This article attempts to understand how spatial variation in UAP reports is linked to environmental variables. Written by several authors, including Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of AARO, this analysis represents one of few attempts to examine this phenomenon at the national level and offers a starting point for a similar approach to be applied to U.S. Government data on UAP activity to help identify possible sources.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49527-x
It’s an interesting article working with some messy data.
The results from a hotspot analysis show a strong trend with many more population standardized sightings (i.e., county reports per 10,000 people) reported in the Western U.S. and in the very Northeast, along with some isolated areas including the tri-state border region of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, surrounding Evansville, Indiana, and the area surrounding Washington D.C. Clusters of low sighting reports are found through the central plains and in the southeast.
The authors make no hypotheses about what people are seeing, only that they will see more when and where they have opportunity to (i.e., without obstructions to block an observer’s viewpoint). The question remains, however, as to what these sighting reports are of. Further examination of regions where the model performs poorly, temporal trends, and reported details of each reported sighting may help further elucidate this.