- Spot some aliens while laying on the beach. Sounds like a plan.
There’s been a surge in renewed interest in UFOs lately. That’s not in small part thanks to the Pentagon releasing a long-anticipated UFO report in June and the weird appearing and disappearing monoliths at the end of last year.
All this just begs the question — how often do people actually spot UFOs? And when’s the best time to go gazing at the night sky in search of alien crafts?
Good news to all you wannabe Fox Mulders, we have the data to tell you. A new study, compiling statistics from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), tells us when and where the little green men like to pop up the most in the U.S.
To sum it all up, if you really want to see a UFO (or at least misinterpret a completely ordinary celestial object as an alien vessel) you’ll want to be out in springtime on the West Coast. The aliens seem to particularly favor California.
Maybe they just like beaches.
The Numbers! What Do They Mean?!
But let’s dive down into the nitty gritty sea of numbers. Just a note, the NUFORC data is based on reports from 2020, so there may be some annual variance.
To begin with, we can establish the best and worst places in the country for UFO-spotting. As we already mentioned, California is the hotspot for UFO sightings with a whopping 619 reports.
That’s way ahead the rest of the top five states, Florida (398 reports), Washington (368), Pennsylvania (313), and Texas (297). The absolute worst location to see a UFO is the double team of Washington, D.C., and Missouri, both of which recorded only one UFO sighting last year.
April was the month with most reports, totaling at 1,045. That was followed by March, with 828, and August, with 713.
The lowest number of reports came in December, at only 370. There seems to something about that spring air that draws out the UFOs.
Unsurprisingly, the best time of day was after dark, between 8 p.m. and 12 a.m., when people made 3,069 sightings. The fewest sightings, again unsurprisingly, were made between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m., with just 428 reports.
From these numbers, we can infer that if you want to maximize your odds of seeing a UFO, you should be in California in April and look up to the heavens starting from 8 p.m. You can then comfortable go to bed at midnight.
Conversely, if you want to make absolutely sure that you don’t see any UFOs while gazing at the sky, your prime time is in December after lunch break. You’ll also want to be in Washington, D.C.
Suppose you could also go to Missouri. But why would you do that?
Lights, Spheres, and Eggs, Oh My!
So, we now know when people see UFOs. But what do they see when they spot one?
NUFORC gives the answer to that question as well. The most common type of UFO is simply a nondescript light hovering in the sky.
Another common sighting is a circle, followed by a sphere. We can probably assume that the sighted circles were also spheres, unless the aliens are two-dimensional beings.
The least common UFO shape is a cone, with only 14 reported sightings. Other unusual UFO shapes include crosses and eggs.
Interestingly, a shape reported as “unknown” is among the top 10. In these cases, people couldn’t make heads or tails of what they saw.
The average UFO sighting lasts for 19 minutes. However, 38% of reports say the saw the object for 1-5 minutes and 23% said the UFO disappeared after less than a minute.
That means your actual sighting will probably not last for a third of an hour. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it, in other words.
Maybe Not So Mysterious, After All
The obvious follow-up questions at this point are why do UFOs prefer the West Coast around spring. Unfortunately, that’s where the data is no longer helpful.
The springtime peak in UFO sightings can probably be explained simply by the fact that more people are venturing outside after the winter. You’re much less likely to see anything weird in the sky when you’re huddled in your home out of the cold.
Meanwhile, California’s penchant for UFO sighting may be due to the fact that there’s a lot of aerospace research being carried out in the state. It’s the same with Florida, so the UFOs might actually just be experimental aircrafts or something like that.
Elon Musk’s pet project SpaceX, for example, launched 180 satellites to the orbit last year, many of which are visible to the bare eye. You can easily see how a sudden increase in satellites could confuse people.
It might also be tempting to say that there’s been an upward trend in UFO sightings over the last year. However, that’s not exactly true, either.
Sure, the annual number of sightings was up from 2019. But it’s still nowhere near the peak witnessed in mid-2010s.
We can also partially blame the pandemic. Some of us have spent so long in quarantine that we’ve forgotten what the normal sky looks like.
In any case, if you really want to see UFOs, you now know where to be. Just don’t blame us if you get abducted and probed.