Washington ranks among top 5 for UFO sightings, says author of new book – seattlepi.com

Perhaps unsurprising to cloud-plagued Seattle, four of the top five shapes of UFO’s reported in Washington are light, circle, sphere and fireball. Just sayin’.

Ha! Well, that said, a new UFO reference book self-published by two UFO experts with straight-up real-world resumes puts Washington at fourth in the nation behind Texas (3rd), Florida (2nd) and California (1st) for reported UFO sightings. Pennsylvania is 5th. New York came in at 6th followed by Arizona, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio.

The “UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001-2015” is a deep data dive into UFO sightings reported to The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) from 2001 to 2015, explains author and UFO columnist Cheryl Costa.

She used both databases every week looking for New York sightings for her column in the weekly Syracuse New Times, she said, and started publishing tables for number of sightings in each New York county, shape of UFOs, when they were reported, etc.

Response to those stats was strong, she said. So when her spouse and co-author Linda Miller Costa got the idea of working through the reports to see just how far down they could drill for every state in the country, they started digging. The end result a year later is the 374-page desk reference.

She said there have been more than 120,000 UFO sightings reported from 2001-2015 in the U.S. She didn’t want to give away all the stats (you know, they do want you to get the book) but she said California holds down the top position with almost 16,000 sightings, and Los Angeles County outranks 40 individual states with 3,200 sightings. Washington at No. 4 had 5,226 sightings. Here’s the top-ten counties for sightings in Washington:

1. King County is No.1 with 1393 reported sightings.
2. Snohomish is 2nd with 555
3. Pierce is 3rd at 473
4. Clark is 4th at 305
5. Spokane is 5th with 241
6. Kitsap is 6th with 232
7. Whatcom had 211 for 7th place
8. Thurston hit 8th with 200
9. Yakima is 9th with 182
10. Skagit sneaks in at No. 10 with 126 reported sightingsHer interest in UFOs stem from her personal UFO sightings, Cheryl Costa said, but her drive to write about sightings came from reading a short news story claiming UFO sightings had fallen off. The report suggested UFO were clearly not real since fewer and fewer people were reporting them, she said.”That didn’t sound right,” she said. “I went out to one of the national data bases and the bar chart (of sightings) goes up like a rocket launch.”
    American’s love their UFO’s. Buzz60’s Emily Drooby (@emilydrooby) has the story.

    Media: MediaOS Video

    And, she added, the reports were not from clearly crazy people.

    “I found that the majority of sighting reports where by people who were very sincere, and it had energized them to find a place to report what they saw,” she said. “They wanted to get this off their chest.”

    A couple other trends she noticed were, one, “the people who see the majority of sightings are outside having a smoke, walking the dog or outside smoking walking the dog.” And, two, “there’s a seasonal pattern.” For most of the country, reported sightings begin to climb during spring and summer. In places without notable shifts from winter to summer — Texas, Florida and Arizona, for example — the number of reportings stays relatively flat. Basically, she figures, come spring and summer, people are simply outside more.

    Washington clearly follows this trend, according to Costa’s chart of reported sightings:

    

    From “UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001-2015,” Courtesy of Cheryl Costa.

    But, um, Seattle … that big bright, fireball sphere-shaped object in the sky is called The Sun! 😉