Office of the Secretary of Defense: 25_Sky_View_Final_Draft

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Maybe the most popular natural explanation for UAP sightings is ball lightning. Ball
lightning incidents are characterized by “a spherical or roughly spherical light-emitting object
whose size varies from a few cm to a meter or more, with an average diameter of about 20 cm,
and whose colors vary from red to yellow, white, blue, and (rarely) green” (Shmatov and
Stephan, 2019, p. 1). Ball lightning is a rare event and data on its occurrences often relies on
eyewitness accounts. These events are believed to most often occur at or near an ongoing
thunderstorm. One of the issues with the ball lightning hypothesis is that it is such a rare, and
rarely recorded event, that its existence is not accepted by all researchers. However, relatively
recent research has confirmed, what is believed to be, a ball lightning incident (see Cen, Yuan,
and Xue, 2014). Despite these attempts at explaining these phenomena, people continue to see
and report things in the sky that they can’t identify. We recognize that some sightings may be
due to mental illnesses or other psychological issues, while others reported are hoaxes.
The recent increase in interest in UAP reports has been accompanied by the development
of new methods to assess and explain sightings (David, 2023), including custom built
observatories and sensors, as well as mobile apps designed to leverage crowd-sourced
information. While these methods bring new sophistication to analysis of individual events, there
remains no information on the general context of sightings, i.e. why sightings are more common
in certain regions of the country, and less common in others. Rather than attempt to explain what
people are seeing in the sky, we explore how the combination of visibility and air traffic relates
to reported sightings, thus providing a first order understanding of why the number of sightings
varies spatially. Given their relative rarity, it seems unlikely that insects, seismic activity, and
ball lightning are responsible for the majority of global sightings, especially those seen in the
daytime. Understanding the environmental context of these sightings will make it easier to
propose and test new explanations for their occurrence, and help to identify any truly anomalous
sightings.
Data and Methods
UAP Public Sighting Data
The public UAP sighting data source is the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC)
online (NUFORC, 2023a). NUFORC was formed in 1974 and “the Center’s primary function
over the past four decades has been to receive, record, and to the greatest degree possible,
corroborate and document reports from individuals who have been witness to unusual, possibly
UFO-related events” (NUFORC, 2023b, np). “UFO” sighting data are available for historical
years, as users can post their sightings from memory. The data are updated to about a month to
the present. Our extracted dataset includes 122,983 reported sightings from June 1930 to June
2022, when we stopped our extraction. Early reports occur for many reasons. For example, a
1930 report is from a user reporting for their mother. Fields in the dataset include: Date, City,
State, Country, Shape, Duration, Summary, Posted Sate, Image, and Lat/Long coordinates. The
data are provided with geographic coordinates at the city level. We use the coordinate data
provided for mapping; however, some entries have no coordinate data. For some, no coordinatesPage determined to be Unclassified
Reviewed by Chief of Staff, AARO
IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841 (a)(1)(C)
Date: 02/06/2025