Well hey, E.T.: Cities across the Carolinas report many UFO sightings, new study says
Charlotte has managed to beam itself up into the ranking of the top 10 largest North American cities for total UFO sightings in the past century, a new study shows.
And other cities in the Carolinas made related lists for sightings per capita, including Wilmington, Asheville and Myrtle Beach.
The Queen City’s 153 sightings of mysterious lights, discs and orbs in the sky since 1910 had Charlotte ranked ninth among the 25 largest cities by population and tops in North Carolina. That’s according to San Francisco-based True People Search, which compiled the rankings based on sightings people sent to the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Wash.
Founded in 1974, the non-profit center maintains a public database of “objective UFO data,” according to its website. It offers an online form and telephone hotline to report sightings.
The people-finder website analyzed more than 80,000 reported UFO sightings in the U.S. and Canada. It then narrowed the list to 446 cities with 25 or more total sightings over 114 years, through 2014, Mitchell Barrick, content director for True People Search Insights told The Charlotte Observer in an email Wednesday.
Seattle topped the list of major cities with 620 sightings, more than double second-place Phoenix. Jacksonville, Fla., was the only other Eastern U.S. city in the top 10, falling just one sighting shy of Charlotte’s overall total.
Charlotte and the lights
Unexplained light in the sky is the most commonly reported type of UFO in the U.S., “and this holds true for Charlotte,” Barrick said.
Charlotteans reported 33 such light sightings from 1910 through 2014, he said.
“These can often be explained as terrestrial aircraft, stars, space stations, comets, meteorites and so on,” Barrick said. The second most commonly sighted UFO shape in Charlotte was a circle, with 15 reports, he said.
Nationwide, according to the study, “lights have been reported to move in weird patterns, flash, appear and disappear, display in a formation, and more. While some lights can be explained as an aircraft originating from Earth, a meteor, or satellites, some reports have remained shrouded in mystery.”
Other commonly reported objects in the U.S. include triangles, circles, fireballs, disks, sphere, snake-like UFOs (cigars and cylinders), chevrons, eggs and cones.
Other Carolina cities
While Charlotte had the most total UFO sightings in North Carolina, the city ranks a paltry 374th in North America when adjusting for population and sixth in North Carolina, according to the report.
Charlotte had 17 reported UFO sightings per 100,000 people.
Three S.C. cities placed in the North American top 10 list for per capita sightings: Surfside Beach at No. 3 with 671 sightings per 100,000 people; Myrtle Beach at No. 6 with 507. sightings; and North Myrtle Beach No. 9 with 380 sightings.
Wilmington ranked highest in North Carolina. Its 58 sightings translated to 47 sightings per 100,000 people, good for 162nd place in North America.
Following Wilmington in the per capita category were Asheville, 43 sightings, 168th place; Gastonia, 25 sightings, 252nd place; Fayetteville, 43 sightings, 351st place; and Greensboro, 56 sightings, 364th place.
Trailing Charlotte in North Carolina’s top 10 ranking for UFO sightings per 100,000 people: Cary, 28 sightings, 387th place; Raleigh, 78 sightings, 388th place; Durham, 33 sightings, 422nd place; and Winston-Salem, 27 sightings, 428th place.
Of its overall UFO findings in North America, True People Search said in its study it had no way “to definitively separate the hoaxes from the ‘real’ UFO sightings.
“But it’s our theory that a higher frequency of sightings correlates with a higher percentage of reports from people who believe they have genuinely seen something in the sky that they cannot explain: a UFO.”
Carolinas coast a UFO hotbed
Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, said he was unfamiliar with the True People Search study and no one from the study had contacted him about it.
He questioned the validity of the rankings for including reports to the center of sightings that turned out to have more earth-bound explanations.
Still, Davenport told the Observer on Thursday, the center has received a spate of recent UFO reports from the Carolinas coast. People have reported red, orange, yellow, amber and gold lights in the sky above the Atlantic Ocean — lights with no earthly explanation, he said.
The center’s homepage highlights this Aug. 18 sighting in Conway, S.C.: “A retired senior law enforcement official, while out sky-watching, observes a tiny, white colored, strobing light fly overhead from NNE to SSW. The object is joined by a second similar object, and then two more, for a total of four objects.
“Because of the strobing, and because of the direction the objects were traveling, the witness doubted whether they could have been ‘Starlink’ satellites. “
Mystery in the NC mountains
Finally, there is one well-known, unknown phenomena associated with the Carolinas. For more than a century, mysterious apparitions known as the Brown Mountain Lights have been reported in the North Carolina highlands.
In summer 2016, a scientific team from Appalachian State University captured on video a bright orb that “suddenly appeared and then vanished” high above a Brown Mountain ridge, the Observer reported at the time.
“Then it came back, same spot,” the Observer reported. “And then an encore.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 3:07 PM with the headline "Well hey, E.T.: Cities across the Carolinas report many UFO sightings, new study says."