The Truth Is Out There

UFOs are typically the stuff of summer blockbusters and sci-fi novels, not Congressional hearings. But in July 2023, the House Oversight Committee listened to testimony from retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor about a mysterious flying object that he and three others observed over the Pacific Ocean in 2004. The hearings riveted the world by bringing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) out of the “alien truther” realm and into the mainstream.

The U.S. Department of Defense is increasingly taking UAP—the new U.S. government name for objects formerly (and still more commonly) known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs)—as a serious threat to national security. Yet there is limited research on UAP sightings, making it hard to analyze patterns. 

Now, University of Utah geographers are contributing to this under-studied area. In a 2023 study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers attempted to understand whether local environmental factors affect the number of sighting reports. Reviewing 98,000 reports from the National UFO Research Center, the study authors found that most sightings occurred in the western U.S.—perhaps not surprising given the West’s historic association with UAP in locales like Nevada’s Area 51 and Roswell, New Mexico. The researchers attribute the prevalence of sightings to the West’s physical geography—lots of wide-open spaces and dark skies. UAP-reporting hot spots also had credible relationships with air traffic and military activity, suggesting that people are spotting real objects but not recognizing what they are.

“There’s more technology in the sky than ever before, so the question is, what are people actually seeing?” asks Richard Medina PhD’09, U associate professor of geography and study lead author. “It’s an important question to answer, because any uncertainty can be a potential threat to national security.”

Understanding the environmental context will make it easier to explain sightings and help identify truly anomalous objects that are a legitimate threat, the researchers say.