NEW YORK, NY — UFOs and the notion that aliens from another galaxy could be sending emissaries to check things out on planet Earth have captivated Americans for decades. And while you may think states like New Mexico — home of the infamous 1947 Roswell “UFO crash” (actually, the Air Force said the crash involved a weather balloon, not a flying saucer) — have the most sightings, a new report suggests you’re just as likely to see E.T. in the Northeast and Northwest.
In the book “UFO Sightings Desk Reference,” authors Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller Costa compiled reports from two government databases to highlight how sightings vary over time and between states. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the number of sightings to determine which states have the most per capita.
Here are the top 10 places in the country for UFO sightings per 100,000 people.
Sightings are largely dependent on the weather. The states with the most reported UFO sightings, and the times of the year where such reports peak, both reflect the greater chance of seeing the sky.
“[The sightings] are about when observers are available to be outside in nice weather, and whether they have leisure time,” Costa told the authors.
In the North, which typically sees colder winters, there are significantly more reported sightings over the summer as residents spend more of their leisure time outside.
The most commonly reported UFO at 13 percent appears as a light. Others include disks, spheres, cigars, flashes and even formations.
As intriguing as these are, don’t expect to see what one New Mexico police officer described in 1964. It would later be called “the best-documented case on record” by an investigator with the U.S. Air Force’s famous UFO investigation program, Project BLUE BOOK, according to the CIA.
Socorro patrolman Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding vehicle when he heard a loud roar and saw flames near the area of a dynamite shack. He abandoned the chase and drove through considerably tough terrain to investigate.
At one point, he came upon an object roughly the size of a car about 800 feet away. There were were one or two figures in white coveralls — he refused to describe them as “people” — and assumed they were the occupants of the vehicle. Once he was about 150 feet away, he proceeded on foot toward the white, “egg-shaped” object, which was standing on girder-like legs. The vehicle had strange, red markings shaped like a crescent with a vertical arrow and horizontal line underneath. In the days following the incident, he said the oval object turned and saw him.
The object then began emitting sounds. The noise, which went from a low pitch to a high pitch, was not from a jet or helicopter. It was unlike anything he’d ever heard. Flames and smoke shot out of the bottom of the vehicle.
“It was as bluish, ahhh, bluish-orange flame,” Zamora told radio interviewer Walter Shrode. “I thought this object was going to blow up, that’s why I started running back.”
Frightened, he rushed to get behind the police car. He bumped his leg and lost his glasses. While crouched and shielding his eyes, the noise stopped after another 10 seconds. It got eerily quiet.
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“The sound … disappeared,” he said. “It was very, very quiet; you could hear a pin drop, yeah.”
The object rose to about 15-20 feet off the ground. The flames and smoke stopped. The aircraft flew “very low to the ground” and then traveled up to a perlite mill before gaining altitude, Zamora said. It cleared the dynamite shack by maybe 3 feet.
Hector Quintanilla, the last chief officer of Project BLUE BOOK, lead the Zamora investigation. His team concluded Zamora did not fabricate the story. Despite an extremely thorough probe, investigators were never able to find the object or determine where it came from.
The case remains unsolved.
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