UFO Sighting Reports Suggest NY Among Top Spots For Alien Visits

NEW YORK, NY – There's something out there, and it's checking us out. According to a new report, 5,141 UFOs were spotted in the skies over New York between 2001 and 2015, putting the state in sixth place in the country for the number of possible visits from space aliens.

According to the financial news and opinion site 24/7 Wall St., that’s 26 sightings for every 100,000 people.

Here are the top 10 places in the country for UFO sightings per 100,000 people.

1. Vermont
2. Oregon
3. Washington
4. Maine
5. New Hampshire
6. Arizona
7. New Mexico
8. Alaska
9. Montana
10. Idaho

In the book “UFO Sightings Desk Reference,” authors Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller Costa compiled reports from two government databases to highlight how sightings vary over time and between states. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the number of sightings to determine which states have the most per capita.

Sightings apparently depend heavily on the weather.

“[The sightings] are about when observers are available to be outside in nice weather, and whether they have leisure time,” Costa told the authors.

In the North, which typically sees colder winters, there are significantly more reported sightings over the summer as residents spend more time outside.

The most commonly reported UFO sightings, at 13 percent, appears as a mysterious light. Others include disks, spheres, cigar shapes, flashes and formations.

As intriguing as these are, don’t expect to see what one New Mexico police officer described in 1964. It would later be called “the best-documented case on record” by an investigator with the U.S. Air Force’s famous UFO investigation program, Project BLUE BOOK, according to the CIA.

Socorro patrolman Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding vehicle when he heard a loud roar and saw flames near the area of a dynamite shack. He abandoned the chase and drove through tough terrain to investigate, according to documents relating to the case.

At one point, he came upon an object roughly the size of a car about 800 feet away. There were one or two figures in white coveralls — he refused to describe them as “people” — and he assumed they were the occupants of the vehicle.

Once he was about 150 feet away, he proceeded on foot toward a white, “egg-shaped” object, which was standing on girder-like legs. The vehicle had red markings shaped like a crescent with a vertical arrow and horizontal line underneath. In the days following the incident, he said the oval object turned and saw him.

The object then began emitting sounds. The noise was unlike anything he’d ever heard, he said. Flames and smoke shot out of the bottom of the vehicle.

“It was as bluish, ahhh, bluish-orange flame,” Zamora told radio interviewer Walter Shrode. “I thought, this object was going to blow up, that’s why I started running back.”

Frightened, he rushed to get behind his police car. He bumped his leg and lost his glasses. While crouched and shielding his eyes, the noise stopped and, after another 10 seconds. It got eerily quiet.

“The sound ... disappeared,” he said. “It was very, very quiet; you could hear a pin drop, yeah.”

The object rose to about 15-20 feet off the ground. The flames and smoke stopped. The aircraft flew “very low to the ground” and then traveled up to a perlite mill before gaining altitude, Zamora said. It cleared the dynamite shack by maybe 3 feet.

Hector Quintanilla, the last chief officer of Project BLUE BOOK, led the Zamora investigation. His team concluded Zamora did not fabricate the story. Despite an extremely thorough probe, investigators were never able to find the object or determine where it came from.

The case remains unsolved.

Written by Dan Hampton on the Patch national desk.

Photo credit: Shutterstock