Researchers from the University of Utah and the U.S. Department of Defense examined approximately 98,000 UFO sighting reports from the National UFO Reporting Center from 2001 to 2020 to determine whether local influencing factors increase or decrease the number of sighting reports. Using statistical methods, they calculated whether there was a connection between reported sightings, tree cover, light pollution, frequent cloud cover and the geographical proximity to airports and military installations. The researchers published their results in the journal “Scientific Reports”.
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In their study, Richard Medina and his colleagues assume that there are natural explanations for observing strange celestial phenomena and “that there are more sightings when there are more opportunities for them.” They therefore calculated whether there were positive correlations between factors such as proximity to airports or particularly good observation conditions (lots of open terrain).
“What do people actually see?”
“The idea is that if you have the chance to see something, you are more likely to see unexplained phenomena in the sky,” the authors write. “There is more technology in the sky than ever before, so the question arises: What do people actually see?”
In fact, environmental factors and proximity to air traffic and military installations were found to significantly influence sighting reports. According to the authors, the fact that most observations of unidentified anomalous phenomena occur in the American West has nothing to do with increased mysterious activity, but rather with open land, dark skies and military bases. The only influencing factor that could not be clearly assigned was frequent cloud cover: the researchers’ initial thesis was that the associated increased scattered light could also lead to more luminous sky phenomena. According to the statistical evaluations, this factor does not seem to influence the frequency of sightings.
The authors note that the sightings reported by the National UFO Research Center are self-reported. So there would be no real way to actually check these reports. However, the fact that the reports show a spatial pattern suggests that they are really based on some kind of observations. In further studies, the researchers now want to clarify whether they can also identify temporal progressions – more observations after major media reports about UFOs – or the influence of socio-cultural factors such as religions or the popularity of television series such as “The X-Files” in the data.
More open questions than answered
Reports of UFO sightings always cause excitement, especially in the USA. Most recently, the US Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) submitted a report in February on the sightings, now known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Accordingly, “no verifiable evidence was found to support the claim that the US government and private companies have access to or are replicating extraterrestrial technology.”
However, the US government regularly leaves more unanswered questions with such publications than it initially answers. For example, the US Air Force only dispelled decades of speculation about a crashed UFO in Roswell in 1994 when it admitted in a report that a top-secret program using high-altitude balloons to monitor Russian nuclear weapons tests had taken place at the base in the 1940s. Observers also note that in the report now presented, the military refers to secret research projects without naming exactly what is being researched.
The journalist Sarah Scoles summed up this approach and its consequences in her book “They are already here”: “The government has launched investigations whose results were predetermined, it has drawn conclusions that do not take all the evidence into account. It has interested parties spied on and she kept her work secret and downplayed her own interests,” she wrote. “In doing so, it has bred a culture of conspiracy theories in ufology. An awareness that the government does not want certain facts to become known.”
(wst)
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