Geospatial and Temporal Patterns in U.S. UFO Sightings: An Analysis of 80,000 Reports (1949–2013)

To the point

An analysis of over 80,000 UFO sighting reports from 1949 to 2013 shows where sightings occur in the United States and converts observations into county-level heat maps weighted by population and recency, revealing California, Washington, and Florida as hotspots with a July peak, shapes dominated by light followed by triangle and circular, and most encounters lasting about three minutes with only a weak relation to time of day, while offering tourism and education ideas such as shape-themed attractions and outlining future work like predictive modeling and anomaly detection.