Why is the Evansville area a UFO hotspot? Study lists Evansville as ‘credible’ UFO hotspot

EVANSVILLE – Researchers with the University of Utah have used geographical data to identify the most credible UFO “hotspots” in the country.

Most of them were out west – home of Area 51, Roswell and Skinwalker Ranch – or in the northeast. But there was an exception: the Evansville area.

The study, led by a pair of geography professors, was first published in the journal Scientific Reports in December, but started making the rounds across the Internet late last month. It listed Vanderburgh County and other TriState locales among the highest likelihood in the country for a “credible” sighting of “unidentified aerial phenomena” − the newfangled moniker for UFO.

But “credible” doesn’t necessarily mean alien spacecraft.

According to the paper, researchers used “sky view potential” (light pollution, cloud cover, etc.) and “the potential for objects to be present in the sky” (proximity to airports and military installations) to determine the chances of seeing flying crafts that a lay person may not be able to pinpoint. They reasoned that if there are more objects darting around, and clear skies to see them in, more sightings will crop up.

They then examined 20 years of data collected by the National UFO Reporting Center, which breaks down sightings by location, and studied areas with lots of UFO reports (like Evansville) or scant UFO reports (like most of the Midwest).

The results? Multiple Tri-State counties, including Vanderburgh, were listed as hotspots with a 95% or 99% credibility rating.

“The results from a hotspot analysis ... show a strong trend with many more population standardized sightings (i.e., county reports per 10,000 people) reported in the Western U.S. and in the very Northeast, along with

some isolated areas including the tristate border region of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, surrounding Evansville, Indiana,” the report reads in part.

The high rates of sightings out west make sense for several reasons, researchers said.

For one, the desert climates of New Mexico, Arizona and California are largely devoid of “canopy cover” from tall trees, giving residents a clear view of those bright, expansive skies. People are also outdoors a lot due to yearlong warm weather, giving them plenty of chances to crane their heads upward.

But perhaps most importantly, those areas brim with what researchers called “paranormal ideation” – thanks in part to marinating in UFO culture since the alleged crash of a flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. (For the record, the Air Force blamed the saucer sighting on a weather balloon. And the aliens people reported seeing were merely “anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft.”)

Other hotspots, though, aren’t so easily explained.

Take the Pacific Northwest. There’s plenty of paranormal ideation there, but heavy rainfall keeps the night sky covered, making UFO sightings difficult to ascertain. Authors don’t provide much reasoning for the spike in the Northeastern U.S., either, nor the other sporadic areas of the map that burn red or deep orange, including Evansville.

But this area has a deep history of UFO and other paranormal sightings. In 1923, long before UFO culture seized the west, a boy named Norman Massie led a horse into a pasture on his family’s property in Mount Erie, Illinois and found an otherworldly spacecraft waiting for him.

It had “lights all around it,” he told columnist Len Wells in 1998. “... The machine was metallic and stood on three legs. The top was a dome with holes in it. The best way I could describe the top was it looked like melted glass.”

He even claimed he saw men milling around inside it. One, he said, was referred to as “The Commander.”

Massie would go on to become a respected teacher and coach in Southern Illinois before dying in 2004 at the age of 91. He never changed his story.

Then came the aftermath of Roswell in ‘47. On July 8 of that year, three people were sunbathing on the roof of the old Downtown Evansville YMCA around 1:30 when they saw what Courier archives described as a “big red disk.” A couple hours later that same day, a man called the Courier and said he’d been flying in a small airplane with another man when six 15-foot-long saucers swarmed them.

Sightings continued into each subsequent decade. The last high-profile one came in 2021, when an EPD officer reported seeing a string of strange lights blinking over the South Side.

“What are those lights?” he said in a video EPD later uploaded to its Facebook page. “What are those, man?”

According to the National UFO Reporting Center, sightings are still happening. The last one listed in the database occurred on Feb. 21, when a cylindrical object appeared in the south skies around 6:30 p.m. and dashed west.

In the paper published in December, researchers admitted that UFO data could be biased. “If your goal is to see a UAP, you may very well see one given the opportunity,” they wrote.

But other reports came from people who didn’t believe in strange aerial phenomena before they saw it themselves. And some even stepped forward despite fears of being mocked or ostracized.

“The stigma given to this area of research, if it is explored scientifically, should be over,” researchers wrote. “We make no hypotheses about what people are seeing, only that they will see more when and where they have opportunity to.

“The question remains, however, as to what these sighting reports are of.”