UFO Sighting Statistics In The U.S.A _ Cheryl Costa.

My name is Sheryl Costa. I'm a resident of upstate New York. In fact, I'm a New York State native, originally. And my spouse, Linda Miller-Costa, and I are... I'm a journalist. And Linda Miller-Costa has been a career scientist. And the two of us produced the first book of UFO statistics called the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, United States of America, 2001 to 2015. And we have been dubbed the mothers of UFO statistics, which we kind of like. I had been writing a newspaper column for the Syracuse New Times for several years. And in the course of writing my column, I would sometimes add up the sightings in a particular county or something like this, especially if I saw that there was some kind of hot activity going on there. And one of the things I did was I noticed the two reporting agencies, the National UFO Reporting Center and MUFON, didn't really collect county data. So I started adding county data because, again, New York State was my beat. I wanted to know what counties these were in. And as I did add the data to it, we found out that people... there were clusters of UFO sightings that nobody knew were clusters before because maybe they were out in some rural area. And the numbers were so small that a lot of the little places out in the rural areas were not much more than a cattle crossing with a volunteer fire department. And the next thing you know, we started putting county data to it. We started noticing huge amounts of clusters in certain rural areas. So along with that, we shared some of this information with some of the New York State UFO investigators. And they said, well, Carol, we didn't know there was a cluster there. We didn't know there was a cluster there either. And then they looked at Monroe County, which is essentially Rochester, New York. And they said, we knew there was a Lake Erie effect out in the Buffalo and Niagara Frontier area. But when we added county data, we found out that Monroe County had almost as many sightings as the Lake Erie area. And people said to me, well, Carol, we didn't know there was a Lake Ontario effect. So one night in October 2015, Linda and I were sitting in our favorite pub staring across a couple of pints and we said, wow, look at all the cool stuff we figured out. We discovered doing these things by simply adding county data and adding everything up. And we said, wow, what would happen if we did the whole country? And we sat there and stared at each other for another 10 minutes and said, wow, this would take like a year to do, you know. In reality, it took 18 months because we did not know what we were doing. And being that we had both been civilian contractors to the government, I worked for Lockheed Martin for 32 years and she was a contractor to government libraries to a firm she worked for. She used to be the head librarian at the Environmental Protection Agency. So we sat down and started writing process procedures. So when you get the raw data from one reporting service or the other, we would say, well, you do this first, you clean this first, you fix these things second, you do this third. And so we figured out how to do all that and clean it. The data is dirty, it has to be cleaned up and organized so you can sort on it and do things with it. People don't spell the name of cities very well, you know, or they'll put a space between the front of the cities or they'll do it in all capitals or do it all in lowercase. It messes up the database, so to speak. So we had to spend a lot of time cleaning that up. Three and a half to 4% of people who report UFO on the Bufon site don't tell you what city they're reporting it from, okay, which makes it difficult. So we learned how to do it. And like I said, it took a long time, and then we started compiling this book. And when we started doing the book, again, there was new ground. We didn't know how to publish a book full of charts, graphs, and tables, taking stuff out of Microsoft Excel and putting it into Word. We have since figured out a much faster way of doing it that's much more reliable. But that's how we got going with it. And then when we put our book out, we hoped that the UFO community would like this book as statistics. Of course, it's charts and graphs. And Linda, when we started to do the book, and this is important, Linda is the real brains behind the book, Linda Miller-Costa. Linda said, we're going to do a book that's going to be like a government report. It's not going to have any cute aliens on the cover. It's going to be charts and graphs. It's going to be a census of UFOs, and we're going to do 21st century information. Because a lot of the stuff that was talked about in UFO communities were stories from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. Now, we said, let's do modern information because there's lots of it going on now, much more than there was back then. So that's what we did. And so we put this book together. It was a 2 1⁄2-pound, 374-page book full of data. And a New York Times reporter got a copy of it, went into his editors and said, hey, some old ladies in Syracuse, New York, did the science. And that impressed them because for 70 years, they had never said a nice thing about UFOs. And suddenly, there's a book with numbers in front of them, no stories, just a book of numbers that said everybody everywhere in the country had seen them. And so they did that lovely story about us in the New York Times in April 24th and 25th. 24th was the online edition, 25th in the print edition. April 24th, 25th of 2017. It's available on the web. Google New York Times, Costa UFO. You'll get the article. And from the moment they put that article up, the newspaper I worked for, the Syracuse New Times, and my own home phone, we started getting phone calls from news directors and newspaper editors all over the world. And there was a lot of interest in our numbers. And that's how we got started in doing this. Crazy, crazy stuff. We never imagined we would have the... I was newly retired. And I thought I was just going to be coasting at this point. We put the book out, we sell a few books, you know. Suddenly, I'm working, I'm getting 5 to 10 phone calls a day for at least the first five weeks, asking for an interview or something like this. I was putting in 8 to 12 hours every day just handling the public relations associated with the book. That's a nice problem to have. And I've had a lot of other UFO authors tell me that they put a book out and it had dismal sales, and I looked at them, and they say, well, how well did you do? And I tell them kind of a number, and the color goes away from their face, you know. You sold that many of them? I said, yeah. So I've had a lot of people write me and say, this thing's nothing but numbers. The truth is in the numbers. Take the time to analyze it, look at it, see what it says about your local area. If you wanted stories, our book was not the one to buy. But a lot of people have bought it, and they've found it to be fascinating. MUFON investigators just think this thing is fantastic because the MUFON database is only 30 or 40% of the sightings. So you add in the National UFO Reporting Center's data, and what you end up with is a complete picture. Use either database by itself, and it's skewed to one geographical region or another. And we found out that the National UFO Reporting Center stuff kind of skews to the southwest and to the northwest of the United States, and MUFON skewed a different way, but you put it all together, and it balances it out. So that's why we use the two databases. Now people have asked me, hey, do you go to these other little databases? I've reached out to some of them. Some of them, the data wasn't compatible or was duplicated in the two major databases. So no, we haven't. Our focus was to analyze the data. A lot of people just want to, like I've had people email me, well, we'd like your 25 best cases. I don't have case studies. In fact, the first thing we get rid of in the database is all the description information about the sighting. We keep date and time, the location, the city location, the state, and the shape. That's all we keep, what, when, and where, and what shape it was, okay? Where most investigators go from like a case study standpoint, which is perfectly valid to go out there and do the CSI thing out there at a sighting site, we decided instead of studying one ant to nauseam, we decided to study the ant hill, okay? So we did a lot of analysis. Initially, the first book that came out, the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, that was more or less a study of adding everything up and finding out who the top states were, who the top counties were, what the top shapes were in every state, and that kind of stuff, right? Well, we've refined the database in the years since, the three years since we put the book out, and we've added additional data, 2016, 17, and 18, and in the original book, 2001 to 2015, there was 121,000 sightings in the book. In this one, we're up to 146,800, so almost 147,000 sightings, and it's intriguing. So what we did was we also wrote, and since that time, we've put together algorithms within, this is considered big data, and the trick with big data is to write algorithms that crunch it, and we have figured out how to crunch it. We can tell you the hours of the day when people see these things. We can tell you, we know for a fact that by analyzing it that UFO sightings are not about the UFOs. They're about the observers seeing the UFOs, and it's driven by population. Of course, everybody knows that, but it's also driven by temperate weather, okay? Like in a northern state, there's a quiescent amount of sightings all through the year, but you get to like June, July, August, it goes through the roof, big peak. Well, everybody said, well, gosh, Harold, summer weather, it's like that. Well, yes, but maybe not. You move down into the mid-Atlantic states, like Virginia, Maryland, and go across the country, and that peak starts flattening out, and those other numbers come up, and then you get to the deep south states, and it's sickly flat. It looks like a picket fence, okay, the numbers do. In fact, in some of the really warm deep south states, the numbers in the summertime actually fall a little bit because they're very hot. You go to Alaska, the numbers in the middle of the summer are there, which is May, June, July. It's daylight all the time. The numbers go into the toilet because it's daylight all the time. We discovered it has to be leisure time and hours of darkness to help fuel sightings. This is something nobody knew. Now, a lot of people sit there and try to trivialize it and say, well, duh, anybody can figure it out. Well, you didn't know that until we added up the numbers and discovered this. The guy John Keel, back in the 70s, he had a small database of maybe 800 or 1,000 sightings. He ran it through some big old 360 computer back in the day at University of Colorado or someplace, and they came up with, well, the peak day for UFO sightings is Wednesday, and after our book came out, one of the first questions somebody asked me, what about the Wednesday effect? We didn't know, so we went back in and started looking at the data and did a crunch. Had to write some special stuff for it, and as soon as we did the software for it and ran it, we found out that 76% of the states, it's Saturday night. 12% of the states, it was a different night, and it's like, on two states, it's like Tuesday. Two other states, it was like Thursday. Three states, it was like Sunday. Who knew? Nobody knew until we crunched the data like that, and I give a tip of the hat to John Keel for doing the early statistics stuff, though he never published a book with that statistics. That's a shame, but he did do the first, him and the Air Force were the only people ever to do the statistics, but nobody published. So when Linda and I came along with the desk reference, it was the first book of published statistics on UFOs. Again, no case studies, just it's a census of UFO sightings. That's a lot of media that called me up. Well, who are they and why are they here? I couldn't answer that question for them. In fact, I told one talk radio host, I said it might be government pilots, it might be extraterrestrials from another solar system or another galaxy, it might be interdimensional beings, it might be keemsters. I don't know who's flying them. All I can tell you is where they're flying them, and I can tell you where they've been seen and when they've been seen. You know, I don't know that, but we've learned a lot by their patterns. We've learned to do cluster studies, and we know that, yeah, okay, you see a lot of sightings around a city, a major city, population to some degree. Again, then we follow it against leisure time. 68 to 74% of the sightings happen from five o'clock at night to 11.30 at night. Okay, then it falls off pretty steep. In fact, between six o'clock in the morning and eight o'clock in the morning is the lowest. Almost every state is the lowest. Everybody's driving to work. You know, who's gonna report a UFO then? And then the 16 hours of the day between midnight and four o'clock, five o'clock in the afternoon is only 28 to 32% of the sightings. It varies from state to state. I was giving you more or less the national curve on that. If you do a state like Nevada, okay, and like the Clark County area, which is essentially Las Vegas, it holds the curve, but when you look at the numbers coming off of midnight, instead of falling off real steep to five or six o'clock in the morning, there's a bump of sightings at one o'clock in the morning, two o'clock in the morning, to four o'clock in the morning. That's when the clubs let out. You know, as I showed it to somebody out there, a Nevada researcher, he said, oh yeah, that's when all the clubs let out. Wow, you know. So you find little things. Again, it actually tells you more about us as observers and our patterns, where things are. The one thing you should take note of, the quiescent sightings, those ones that just happen all the time, just regularly, what we call the baseline sightings, those are dog walkers, smokers, and people out having a smoke walking the dog. In fact, MUFON investigators will tell you when they're going to analyze a month's worth of data, they will sometimes sort on smoke or dog because one, they're considered reliable observers because they're out in their neighborhood, day in, day out, they know the land, rain or shine, they know the lay of the land, and if something's unusual, they'll know what it is. And usually the dog will tell them. You know, that kind of thing, you know. And I've read many stories where it says, my dog suddenly went stiff as a board and was growling at something in the sky, you know. And you wouldn't believe how many stories I've read that sound something like that. Okay, top three states for sightings, and this has been stable since 2004. Top states, California, as of 2001 to 2018, 18,888 sightings. Florida is second in the country, okay, and it's in the 9,000 to 10,000 range, okay, for that 18-year period. Texas follows Florida about the same numbers as Florida, just slightly less. And then the top 10 states, number four, number five, number six, number seven, seem to swap back and forth between Ohio, Washington State, New York State, and Pennsylvania. Like a couple years ago, New York State was number six. Right now, last year it was number four. They swapped up, okay. And then there's a little bit of swapping down below, and then there are some states that stay pretty stable where they are. I'll give you an example. Las Vegas was number 25 in our original book. In the 2018 version of that, they were number 26 before, and now they're number 25. But are those places for the top things? Okay, Los Angeles County, not the city, but Los Angeles County, which is an incorporated area, has the most sightings in the country of over 3,200 counties. They have more sightings than 40 individual states. The second largest county to get for sightings is Maricopa County, which is essentially the Phoenix, Arizona area, and they have more sightings than 36 individual states. Now, people look at L.A. and they say, wait a minute, they got all that light out there. How do they have? Okay, Los Angeles area has had sightings up and down those canyons of UFOs since the 1880s. Okay, funny lights in the sky and all that kind of thing. So there's a long history. There was the Battle of L.A. in February of 1942. So they've had a long, long history of sightings. Phoenix, excuse me, has had their share of sightings as well, plus 20 years ago they had the Phoenix lights. And people ask me, well, how come they have so many? And I said, well, you know, there's another thing we think might be going on. They did have a lot of stuff going on, or they had some kind of major event happen like 20 or 70 years ago. And they maybe heard Grandpa talk about it, and Grandma talk about it, and Mom and Dad talk about it. So there might be a generational thing. If they saw something cool in the sky, maybe I'll see something if I look up. And we think that might be it. It's a theory. It's just a theory. The top city in the country. In 2015, the top city was Las Vegas. In 2017, the top city was Las Vegas. This year, Phoenix has crept up by about 114 extra sightings, and they are the number one city in the country for UFOs. Now, I don't count New York City because New York City is considered its five counties, and I count the city by their counties. And people in New York City are very, very proud to name their borough or their county. So if it says New York City, fine, but it says Bronx, or it says Brooklyn, or Queens, or Kings, or New York County, which is Manhattan, I make sure I break it out. So I don't give the whole city, regional city, the credit that, like L.A. County, if it was all in one incorporated county as a city, I would say, yeah, sure, but I don't do it that way. But they do have a lot of sightings there. If you remember earlier, I stated about the Wednesday effect with John Keel, and we discovered it was Saturday night. Well, that was only 76% of the states were on Saturday night. So I went back, I did have people come back and say, are there any other states that have a different day of the week? And I said, okay, let me see if I can break it out. So I did. And what's weird is that there were a number of states that it was Wednesday, or it was Thursday, or something different. Monday was not a day that anybody, it was a peak day. And they were, one, all southern states. And then some interns took a look at it for us, and they seemed to think, this is only a theory, but some of them were from, these were some college interns, and some of them were from the deep south. And they said, well, Wednesday night, well, that's Bible study night. Or Thursday night, that's Bible study night. And that seems to be what it might be. Remember I said, it's about leisure time. So if people are out, they're coming back from their bowling night or something like that, hey, wow, look at that thing in the sky. So we don't know what it is. We have no way to ascertain what that is. All we know is it is. There's a definite difference. Heck, Arkansas. This interview's being done in Arkansas. Arkansas's top day is Thursday. And we have absolutely no idea. The pattern for Arkansas's day of the week recitings looks like no other state reunion. Who knew? I think that's the best I can tell you about. The statistics tell us a great deal about a lot of little things. I've had very strange requests for them. And all of these requests have come down to time, the month. Heck, we found in some states, certain months seem to have more sightings of a particular shape versus the overall mean of all the 28 shapes that are out there. We found out that in the last 18 years, in the last five years of the 18 years, there's been a radical fall-off, a 39% fall-off in sightings. But three shapes are on the increase. We discovered that. Who knew? We found a couple of shapes that are down there hiding in the grass, and they are consistent. They're there all the time, but they're so very tiny, tiny little numbers. It's like walking through a wheat field. You see all the lovely wheat there, and that's all the UFO sightings. And then down at your ankle levels is the gopher or the snake running around by your feet. It's a very small number of things that Linda coined it, the truth is in the shapes. We did a study where we took every shape out of the 28 shapes that we know of. We took every shape that even remotely looked like something like an airplane. Cylinder shapes, we took them out. We took out the triangles because people tell us triangles, oh, that's the TR-3B, that's testing. We took those out. If it even remotely looked like something that somebody says they're working on, we took it out. So we kept all the really weird shapes, you know, spears and saucers and squares and rectangles, things like that, and the changing UFO. I never paid any attention to the changing UFO. There weren't very many of them, and I thought maybe the person who was seeing it just couldn't figure out what it was. Well, then I heard another UFO scientist say, you know, we found that those changing UFOs are really weird because just when you are trying to get the equipment on them, they'll change and look like something else, you know. So I went and studied them, and they are the most consistent UFO that's out there. There's only about 100 of them sightings a year, but they sit there and hover between about 70 and 123 sightings a year, but they've been consistent. But over 18 years, only about, what, 2,300 of them? You know, that's where the secrets are. And Linda coined the term, the secrets are in the shapes. And we added another term to that, the secrets are in the small numbers. The real secrets are in those small numbers of sightings. Dr. Jacques Fillet made a remark on a coast-to-coast program sometime back when George Knapp was interviewing him, and he said 80% of the sightings out there are noise. They're junk, okay, and about 20% are the real thing. Linda and I crunched it a different way, and we came up with a number very similar, about 30%. So if you want to make an average, maybe about 25%, 30% is probably the real thing. And it was down in those 25%, 30% numbers that we saw interesting and, how do I want to say it, we saw both consistent patterns and then periodic patterns that could be tracked. There's a couple of shapes that they peaked in 2008, they peaked in 2012, and they peaked in 2014. And they were around the other times, but they weren't huge. But only a couple of shapes are like that. There's other shapes that have just followed the overall curve over the last 18 years. I have found this fascinating. I've found myself on many rainy afternoons getting lost in the numbers. It tells an interesting story. But I can't tell you who's driving them. I can't tell you where they're from. I can't tell you the social economic level of the individuals who are seeing them. I can't tell you the gender of the people who are seeing them. About the only thing I can tell you about them is that they were laying in the hood of their car, they were taking the dog for a walk, or they were out for a smoke from their shift, or they were out for a smoke near bedtime. That's all I can tell you. Well, a couple of things we recently discovered, and this is preliminary data. And so we're talking here, we are sitting here talking in April of 2019. So this is very preliminary at this point in time. I loaned a copy of the database to a retired astronomy and physics professor. And I said, could we study this stuff against astronomical time? Astronomical time is the Earth rotates at 23 hours, 56 minutes. Most people say, well, that's 24 hours. No, it's 23 hours, 56 minutes. So the star that is overhead right now will be overhead tomorrow, four minutes earlier. And the day after that, four minutes earlier after that. After seven days, it will be, that star that was overhead today right now will be overhead 30 minutes earlier. So it's a moving target. It's called sidereal time. And for fun, I presented him with the data and I said, if we added latitude data with the time and all that kind of information, could you figure out whether or not there's a specific time when these things show up astronomically? And we both expected to see a statistically flat no. No, we found there was a specific time when a lot of these showed up. And it was when the galaxy is directly overhead. Now, on a starry night, that's wonderful. But the galaxy is not overhead always at nighttime. Other times of the year, it's overhead during the daytime when you wouldn't see it. So that's the goofy thing. And to be honest with you, it scared the snot out of both of us because it really hammered home. These things are real, okay? There was another thing we discovered about clusters. And we figured out that there were places here in the states of little podunk counties, different places, where nothing ever goes on there. They have one, two sightings, once in the blue moon. And all of a sudden, five years ago or seven years ago, there was a two-week window when they had a whole bunch of sightings. That's intriguing. What was going on? What was that flap? What was that about? And that's been some of the stuff that's been teasing us lately is these small numbers in small windows of time. And we've written algorithms and designed certain kinds of charts to find that kind of stuff. There was a book out a couple of years ago. It came out in 2016 when Linda and I were deep into crunching the book. A book came out by somebody that said that the 37th parallel is the UFO superhighway. And they pulled through sightings here and there, and they talked about paranormal things going on and all that kind of stuff. And oh, the pyramids are on this parallel. Well, when you crunch it up against the numbers, we did the 2018 numbers. We added latitude data to it. And the 37th parallel is not a superhighway. There are 10 other parallels in the United States. Remember, I'm doing only USA numbers. There are 10 other parallels in the United States where they have far more sightings. And people came back to me, well, maybe it's because of the regularity of them across the country. So I did a chart of all the counties in the 37th parallel, which I know I can do. And most of the sightings, it was like nonexistent to onesies, twosies, except when the 37th parallel went through a major city like Los Angeles or something like that. And that's where they were getting their numbers from. Now, I went up to like the 42nd or 40th parallel. It's going through the industrial northeast. And the numbers were consistent across the country, 30, 40 sightings in every county. And it was very consistent. So I would think something that was a UFO superhighway would have numbers all the way across the country and show a lot of volume, not just in added up numbers, but also consistently across the thing. And so I think we debunked the book because another thing where they came back and they said to me, well, what about the parallel? What about the paranormal? And what about the, say it was paranormal and it was just UFOs, it was paranormal. Oh, and livestock mutilation. So I had an intern sit down and Google every single state one afternoon with the other term of livestock mutilation. Every single state has had livestock mutilation. Because of the publicity, we're led to believe it only happens in western states where they have large ranges of livestock. But every single state has had it. The same intern Googled every single state and paranormal. And every single state had its haunted trails, haunted buildings, haunted old assayed asylums, and all of that. So you can't swing a cat and not hit all that stuff. So we felt that the book was just cherry picking what was going on locally for them versus what's really going on bigger in other areas. The current book that's available via Amazon is called The UFO Sightings Desk Reference. If you Google just that or go to Amazon UFO Sightings Desk Reference, you'll find the book. The whole title is UFO Sightings Desk Reference United States of America 2001 to 2015 by Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller-Costa. In 2019 into 2020, we will be producing an updated version and it may be multiple volumes because it's going to be pretty big.