Alien Arrivals Nosedive in 2023!

Where have all the interstellar tourists gone? That's the question gripping the world after a bombshell report revealed a staggering 19% drop in alien visitation in 2023! Is this a sign of a permanent shift in galactic travel? Or can the Earth win back alien vacationers?

According to the National UFO Reporting Center sightings of little green tourists were down 19% in 2023 compared to 2022. Could it be that humanity's warmongering and environmental pillaging have finally driven the aliens away in disgust? Or maybe this sudden drop in alien tourism is a prelude to something far more sinister. Are the aliens simply regrouping, preparing for a full-scale invasion?

US UFO Sightings map compared to a population density map from Visual Capitalist

Perhaps it is time someone took a deep-dive into the data to discover the real reasons for the alarming drop in alien probing in 2023. One common comment on the National UFO Reporting Center's map of UFO Sightings is that it closely resembles a population map of the United States. The implication of this criticism is that the National UFO Reporting Center map is much better at showing where people live in the US than it is at showing where aliens are actually visiting.

Thankfully Axios has gone to the trouble of normalizing the National UFO Reporting Center's data for 2000-2023 to create a Reported UFO sightings per 100k residents map at the county level. Now we can see where in the United States more UFO sightings are being made per person than in other areas of the country.

The Axios map reveals that the further west you travel in the United States then the more likely you are to be visited by aliens. Axios claims that their map 'roughly correlates to dark sky locations'. Unfortunately the Axios map also leaves us in the dark as to why alien sightings fell so dramatically last year compared to 2022.

(Someone at Axios also forgot to add the locations of all the airbases in the United States to the UFO sightings map. Not that I'm in any way suggesting that anyone is likely to mistake an aircraft for a flying saucer in the middle of the night).