UFO sightings around the USA, mapped in detail. Guess which state had the most?

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It’s really not clear to me which state had the most. California? New Jersey? The Chicago area seems to have a cluster, but it’s hard to tell how many besides a couple events where 70+ people saw something. The big circles just indicate reports with multiple witnesses, and the spots stack, so…

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It seems Washington had the most UFO sightings per capita. Would have never guessed that from the map, but their website has another one that shows state rankings.

One explanation I’ve heard for the bulk of Chicago-area ones is that the Chinatown neighborhood has a lot of festivals that end up sending paper lanterns into the sky.

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It’s great to be able to read the eyewitness accounts. It’s just too bad that the one-off incidents don’t seem to have associated eyewitness accounts. I wonder why? Oh, right: government conspiracy!

And yet New Mexico has fewer UFO sightings per capita than many other places. So much for the whole Area 51 thing. Or maybe they’re just better at repressing reports of sightings, what with all the government agents there.

My first thought was that the number of sightings correlate to population density, so this chart is not so interesting. I gradually figured out that blip size shows corroborated UFO sightings. I guess that still correlates to population density, but in a much more interesting way.

I bet the chevron-shaped UFO sighted in Phoenix in 1997 was related to the Aurora spy plane project. I wonder if there are any secret government-operated air bases nearby? Maybe in Nevada?

The state rankings map is interesting. Aliens appear to have intelligence and discernment as they evidently avoid the deep South and Texas.

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Hm, I clicked one listed right in my neighborhood, and it opened up a report with Ohio on top and a sighting report from Erlanger, Ky, which is a half-hour away and, I might point out, not Ohio at all. This makes me curious about the methodology.

The per-capita map is interesting. I would have expected sightings to be fairly even per-capita except mabe for more sightings in sparsely populated states, especially in the West (especially especially Western states with experimental aircraft testing facilities), but that’s not really the case. Top states: Washington and Vermont. Western states and New England? What do those states have in common?

The aliens prefer to study the parts of the Earth that are older than 6,000 years…

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Not California? That’s where the next forthcoming space movie is about to be made/released?

The distribution can likely be explained by the Dead Milkman Bounce Theory:

Now Stuart, if you look at the soil around any large U.S. city with a big underground homosexual population - Des Moines, Iowa, perfect example. Look at the soil around Des Moines, Stuart. You can't build on it, you can't grow anything in it. The government says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on, Stuart. I know it's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians. I swear to God.
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y’know that Johnny Wormser kid; kid delivers papers in the neighborhood? he’s a fine kid!

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Area 51’s not in New Mexico. You’re thinking of Roswell. Area 51’s supposed to be where the alien stuff gets stored or studied.

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The UFO subject is a very tough nut to crack. I’m about to ramble a bit; but the TLDR is essentially this: you have to look at the details of each case independently, and listen to various testimonies, before considering any /plausible/ explanation… Don’t take the official explanation for granted.

There’s many possible hypothesis to explain away UFOs: flares, weather balloons, army jets during a military exercise, Mars, Venus, lightning balls, swamp gases, Chinese lanterns. The problem in too many of these instances is that to fit the chosen hypothesis you’ll have to dismiss /part/ of the observer’s testimony. For example: the flare, meteorite or Chinese lantern explanations won’t account for a perfectly horizontal trajectory, or dramatic changes in direction, or impressive acceleration or deceleration, or running off from military jets. This is true from even the most official investigative efforts like Project Blue Book and the Condon Committee.

Other examples: Mars was used to explain a red light, but didn’t explain the movements of the object; Venus was used to explain a white light, but didn’t explain the ‘huge’ size of the object or its metallic features; an helicopter was used to explain a huge spotlight, but didn’t explain the lack of noise, or mechanical failures of cars in its vicinity…

The ultimate explanation that applies to all of these reports, is that the observers are either unreliable (aka liars), bad observers (aka dumb), or are prone to mass hysteria (aka crazy). Personally, I am unsatisfied with these assessments, but because of these demeaning conclusions, the UFO subject is ripe with misplaced arrogance, derision, bullying, and an impressive bias…

Ah, right you are. For some reason I thought they were in more or less the same place.

The distribution seems to correlate with population.

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