In its Fiscal Year 2024 annual report on unidentified anomalous phenomena, published November 14, 2024, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office drew a global map of UAP reporting hotspots. Four regions stood out: the southeastern United States and Gulf of Mexico, the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, the Middle East, and northeastern Asia near Japan and the Korean peninsula. Then, according to Universe Today's account of the report, AARO added a caveat that undercuts the map's mystique on its own terms — the pattern reflects, in the office's own language as quoted by Universe Today, a "continued geographic collection bias based on locations near U.S. military assets and sensors operating globally."
That's not a debunking. It's an admission, from the agency built to resolve these cases, that its own hotspot map is substantially a map of where the Pentagon is looking. That single sentence turns out to be the thesis of nearly every serious study of UAP geography produced in the last three years — academic, governmental, and commercial alike. Sighting density tracks exposure: population, air traffic, military footprint, dark skies, and the reach of whatever reporting system happens to exist that year. Nobody who has actually run the numbers claims otherwise, and the pattern is consistent enough, across independent datasets, that it deserves to be reported as a finding rather than hedged into oblivion.
Start with the numbers themselves, because they move a lot depending on who's counting and how. The NASA-commissioned Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team, in its 2023 final report, noted that only 263 reports had been filed in the 17 years prior to March 2021 — a trickle, consistent with a reporting system that, as the same report states, did not exist in standardized form; FAA guidance at the time simply told citizens to contact local law enforcement or non-governmental groups. Compare that to AARO's Fiscal Year 2024 report: 757 UAP reports received in a single 13-month period (May 2023 to June 2024), 485 of them from incidents in that window and 272 backlogged from 2021–2022, bringing AARO's total holdings to 1,652 reports. That is not evidence of a sudden proliferation of anomalous objects. It is what happens when a reporting pipeline gets built. Of the reports AARO received in that period, 392 arrived via the FAA — meaning nearly half the Pentagon's case load now comes through a single civilian aviation channel that barely existed for this purpose a few years earlier.
What the outside studies found
RAND researchers, led by Marek Posard, examined a much larger public dataset — more than 101,151 reports across 12,783 U.S. Census Bureau-designated places, according to AeroTime's account of the study. Their headline finding, as reported by Military Times and PopSci, was that UFO-type sightings cluster near military training airspace, and RAND's recommendation was for the U.S. government to build a standardized public reporting system to fix the data problem, not to chase the sightings themselves. AeroTime also reported a striking side effect: Google searches for the term "UFO" rose roughly 4.88 times in the United States and 5.25 times globally in the aftermath of the July 26, 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing — the same hearing at which David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified, according to both PopSci and Military Times. A month before that, in July 2023, retired Navy commander David Fravor testified to the same committee about a Tic Tac-shaped object he says he and three others observed over the Pacific Ocean in 2004. ScienceDaily's account of that hearing quotes Fravor describing an object that "had just traveled 60 miles in…less than a minute, was far superior in performance to my brand-new F/A-18F and did not operate with any of the known aerodynamic principles that we expect for objects that fly in our atmosphere." Public attention spiked around that hearing — which is itself a data point about reporting behavior, not necessarily about the sky.
A separate, peer-reviewed effort — published in Scientific Reports and led by University of Utah geographers Richard Medina and Simon Brewer, with Sean Kirkpatrick as a co-author — ran a Bayesian regression on more than 98,000 publicly reported sightings from the National UFO Reporting Center covering 2001 to 2020. ScienceDaily's writeup of the study, which credited Kirkpatrick as the AARO's first director in its own account (a credential attributed to ScienceDaily's reporting rather than independently confirmed here), quoted Medina saying, "If you have a chance to see something, then it's more likely that you're going to see unexplained phenomena in the sky." The model tied sighting density to "sky view potential" — light pollution, tree canopy, cloud cover — and to proximity to airports and military installations. Medina and Brewer's own paper is explicit about the limits of the underlying data: NUFORC is a public, self-reporting system with no mechanism to verify hoaxes, and the study assumed each report was independent even when many people report the same event.
"If you have a chance to see something, then it's more likely that you're going to see unexplained phenomena in the sky."
A Datawrapper visualization built on 112,914 NUFORC-submitted sightings from 2000 to 2023 shows the same geography at the county level: the western half of the country reports far more sightings per 100,000 residents than the eastern half, with additional clusters in New England and along the Carolina coast. Lincoln County, Nevada — home to Area 51 — tops the list at 820.9 sightings per 100,000 residents. Why that particular county leads the per-capita rankings, whether it's proximity to restricted airspace, tourism drawn by the base's own mythology, or something else, is not established by the data shown here; it remains, plainly, an open question.
Newsweek's reporting on Enigma Labs' crowdsourced database — more than 33,000 published U.S. sightings collected through an app launched in 2022 and 2023 — found California, Florida, Texas, and New York leading in raw counts. Newsweek's own framing cautioned that populous states with wide-open skies report more, and that many sightings are later identified as aircraft, drones, satellites, weather balloons, or rocket launches, especially in states with major military installations, space industry hubs, or heavy air traffic. Enigma says it filters hoaxes and duplicates, but its public totals reflect published reports, not confirmed unidentified phenomena — an important distinction Newsweek's piece states directly.
The stigma problem, and the one place the record disagrees with itself
The NASA study team's central finding was less about geography than about the plumbing: the negative perception surrounding UAP reporting, its report states, poses an obstacle to collecting data on the phenomena in the first place, and NASA's involvement was framed explicitly as a way to reduce that stigma. That claim sits in tension with another item in this record — a claim, sourced separately, that UFO truthers were not satisfied with the disclosure of UAP. The document underlying that second claim was not made available for close review here, so it's worth flagging the tension rather than resolving it: does more official transparency reduce stigma and improve reporting, as NASA's panel argues, or does it fail to satisfy the audience most invested in the subject, leaving the reporting problem where it started? The record as assembled doesn't settle that.
What would settle the larger question — whether any of these hotspots reflect something beyond exposure and collection bias — is also stated plainly in this record's own falsification criteria: if sighting hotspots remain stable and strongly elevated after researchers control comprehensively for population, darkness, air traffic, military airspace, camera and internet adoption, and reporting-system coverage, that residual would be worth chasing. No study reviewed here has yet run that full, combined model. RAND, the Utah/Nature team, and AARO's own analysts have each tested pieces of it — military proximity, sky darkness, collection channel — and each piece points the same direction. Nobody has yet published the composite, exposure-adjusted residual map the original research question here was built to find. That gap — a rigorous, denominator-aware, all-variables-controlled national UAP density model, built from AARO's, NUFORC's, and FAA's underlying data rather than any single agency's partial slice of it — is the specific document that doesn't yet exist. Its eventual publication, or a credible attempt at one, is what would actually move this story past exposure and into evidence.
In the meantime, NASA's 2023 recommendation that AARO and NASA jointly build a standardized federal civilian reporting system, and a crowdsourced data-collection partnership, remains, per the open questions in this record, unconfirmed as implemented. Whether that system gets built — and whether anyone then runs the full exposure-adjusted analysis on it — is the next thing worth watching.