🌅 Today’s stat: 122,983

SOURCE

Medina & Brewer (2023)

WHAT TO KNOW

• The majority of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) sightings were located in the western part of the U.S., largely due to its geography of dark skies and wide-open spaces (the West also has a long history with aliens in Roswell, New Mexico and Utah’s Skinwalker Ranch). “Hot spot” locations with a high number of sightings over the past two decades were located mainly in the West and far Northeast regions, while “cold spots” were concentrated in the central plains and Southeast.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Hot spots for UAP sightings are credibly associated with air traffic and military activity, suggesting people are seeing real objects they simply don’t recognize. Sightings have also increased in recent years, which researchers believe is related to the massive growth in spacecraft launches and orbiters, like SpaceX’s Starlink system, and the ubiquity of personal drones.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• This past November, humanity’s first interstellar transmission seeking extraterrestrial intelligence, the famed Arecibo message, turned 50, marking five decades of sending its string of binary code into space. A recent study called for an update to Arecibo’s original 1s and 0s, adding basic information about math, biology, and physiology, and updating the map of the solar system in the original message to include a map of the Milky Way and the Earth itself.