Documents / Official release
This is a 2023 draft research paper by Richard M. Medina and Simon Brewer of the University of Utah and Sean M. Kirkpatrick of the Department of Defense, prepared for journal submission and released in full by AARO in 2025. It analyzes 98,724 NUFORC public sighting reports from 2001 to 2020 by county with a Bayesian model. It finds that more light pollution and tree canopy mean fewer sightings, while more air traffic and military area mean more. Cloud cover showed no relationship.
025 Figure 2 NUFORC Reported Sighting Spatial Distribution for the Conterminous U.S. from 2001-2020 In the spatial sciences, data like these are typically referred to as Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI). VGI are geographic information that are volunteered either knowingly or unknowingly by individuals, typically with the assistance of location enabled digital tools (Goodchild, 2007), and the issues connected to the use of these datasets has been extensively discussed. Those vulnerabilities are present here, along with others given the nature of this dataset. Like with other crowdsourced data, there is little hope for assurance of quality for VGI (Goodchild and Li, 2012). This problem is furthered in this dataset where some may be trying to actively disinform. It is clear that these data cannot be verified, and even if interviews with each person were possible, there would be issues determining truth and accuracy, especially given the historical attributes of the reports. However, NUFORC does include disclaimers on their reporting page to help remove false reports. First, they provide information including descriptions, images, and video of Starlink Satellites, which can look unidentified to those that have not seen them before. Second, they provide a description of Venus, which was discussed previously as a potential for unidentified sightings. Third, NUFORC discusses hoax and joke reports, which are said to be ignored and discarded (NUFORC, 2023c). Given the size and structure of the data, it is not clear that all hoaxes can be identified, but at least NUFORC is paying attention to hoax cases. Nor can we differentiate those sightings that have obvious and/or logical explanations, but we note that these still represent an ‘unidentified’ sighting. Still, this isPage determined to be Unclassified Reviewed by Chief of Staff, AARO IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841 (a)(1)(C) Date: 02/06/2025
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 16 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.