NUFORC’s public sighting index by month reveals a striking anomaly in the data: December 2024 produced 985 sighting reports — nearly triple the typical monthly average of 300–400, and more than any other recent month on record. The cause is identifiable: the New Jersey drone incident that dominated US national news in late November and December 2024, generating mass public attention to anything unusual in the sky.
The Monthly Data
Recent NUFORC monthly counts from the public index: May 2026: 35 (month in progress); April 2026: 196; March 2026: 197; February 2026: 176; January 2026: 279; December 2025: 262; November 2025: 392; October 2025: 420; September 2025: 343; August 2025: 359; Summer 2025 average: ~360/month; January 2025: 581; December 2024: 985. The January 2025 spike (581) is the immediate follow-on to December 2024 — the tail of the same media cycle. Combined, the two months produced 1,566 reports. The rest of 2025 normalised to 300–420 per month.
California Leads by State with 17,143 Reports
NUFORC’s state-by-state index is the most granular public UAP frequency map available for the United States. California leads with 17,143 reports. Florida: 8,874. Texas: 6,711. New York: 6,335. Pennsylvania: 5,386. Arizona: 5,337. Ohio: 4,724. Illinois: 4,515. Michigan: 3,897. North Carolina: 3,908. Oregon: 3,807. Colorado: 3,573. The state distribution correlates partially with population density but diverges in key areas — Pennsylvania and Arizona both outperform their population ranking, and Oregon’s count is disproportionate to its population size. Lincoln County, Nevada — the home of Area 51 — has the highest per capita sighting rate of any county in the United States.
Signal vs Noise
The December 2024 spike demonstrates the core analytical challenge for civilian UAP databases: mass media coverage generates mass reporting, most of which is misidentification of known objects by newly alert observers. NUFORC’s tier system addresses this directly — Tier 1 cases (structured craft at close range) are the signal. The 985 December 2024 reports contained a very small number of Tier 1 cases amid a large volume of Tier 4 drone and aircraft misidentifications. The AARO-NUFORC workshop in August 2025 directly addressed this challenge: how to apply AI to large-scale narrative datasets to separate anomalous cases from explained ones at volume.
Source: nuforc.org/ndx/?id=event (NUFORC Reports by Month). nuforc.org/ndx/?id=loc (NUFORC Reports by Location). nuforc.org/spotlight-on-nevada.