In February, I spoke at the 2015 international UFO Congress. The presentation was called “200 years of UFOs over New York.” After my presentation, a number of UFO researchers and academics asked me if I knew where the UFO hot spots were in New York. My honest answer at the time was that it would require a county by county study of UFO sightings over a specific period of time.

To be honest, the results of my research shocked and surprised both myself and several other researchers. As a result of my study, the mystery of UFO sightings in New York became even more mysterious.

I decided to study the years 1999 through 2014. This gave me 15 years to work with; a base of some 4,647 UFO sightings. I polled data from the MUFON and NUFORC databases. Sorting out the County data with the MUFON database was straightforward, as they track the cities and counties of sightings. The NUFORC database does not track county information, so I was required to look up the counties from the cities logged with over 3,500 sightings. The work was tedious and took my evenings away for over two months.

When I began the study, I used the county breakdowns from New York’s 10 economic districts. So, let’s start with Western New York district. The range of UFO sightings over 15 years for four counties was between 18 and 80, except for Erie County, which had 305. Any Ufologist in New York could have concluded that Erie County is a UFO hot spot. The high rate of sightings there has been called the “Lake Erie effect,” and is a well-known phenomenon.

The real surprise was when we looked at the nine counties of the Finger Lakes district. The range of UFO sightings over 15 years for the counties was between 8 and 41, which is about what we expected. Monroe County had 212 UFO sightings for the same period. This shocked over a dozen Ufologists from around the state. The question that was raised in UFO chat rooms was: Is there a “Lake Ontario Effect?” We just don’t know.

Moving to the Southern tier and Central New York districts, again the data showed low UFO sighting counts in most of the counties in each of the two districts. In Central New York, Onondaga County is the UFO hot spot with UFO sightings 100 percent higher than neighboring counties. In the Southern tier, the sighting model was slightly different, with both Broome and Delaware counties being the heavy UFO sighting locations over their neighboring counties.

In the North country, St. Lawerence County dominated the other counties in the region.

If you are beginning to sense a pattern, you are not alone. From the beginning of the project, I had a nagging hint of a suspected pattern with regard to the UFO hot spots, but it would take many months to come up with a plausible hypotheses.

In part two of this miniseries, I will discuss the Mohawk and the Hudson Valley and the astonishment the data presented there.

Let’s take a look at some recent UFO sighting in New York Skies

Oct. 11, 2015: At 7:30 a.m., a Binghamton resident observed a diamond-shaped UFO with fireball UFO’s accompanying it on each of the diamond’s points.

Oct. 11, 2015: At 7:00 p.m., a resident of Poughkeepsie witnessed three bright orange orbs hovering over a local college.

Oct. 11, 2015: At 8 p.m., a resident of North Tonawanda reported a strange airborne craft over Lake Erie.

Oct. 16, 2015: At 9 p.m., a resident of Schenectady observed an orange ball of light that grew from the size of a star in the sky to the size of a marble.

If you are interested in joining a monthly UFO discussion group in the Onondaga County area, drop Cheryl an email NYSkies@DragonLadyMedia.com. If you have a UFO sighting to report, you can use either one of the two national database services: nuforc.org or mufon.com. Both services respect confidentiality.

Cheryl Costa would love to hear the when, where and what of your New York sighting. Email it to NYSkies@DragonLadyMedia.com. The names of witnesses will be omitted to protect their privacy.

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