America’s UFO hotspots revealed in a new map of nearly 100,000 sightings spanning two decades… is YOUR hometown in the ‘red zone?’

The first step toward identifying what unidentified flying objects (UFOs) actually are could be mapping where these riddles are most commonly observed, a new study says.

Geographers with the University of Utah, in collaboration with recently retired Pentagon UFO chief Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick – roughly 98,000 UFO reports over a twenty-year period in the 21st century, from 2001 to 2020.

The researchers aggressively compared the data based on local population density, light pollution levels, annual cloud cover, “tree canopy” coverage, proximity to airports and military bases, and a host of other factors that influence the number of UFO sightings.

What they found was statistical evidence of the long-supposed “historical relationship” between UFOs and the American West.

Their county-by-county review of their research revealed hotspots or “red zones,” mostly just east of the Rockies or toward the Pacific Ocean, but also a few odd outliers, including Georgetown County, South Carolina and Union, Kentucky.

“The West has a historic relationship with UAP – Area 51 in Nevada, Roswell in New Mexico,” the study’s lead author, Richard Medina, said in a statement.

“And here in Utah we have Skinwalker Ranch in the Uinta Basin and military activities at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground,” Medina, a associate professor of geography at the University of Utah, noted.

“In addition, there is a robust outdoor community that recreates on public lands year-round. People are outside and looking up at the sky.”

While these explanations held true for the deep red hotspots that covered most of Nevada and New Mexico, the study authors were more perplexed about the equally deep red counties in Oregon and Washington state.

These rainy and “relatively cloudy” northwestern Pacific states, they noted, are known more for being shrouded in fog than for being prime sky-watching areas.

“There are also some isolated provinces in the rest of the country that warrant further investigation,” they wrote in the journal Scientific reports‘to identify which properties may generate relatively more UAP attention (i.e. UFO attention).’

Counties in Maine, Vermont, Indiana, Arkansas and Nebraska were some of the more unexplained hotspots revealed by the team’s analysis.

To break down their sighting research by county, Median and his co-authors focused on two main criteria to compare against the UFO sighting reports.

First, they compared the observation statistics obtained from the citizen National UFO Research Centerusing a measure they called “sky vision potential,” an amalgam of data about how physically likely it would be to spot something interesting in the near sky.

To assess each province’s ‘sky view potential’, they pooled data on each area light pollution, cloud cover and canopy coverage – as well as the likelihood that strange or frequent objects would be in the sky from nearby airports and military bases.

“The idea is that if you have a chance to see something, you’re more likely to see unexplained phenomena in the sky,” Medina says.

‘There is more technology in the air than ever before, so the question is: what do people actually see? It’s a difficult question to answer, and an important one, because any uncertainty is a potential threat to national security.”

The geographers attributed the higher percentage of sightings in the West to the desert southwest’s wide-open natural areas and dark skies, unaffected by big city lights or industrial smog.

They discovered it was a big UFO case hotspots showed a striking relationship with local air traffic and military installation activities, a clue that could indicate that witnesses often see real terrestrial objects that they simply did not recognize.

The team hopes that this geographic analysis will help government agencies better separate truly abnormal airborne events from routine flights, thus uncovering any legitimate security threat.