Documents / Official release

Office of the Secretary of Defense: 25_Sky_View_Final_Draft

Department of Defense. Office of the Secretary of Defense. · 2023 · 16 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

Open the PDF at page 9 Original source ↗

“Sightings”14 pages

  • p. 1 025 Public UAP Sightings and the Environment: An Analysis of Sky View Potential Richard M. Medina…
  • p. 2 …In 1969, another government effort, Project Blue Book determined that 701 sightings out of 12,618…
  • p. 3 …The most likely explanation for a portion of UAP sightings is natural phenomena. For example, the…
  • p. 4 025 Maybe the most popular natural explanation for UAP sightings is ball lightning. Ball lightning incidents…
  • p. 5 …from 2001 to 2020, which reduces the number of reported sightings to 98,724. For the…
  • p. 6 025 Figure 2 NUFORC Reported Sighting Spatial Distribution for the Conterminous U.S. from 2001-2020…
  • p. 8 …Models The NUFORC dataset is first explored alone to identify general spatial patterns of reported sightings…
  • p. 9 …Recall that this number does not represent sightings, but sightings per 10,000 in each conterminous…
  • p. 10 …increasing sightings); values below 1 indicate a negative relationship (decreasing sightings). For example, the coefficient for…
  • p. 11 …County UAP Reported Sightings, 2001-2020 Discussion and Conclusions We recall here our initial research questions…
  • p. 12 025 sightings would exhibit little to no spatial pattern, and are unlikely to follow a pattern…
  • p. 13 …We had initially expected cloud cover to be credibly related to sightings, as clouds can cause…
  • p. 14 …The question remains, however, as to what these sightings are of. Further examination of regions where…
  • p. 16 …A. (1984) Social Psychological Correlates of Possible UFO Sightings. The Journal of Social Psychology 123: 199…
025
model, for all variables in the model are well under 2. VIF values are traditionally accepted if
they are under 5.
Results
The hotspot analysis shows a strong trend, with many more standardized sightings
reported in the Western U.S. and in the very Northeast, along with some isolated areas including
the tri-state border area of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, surrounding Evansville, Indiana, and
the area surrounding Washington D.C. Smaller clusters of low sightings are found through the
central plains and in the southeast. Recall that this number does not represent sightings, but
sightings per 10,000 in each conterminous U.S. county.
Figure 3 Hotspot Analysis (Getis-Ord Gi*) of Reported Sightings from 2001-2020
Table 1 shows the results of the Bayesian small area model, based on the posterior
probability distribution of each coefficient. As the model is based on log-transformed relativePage determined to be Unclassified
Reviewed by Chief of Staff, AARO
IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841 (a)(1)(C)
Date: 02/06/2025

Cases discussed

About this file

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.