Source: Patch.com

The idea that we’re not alone and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft has long fascinated us. Thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, are filed every year.

Colorado is ranked #17 for the most reported UFOs sightings per capita in the nation, according to a new report by analysts at Satellite Internet.

The analysts used data from the National UFO Reporting Center and the U.S. Census to find out which states have the most reported UFO sightings per capita from 2019 to June 2020. There were 235 sightings in Colorado during that time period.

States with the most sightings

1. Idaho

2. Montana

3. New Hampshire

4. Maine

5. New Mexico

States with the fewest sightings

1. Texas

2. Louisiana

3. New York

4. Maryland

5. Illinois

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”

Although the objects Arnold claimed to see weren’t saucer-shaped at all, his analogy led to the popularization of the term “flying saucers.” And since then, Americans have been more or less obsessed with the idea that alien life is among us.

It may be easy to scoff at some of the eyewitness accounts on the National UFO Reporting Center, but the idea of intergalactic travel got a boost when information emerged from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million, multi-year program that began in 2007 to investigate “unidentified aerial phenomena,” according to reports by The New York Times and Politico.

Source: Patch.com