Reports of unidentified objects in the sky nearly doubled in New York State last year as the COVID-19 pandemic tore through the U.S. According to the National U.F.O. Reporting Center [NUFORC], there were 289 sightings reported statewide, compared to 189 sightings reported in 2019. The increase in local sightings corresponds with a rise in reports nationwide, according to the NY Times.
Though the spike in U.F.O. sightings coincided with the pandemic, there is currently no evidence to suggest that aliens have been seeding Earth's clouds with coronavirus. Rather, those who take U.F.O. reports seriously and call themselves ufologists say the rise in reports is not caused by more aliens in the sky, but rather more people looking up. The theory is that more people have fled cities during the pandemic and relocated to areas with less light pollution. In addition, more people have been stuck at home with less to do.
“With the Covid thing, more people are looking up,” Chris DePerno, the assistant director of the New York State branch of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, told the Times. “They come up toward the Hudson Valley, it’s beautiful up there, you get clear skies and then all of a sudden you see this thing zipping through the sky, that stopped on a dime, goes straight up, takes off again, stops, comes back — we’re talking incredible speeds."
But there is no shortage of U.F.O. sightings in the city as well, as this interactive map shows.
The number of sightings in 2020 is still not as high as some recent years -- in 2012 there were 381 U.F.O. sightings in New York State. 2012 was also the year the Mayan calendar ended, which many feared portended the end of civilization. Did an army of aliens secretly save humanity from extinction that year? Check out this infographic and decide for yourself:
And it was in December of 2012 that several witnesses observed this strange phenomenon in the skies over Brooklyn:
Peter Davenport, NUFORC's director, told the Times that the uptick in reports does not mean there are more legitimate sightings, noting that the majority of reports his group receives wind up being explainable phenomena, like drones or bats. A U.F.O. sighting that stopped traffic in New Jersey last year, for example, was actually determined to be a Goodyear blimp. "A skilled U.F.O. investigator is one of the most skeptical people around," Davenport said.
NUFORC maintains a detailed log of U.F.O. sightings nationwide -- you can peruse the New York reports from their archive below (use the search bar to locate specific locations or phenomena) if you want to believe:
