The Year Everyone Was Home and Looking Up

In 2020, reports to the National UFO Reporting Center rose by roughly a thousand, to more than 7,200. 1 Sightings in New York nearly doubled to about 300. 1 Twenty per cent of that year's incidents were logged in April, at the height of American lockdown. 1 In Canada, researcher Chris Rutkowski counted 1,243 reports, a 46 per cent increase and one of the highest totals ever recorded there. 3

The intuitive explanation was that people confined at home had more time to look up, and that many had left cities for places with darker skies. 12

The intuitive explanation is partly wrong

A study published in 2023 examined it properly and found no association between report volume and mobility or pandemic health measures. 4 The researchers identified a different culprit: Starlink.

Regular launches began in late 2019, each putting up to sixty small satellites into orbit at once. They cross the sky in a distinctive train, they are easy to see, and enormous numbers of people reported them as UFOs. 4

The 2020 surge was substantially an artefact of a new commercial constellation. Any analysis that treats sighting counts as a measure of anomalous activity is measuring satellite launch cadence and public attention instead.

The 2025 surge, and the same trap

It happened again. NUFORC logged 2,174 reports in the first half of 2025 — a 46 per cent increase on the 1,492 recorded in the same period of 2024. 58

The obvious driver is not aerial. Between those two windows came the New Jersey drone wave, sustained congressional hearings, and a presidential promise to release the files. Attention rose; reporting followed. 6

The year-to-year record makes the volatility plain: 2,077 reports in the first half of 2023, 1,492 in the same period of 2024, 2,174 in 2025. 78 That is not a signal about the sky. It is a signal about the news.

Sighting counts are still worth collecting — they are the only continuous public record there is. They are simply not evidence of anything, and they are cited as evidence constantly.