The skies of Pennsylvania appear to be packed with unidentified flying objects, UFOs.
Pennsylvanians haven’t reported sightings at anywhere near the rate of the top reporting city in the country. Residents of Gila Bend, Arizona, about 470 miles west of Roswell, New Mexico, since 1914 have reported UFOs at a rate of 1,193.89 per 100,000 people.
Pennsylvania’s top reporting city, West Chester, has seen a rate of 154.63 UFO sighting reports per 100,000 people in that same period.
The Insights team at TruePeopleSearch, an online people-searching service, did an analysis of the National UFO Reporting Center’s database of more than 80,000 unidentified flying object reports from 1910-2014 in the U.S. and Canada to come up with rates that could be compared across cities and similar areas.
West Chester ranked at No. 31 on the resulting list of 447 cities.
Other Pennsylvania cities on that list are York, 79.33 reported sightings per 100,000 people, ranked at No. 77; Harrisburg, 73.13, No. 83; State College, 66.11, No. 100; Lancaster, 58.903, No. 116; Erie, 50.79, No. 145; Reading, 47.46, No. 159; Pittsburgh, 39.53, No. 206; Allentown, 34.59, No. 238; and Philadelphia, 7.64; No. 436.
While the rankings are based on the calculated rate of reported sightings per 100,000 people, the actual number of sightings reported in the Pennsylvania cities were West Chester, 31; York, 35; Harrisburg, 36; State College, 28; Lancaster, 35; Erie, 49; Reading, 42; Pittsburgh 119; Allentown, 42; and Philadelphia, 121.
The top reporting cities across the U.S. were Gila Bend, Arizona, 1,193.88 reports per 100,000 people; Surfside Beach, South Carolina, 671.44; Sedona, Arizona, 667.63; Sonora, California, 554.42; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 507.26; Cumming, Georgia, 486.19; Ocean City, Maryland, 389.78; North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 380.14; and Lincoln City, Oregon, 354.85.
In releasing their report, the Insights team noted, “There’s no way for us to definitively separate the hoaxes from the ‘real’ UFO sightings, but it’s our theory that a higher frequency of sightings correlates with a higher percentage of reports from people who believe they have genuinely seen something in the sky that they cannot explain: a UFO.”
A UFO is “an airborne anomaly that the observer is unable to explain or immediately identify. Most unexplained aerial phenomena are identified upon investigation with common explanations such as airplanes, weather balloons and meteors. UFOs and extraterrestrials are not synonymous, but the term is most commonly used in relation to suspected spaceship and alien sightings.”
The most commonly reported UFO type is an unexplained light in the sky. Among the other most reported UFO types are triangles, circles, fireballs, disks, sphere, cigars, cylinders, chevrons, eggs and cones.
The Insights team ran the numbers on reported UFO types and found that unexplained light accounted for 16,498 reports, followed by triangles at 7,913; circle, 7,603; fireball, 6,104; other shape, 5,695; disk, 5,393; sphere, 5,252; oval, 3,753; formation, 2,433; cigars, 2,031; changing, 1,971; flash, 1,362; rectangle, 1,304; cylinder, 1,277; diamond, 1,178; chevron, 959; egg, 743; teardrop, 727; cone, 316; and cross, 240. There were 8,604 reports of unknown shapes.
