Public UAP Sightings and Sky View Potential: The AARO-Utah Study Draft

Why does one county report more UFOs than another? This draft tests a simple answer before reaching for exotic ones: people report things in the sky where they can see the sky, and where there is more in it to see.

What this record is

This is a 16-page draft journal article titled “Public UAP Sightings and the Environment: An Analysis of Sky View Potential.” Its authors are Richard M. Medina and Simon Brewer of the University of Utah and Sean M. Kirkpatrick of the Department of Defense. It names the Annals of the American Association of Geographers as the journal it was intended for. The Department of Defense prepublication office cleared it for open publication on 17 February 2023, and it carries All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) case number 330UAP000025, released in full. A revised version was published in December 2023 in Scientific Reports as “An environmental analysis of public UAP sightings and sky view potential.” The National Archives copy is the earlier draft.

What it says

The introduction places the work within the government’s UAP efforts. It recounts the UAP Task Force set up on 4 August 2020, the planned move to the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group in November 2021, and AARO’s establishment on 20 July 2022. It cites the 144 reports in the 2021 ODNI assessment and the 510 in the 2022 report, and Project Blue Book’s 701 “unidentified” cases out of 12,618. It asks three questions: whether public sighting data are usable at all, whether they show real spatial patterns, and whether the physical and built environment can explain those patterns.

A literature review covers earlier natural explanations, including the planet Venus, balloons, insects glowing in electric fields, the tectonic strain hypothesis linking sightings to earthquakes, and ball lightning. It judges that most of these are too rare to account for the bulk of reports.

The data come from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). The authors extracted 122,983 reports dated from June 1930 to June 2022. After adding coordinates, they limited the analysis to 98,724 reports from the lower 48 states between 2001 and 2020, and totalled them by county. They are open about the problems with this kind of “volunteered geographic information.” Reports cannot be verified, some may be hoaxes or deliberate disinformation, and people who report may not be typical of the population. They note that NUFORC warns reporters about Starlink and Venus and says it discards obvious hoaxes. The explanatory variables were light pollution, cloud cover and tree canopy, which limit how much sky people can see, and airports per square kilometer and the share of each county covered by military installations, which represent how much is flying.

A Bayesian small-area model, a method borrowed from disease mapping, gave consistent results. Each standard-deviation increase in light pollution was linked to 7.7 percent fewer reports, with 100 percent credibility. More tree canopy meant fewer reports (94 percent credibility). More air traffic meant more reports (100 percent), and so did more military land (92 percent). Cloud cover showed no relationship. Hotspot analysis found clusters in the West and the far Northeast, with smaller ones around Evansville, Indiana and Washington, D.C., and low clusters across the central plains and the Southeast. The highest probabilities ran in a band from New Mexico and Nevada north to Washington State.

The authors conclude that the data are usable, that the patterns are real, and that they are best explained by the opportunity to see things and by the presence of human-made objects. They say satellites and drones, which they did not model, are “likely important factors.” They also note open questions, including why California reports so few compared with its neighbours, and raise the idea of “motivated perception,” in which “if your goal is to see a UAP, you may very well see one given the opportunity.”

Context

The authors describe the study as, “to our knowledge,” the first attempt to link the geography of sightings to environmental variables, and one of its authors was running the government’s UAP office at the time. It marks a change in approach. Rather than chasing individual reports one at a time, the authors looked at the whole dataset and asked what ordinary factors predict it. Its limits follow from its data. NUFORC reports are unchecked, and a county-level model shows correlation, not what any particular witness saw. The main omission, satellites, was taken up in AARO’s own later work on Starlink flares, and the misjudged distance that underlies many reports is covered in its paper on forced perspective and parallax.

Status

This is a research draft, not a case file. Its finding is statistical and says little about any single sighting. It does not claim that every report is explained. It shows that where reports cluster follows sky visibility and air activity closely, which is what would be expected if most reports are ordinary objects seen by people with a good view. The published Scientific Reports version should be treated as the authoritative text. This draft shows the study as it stood when the Department of Defense cleared it.

Sources

• National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/499915957
• PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/493468580/25_Sky_View_Final_Draft.pdf
• Series: Records from the Office of the Secretary of Defense Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/493468580
• National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615
• Medina, Brewer and Kirkpatrick, “An environmental analysis of public UAP sightings and sky view potential,” Scientific Reports (2023): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49527-x