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.
“Sightings”14 pages
025 there is a potential threat. That threat grows as our uncertainties grow. Although based on a noisy, crowd sourced dataset, our results can provide a context for how sightings of unidentified objects vary in space, the factors may be linked to these, and may provide a small step towards understanding these threats. This problem is relevant on many fronts, including anthropological and sociological (i.e., understanding the human/social experience). The stigma given to this area of research, if it is explored scientifically, should be over. From a research perspective, we make no hypotheses about what people are seeing, only that they will see more when and where they have opportunity to. The question remains, however, as to what these sightings are of. Further examination of regions where the model performs poorly, temporal trends and reported details of each sighting may help further elucidate this. Works Cited Appelle, S. (1998) UFOs and the Scientific Method. Science, 281:5379, 919. Callahan, P. S. and Mankin, R. W. (1978) Insects as Unidentified Flying Objects. Applied Optics 17(21): 3355-3360. Callahan, P. S. (1979) Insects as Unidentified Flying Objects: Author’s Reply to Comments. Applied Optics 18(16): 2725-2726. Cen, J., Yuan, P., and Xue, S. (2014) Observation of the Optical and Spectral Characteristics of Ball Lightning. Physical Review Letters 112: 035001. Coulston, J. W., Moisen, G. G., Wilson, B. T., Finco, M. V., Cohen, W. B., and Brewer, C. K. (2012). Modeling percent tree canopy cover: a pilot study. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 78(7): 715-727. Coulston, J. W., Jacobs, D. M., King, C. R., and Elmore, I. C. (2013). The influence of multi- season imagery on models of canopy cover: a case study. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 79(5):469-477. Data.gov (2022) TIGER/Line Shapefile, 2019, nation, U.S., Military Installation National Shapefile. https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/tiger-line-shapefile-2019-nation-u-s-military- installation-national-shapefile. David, L. (2023). Scientists Try to Get Serious about Studying UFOs. Good Luck with That. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-try-to-get-serious- about-studying-ufos-good-luck-with-that/ Falchi, F., Cinzano, P., Duriscoe, D., Kyba, C. C. M., Elvidge, C. D., Baugh, K., Portnov, B., Rybnikova, N. A., Furgoni, R. (2016a) Supplement to: The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness. GFZ Data Services. http://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.1.4.2016.001 Falchi, F., Cinzano, P., Duriscoe, D., Kyba, C. C., Elvidge, C. D., Baugh, K., Portnov, B. A., Rybnikova, N. A., Furgoni, R. (2016b) The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness. Science Advances. 2016 Jun 1, 2(6): e1600377.Page 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 under it. 16 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.