during World War II to sequester a notable British medium in prison to prevent her from leaking the details of the planned D-Day invasion.
In 1951, England greatly relaxed its anti-witchcraft laws. British civil servant Gerald Gardner used this newfound freedom to publish many books on the craft. He established the first popular tradition of modern witchcraft, called the Gardnerian tradition, in 1951. Since that time many other traditions of witchcraft have blossomed. This goddess-based faith had a massive growth spurt during the women’s movement of the 1960s, when women began rejecting patriarchal-based faith. These days there are many thousands of witchcraft practitioners across the country, all practicing a humble life and affirming goddess-based spirituality.
So here’s the 2,000-pound dragon in the room: “Are there good and bad witches?” Of course. But the real answer comes down to: Are there good and bad people, with good and bad intentions?
The force of magick is neutral. It’s the intention of the practitioner that colors the working. So if a witch uses the magick to help heal someone, then most people would consider that a good thing.
But what if a witch did magick working in the years after Sept. 11, 2001, for the capture and demise of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda? Was that a good or bad thing? It’s all relative, subject to moral judgment and cultural perspective. To label witches as evil is simply accepting the medieval Catholic Church’s political propaganda and prejudice. And with recent headlines, these days the Catholic Church can’t claim the moral high ground, either.
I started out as a wicca tradition practitioner four decades ago and evolved as a practitioner. I practice a 21st-century tradition known as Mystic Witchcraft. Do I wiggle my nose and supper appears? No, I don’t. Nobody does!
So here are some easy lessons in magick craft:
So in this season of Halloween or the witch’s holiday of Samhain, I wish you all bright blessings.
One of the most perplexing of all the UFO shapes is the Changing UFOs category. For a few years now I’ve heard many UFO enthusiasts complain that the Changing category is useless since it really doesn’t define anything, or that the observers are flawed in some way. I must admit that the previous reports of Changing or Morphing UFOs left me with the impression that these were flawed observations.
Then I listened to the radio talk show Coast to Coast AM, as investigative journalist George Knapp was interviewing Jacques Vallee, one of the deans of Ufology. Vallée made a point about Changing UFOs that seem to morph in an effort to confound observers, their cameras and other scientific equipment that the researchers might be using.
A strong case has been made that many UFOs seem to be under intelligent control vs. some random natural phenomena like ball lighting. Another idea is that these unidentified craft might be “living ships with Artificial Intelligence (AI) Consciousness.” The idea is that these living ships detect the thoughts of people on the ground trying to observe them.
I decided to see what the statistical numbers indicate. First, let me preface two important points:
Here’s some intriguing data on the “Frequency of Sighting Profile.” For comparison, I selected the most common UFO shape reported: a simple “light” in the sky. The blue line sighting profile from 2001 to 2017 is roughly consistent with most other UFO shapes. There was a slight rise from 2001 through 2007. There is a spike in 2008, which was caused by a documentary about UFOs that was on the Discovery Channel. MUFON was featured in that Discovery show as a national UFO reporting service and thereafter the MUFON data loosely tracked year to year similar to NUFOC. In 2011 through 2015 there is a sharp rise and fall and in 2016 and 2017 have fallen off sharply.
Now look at the red line which represents the Changing UFOs. Note that that the Light shape has sharply changing and huge sighting numbers between the high hundreds through the tens of thousands. The Changing UFO has numbers more or less in the dirt by comparison; with an even string of reports totaling less than 2,100 sighting reports over 17 years.
If we examine the Changing UFO with a finer resolution we can see that it also has a rolling cyclic nature; with an average of about 123 sighting reports per year.
I was surprised where these Changing UFO reports were coming from. California, as you might expect, had 340. Yet it was the next four states that were telling, with a range from 130 to 103: Florida, 130; Washington, 104; Arizona, 103; and Texas, 103. I expected to see a steeper drop in those sighting numbers. Thereafter, the sighting numbers for the Changing UFO dropped very gradually across the various states, which is a very atypical sighting pattern.
I took a peek at U.S. counties for this Changing UFO. Since the overall national sighting numbers for the Changing UFO were barely 2,100, I didn’t expect every county in the country to have a sighting. Using a Forensic Cluster process that I’ve developed I discovered the following with regard to Changing UFO reports.
Only 594 counties of more than 3,000 counties nationally, reported a Changing UFO from 2001 to 2017. Only 319 counties reported more than two. Only 31 counties reported more than 10. Interestingly, only four counties reported more than 25. Clark County, Nevada, reported 26. Orange County, California, reported 41. Maricopa County, Arizona, reported 60 and Los Angeles County, California, reported 79.
I would never have dreamed that from such tiny sighting numbers that such an interesting mystery would reveal itself.
I have previously reported that UFO sighting reports have been on a steep decline for three years. 2018 is continuing this steep dropoff.
Please note that I said “UFO sighting reports” and not sightings. I’ve been getting considerable mail that sightings are still up in North America and in Europe. It just seems that folks aren’t showing an enthusiasm for reporting their recent sightings. One UFO researcher commented, “We see so many, who has time to report them all!”
After my last report about the decline, I observed two things. One was a volume of mansplaining why this decline is occurring. The other was a host of copycat articles being posted, some with the most absurd numbers.
The numbers in this article are a snapshot as of Sept. 20. Keep in mind that people do report sightings years after the event. So a sample I take today might be off by 50 or 100 for a particular year, if I sample three to six months from now.
I’ve come to understand that the UFO sighting report databases are, in a sense, living documents and seem to have a creeping growth. If we were studying farm reports or the census from a particular year, the numbers, for the most part, are solid with a small margin of error. So please keep this in mind when I do a year-end report because the numbers may be slightly different.
Let’s look at an eight-year snapshot of National UFO Reporting Center data. Note that 2017 is displaying a seven-year low for UFO sighting reports. The decline from 2014 to 2015 was 1,788 reports. The decrease from 2015 to 2016 was 1,231 reports. Interestingly, the shrinkage from 2016 to 2017 was only 680 reports. Ordinarily, one might assume that the UFO sighting report deterioration might be leveling out to an average baseline.
Yet if we examine the first eight months of the past six years, including 2018, except for a spike in 2014, we generally see a steady downward trend. Where it will all settle out is anybody’s guess.
But let’s consider some of the possible reasons that have been offered by many readers. Some blamed the announcement of Space Force; sorry, the declines in reports started four years before the announcement.
Others blamed too many people with their heads down and focused on their pads and phones. Maybe.
Quite a few people suggested that the ETs may have run out of interest (or perhaps galactic grant funding) to continue their studies here on Earth. Still others expressed boredom with reporting UFO sightings, especially since Disclosure seems to be stalled. The mood was “Why bother?”
Some suggested that there’s a general apathy in the country given our chaotic political situation. Finally, there are many who wonder if the falloff in UFO sighting reports is the calm before a storm. Who knows?
Michigan UFO Con-Tact. Sept 20-21
CNY UFO Club. Sept. 29, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Jamesville-Dewitt Community Library, 5110 Jamesville Road, Jamesville, New York
Greater New England UFO Conference. Oct. 4-5
UFO MEGA CON. March 24-30. Laughlin, Nevada
Ozark Mountains UFO Conference. April 12-14. Eureka Springs, Arkansas
Pine Bush UFO Festival. May 18. Pine Bush, New York
It’s funny how publishing UFO sightings numbers scares the hell out of some people. Many have written to me, “They (UFOs) can’t all be real!” They reassure themselves with the notion that UFO reports are largely misidentifications, and the product of kooks and crackpots.
A number of other people who have purchased my book UFO Sightings Desk Reference seem to go out of their way to twist my words and suggest that I think only 7 percent of UFO sightings are real. Then there are the debunkers who fail to accept good research and data. These are the folks who have their own opinion, and, by gosh, they’re right!
An important step in the scientific process is gathering data for analysis. My co-author Linda Miller Costa had an opinion she arrived at after editing and assembling the first draft of the publication. In 2018 she said, “The Truth is in the Shapes!” More recently she stated, “The diversity of exotic UFO shapes suggests a wide variety of species and builders.”
Let’s take a look at a recent analysis I did that is ruthless in its removal of questionable UFO shapes. For the purpose of this study I have eliminated any UFO shapes that either could not be clearly described or shapes that might easily be viewed as man-made. I caution my readers to not be emotionally attached to a favorite shape I’ve excluded. I eliminated all undefined shapes as well as triangles; yes, I know they are as big as a football field, and they could be an experimental TR-3B, I’m told regularly. Boomerang and Chevrons must also be removed because they reasonably could be some advanced bomber or fighter aircraft. I took out cigar, cylinder, bullet and bullet/missile shapes because most reasonable people would agree that these shapes might be an airliner seen from the side. I think you get my point.
Remember the objective: What we wanted was only exotic shapes, UFO shapes that have high probability for not being man-made. The numbers in the chart reflect the combined NUFORC (National UFO Reporting Center) and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) sighting reports from 2001 through 2017. The total is 139,876 and the exotic shapes’ sum is 45,894, a whopping 32.8 percent of 17 years’ worth of UFO sighting reports. Spread evenly over 17 years, that would be about 2,699 per year and approximately 224 per month. In my estimation, those kinds of numbers are still something significant to talk and write about. I’m not saying that the other 67.2 percent of the UFO sightings are noise, either, only that 32.8 percent of UFO sightings stick out as not made on earth.
An eyewitness account can get you convicted in any court in this country, in the absence of forensic evidence to the contrary. Here we have 45,894 eyewitness accounts of something bizarre flying in the sky. These eyewitness reports represent a body of evidence; a preponderance of this evidence should give a skeptic pause
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines xenophobia as fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign. Since xenophobia is such a big word, let’s break it down to a word we’re all familiar with: prejudice.
It often starts in grade school. Parents tell a child that a classmate lives on the wrong side of the railroad tracks or the wrong side of town. Sometimes parents tell their kids that they shouldn’t hang out with that creed or nationality, or the ever-present taboo of racial skin color.
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II took on the subject of prejudice in the 1940s in their musical South Pacific, with the classic song, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
American politics has also seen a similar stirring-up of a unique political base with anti-immigrant rhetoric. This is paradoxical because we are a nation of immigrants, except for our Native American neighbors.
What does this have to do with UFOs, the extraterrestrial presence and disclosure? Plenty!
Over the past year, and with increasing intensity, I’ve observed a great deal of anti-extraterrestrial rhetoric in social media, most of it polarized within a theological context. This rhetoric takes the position that extraterrestrials are “fallen angels and demonic entities.” Many of these doomsayer advocates naturally suggest that the ever-popular Satan is in charge of the whole Ufology movement.
At the 2018 MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Symposium in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, I was confronted by an “ETs are demonic entities” advocate. Surprisingly, I had just exited a presentation about Ufology and religion.
A well-dressed gentleman had in his hand a large envelope—with my name on the printed label in 50-point font. The man introduced himself as a good Catholic of some sect I had never heard of. The man genuinely wanted me to know that Revelations predicts that the coming force of space aliens were fallen angels, demonic entities and part of a force of 666 demons. He professed to me that Ufology and aliens were a huge demonic deception to make us doubt God.
I politely accepted his envelope and informed him that I was an Orthodox Tibetan Buddhist. I further told him that I did not share his view that sentient beings from celestial realms were any more good or evil than the rest of us. Then I excused myself and proceeded to another meeting.
So we’ve got people running around in misplaced morbid fear, demeaning off-world species before we’ve even met them, based solely on a highly misinterpreted chapter of the Bible.
Combat soldiers used to be indoctrinated with negative terminology about the enemy in order to dehumanize them, which supposedly made the enemy easier to kill if they were something less than human.
It’s disheartening that some people of a supposed loving faith are out spreading their twisted theological rhetoric in an effort to demean off-world visitors with an ultimate objective of making them easier to kill.
In June 2017, a contingent of congressional representatives recommended dividing the Air Force’s Space Force mission into two separate undertakings: to focus on terrestrial aviation-related matters and to concentrate operational matters in the realm of space.
When President Trump announced that he was directing the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the armed services, the proposal was met with skepticism, lots of rolling eyes and plenty of comedic jabs by late-night TV comedians.
In the UFO community, there were many who viewed the Space Force call as another step toward UFO and ET disclosure. The doomsters saw the effort as an ominous hint that some nefarious alien invasion force might be on its way here. But let’s take a deep breath and examine the concept of Space Force with a practical view.
During the 1970s, it was just the Americans and Russians who were doing things in space. But in the last 50 years, dozens of countries have been engaged in space research and have been involved with putting commercial and military assets into Earth’s orbit. The Chinese put a rover on the moon in early 2016, for example.
So there are lots of players in the space game. And there are plenty of commercial businesses in the aerospace marketplace ready to sell launch technology to those who can pay for it.
The late-night comics might have you believe that Space Force will be Marines in spacesuits flying around with laser rifles, which sounds like something out of a pulp comic book. But this is the 21st century, so wake up: Space Force will be handled with robotic devices.
Consider, for a moment, a rogue country like North Korea or a well-funded terrorist with access to launch technology. Imagine if they decided to destroy key American communications satellites using missiles launched with low-yield nuclear weapons.
Cable television feeds and satellite-supported internet pipelines would be gone, and our domestic and international telephone capacity cut to a trickle. Suddenly our country would be plunged back into the 1960s, while our commercial economy would grind to a standstill. Think of it as another Pearl Harbor.
It might sound too fantastic for some people, yet the threat is very real and our enemies are out there. It’s easy to make a laundry list of folks who don’t like the United States. Many of these despicable actors are unable to create that kind of technology, but they would certainly buy it if they had the financial resources.
Some have suggested that “this Space Force stuff is NASA’s job.” Yet NASA is strictly a research operation. Its mission statement states, “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”
During the presidency of George Washington, American commercial shipping was being seriously disrupted by four North African Muslim states in the southern Mediterranean. Congress passed the Naval Act of 1794, which established a permanent naval force to protect American commercial interests on the high seas around the world.
The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.
In those colonial times, our commercial interests were driven by our country being a seafaring nation. But what a lot of people do not consider now is that humans have become a space-faring species. We have substantial commercial assets in Earth’s orbit that our economy and our daily lives depend upon.
So is Space Force a dumb idea? Not in the least! Perhaps a good mission statement for Space Force would be this: to maintain, train, equip combat-ready, operational space-borne resources capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining free access to the realm of space.