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New York UFO Sightings Are On The Rise. Why? New York UFO Sightings Are On The Rise. Why?

By Lucy Cardon

Lucy Cardon: For residents of New York, this past year has been one of more: more worry, more caution, more distance. It’s also brought something more distant – something a little out of this world.

Hannah Zanin: I feel like there’s got to be something else out there, but I don’t know if it’s in the way that we’re thinking it is. Like, UFO’s and green little alien guys.

Cardon: About those guys…

Juliana Cirillo: I think that we as a society aren’t ready for the technology and the information that they have. Like, we’re not as developed as they are.

Cardon: Maybe not. Unidentified flying objects. Researchers estimate that only about 30% of sightings actually fit the criteria, and if you’re thinking X Files, UFO Researcher Cheryl Costa has a bit of a different story to tell.

Cheryl Costa: We can’t tell you who they are, we can’t tell you where they’re from, we can’t tell you how they’re propelled, we can’t tell you how they span the vast distances.

Cardon: What she can tell is data, and the simple reason she believes sightings rise and fall.

Costa: All the numbers falling off in 2017, going down, they were tanking. And everybody’s yelling and screaming ‘oh they went home, oh they’re frustrated with us, oh, Space Force chased them away!’ You know, I kept telling everybody, anybody who would ask me, I said ‘guys, it’s part of a natural cycle.’

Cardon: And she says there’s another factor too – one we’ve become all too accustomed too.

Costa: When we went into the lockdown, I got phone calls from a lot of fans saying ‘this is your laboratory to test leisure time because we’re all locked down.’ And by golly, the number for March and April in 2020 went through the roof.

Cardon: More sightings? Costa’s data seems to say yes. Aliens in Syracuse? Maybe, maybe not. But take a look up at the sky sometime, and you might just see something unidentifiable overhead. Lucy Cardon, NCC News.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) – UFOs have long been a topic of skeptical conversation. It’s a byproduct of their very nature; they’re unidentified, unknown, often unbelievable.

According to UFO researcher Cheryl Costa, they’re also growing in frequency. Reported sightings in the United States began skyrocketing in 2019, leading to an increase of almost 3,000 cases compared to the year prior. In 2020, that number went up by another 1,352, leaving the country with a combined total of over 11,000 sightings.

“2020 shook out to be the best year since 2012, similar numbers,” Costa said. “So they’re back.”

The phenomenon isn’t just a case of nationwide averages. New York, which regularly ranks in the top ten states for sightings, experienced an almost identical uptick. According to Costa’s data, the answer lies in a multi-year cycle that’s seen sighting counts rise and fall for decades.

There are other factors at play, too. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly boosted the amount of time Americans spend at home, leaving everyone with a little more time to look up at the sky. Constant improvements in technology, too, have enabled more people to access the internet and report their sightings.

“Too often, you google stuff about UFOs online, and you hear people raving about something that happened in 1957… there’s plenty of stuff going on in the 21st century, let’s write about that,” Costa said.

Something unknown in the sky, or just a trick of the eye? At least for now, the answer is unclear. The goal, Costa said, is simply to open the public’s eyes to a new world of possibility, one that is as-yet unidentifiable.

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