What if someone actually ran the numbers — 20 years of UFO sighting data, broken down by state, county, ZIP code, season, and time of day? Our guest did exactly that, and the results don't look like what most people expect. Cheryl Costa is a statistician, journalist, combat veteran, and former Lockheed Martin IT professional who spent seven years writing a UFO column for the Syracuse New Times. She is the co-author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference series — including a 20-year statistical analysis covering all 50 states down to the ZIP code level — and has been cited by Congressional staffers and covered by the New York Times. Top 5 Takeaways:

1. The U.S. averages 23 UFO sightings per day — and even throwing out 99% of reports still leaves numbers most editors won't print.
2. The hottest ZIP code in the country for sightings is Downtown Phoenix (85001) — not the locations TV producers keep asking about.
3. UFO sightings cluster around large bodies of water, geological fault lines, and active military installations with nuclear technology — not nuclear power plants.
4. Only 1 in 257 people who see something actually report it — which means the raw reported numbers may represent a fraction of actual observations.
5. The so-called "media contagion" effect turns out to be largely retroactive reporting — people filing old sightings after a local story runs, not just copycats.

Topics Discussed:

• How Cheryl went from flunking high school geometry to publishing 52 UFO statistics books
• The 20-year dataset covering 167,000 U.S. sightings broken down by state, county, and ZIP code
• Why February is the worst month for sightings anywhere in the United States
• The five main drivers of sighting volume: population, temperate weather, leisure time, hours of darkness, and broadband access
• Why Los Angeles County leads all counties nationally despite heavy light pollution
• The 2008 Indiana "Kokomo Lights" — a state averaging 3 sightings a week logged 25 in a single day
• CIA and Project Blue Book internal documents wrestling with the same seasonal patterns Cheryl's data confirms
• The theory that nuclear detonations in 1945 may have opened something — and what that could mean
• CERN research into fifth-dimensional travel and what it might explain about how these craft get here
• Cheryl's own first sighting in 1965, a Vietnam-era encounter on Christmas Eve, and decades of personal experiences she kept private while under security clearance

Stories Discussed:

• Cheryl recalls her family pulling over on a dirt road in upstate New York in 1965, watching a sphere hang motionless in a clear blue sky — her mother suggesting it might be "people from another world."
• She describes a Christmas Eve 1971 encounter at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, where a light crossed the sky, stopped mid-air, then began moving in ways neither she nor her companion could explain.
• She recounts the moment she challenged a government security officer threatening to revoke her clearance — and how appearing on national television before he came back turned the meeting on its head.
• She walks through the April 16, 2008 Indiana spike — a state that rarely exceeds three sightings a week logging 25 in a single day, later identified as the "Kokomo Lights" cluster.
• She shares the conversation with Linda over breakfast where she disclosed her own ongoing experiences — and Linda's matter-of-fact response after decades in the UFO research community.

Memorable Quote: "If you throw away 99% of the sightings, you still have seven a month for 240 consecutive months. That's still newsworthy."

Cheryl Costa – Career Data Analyst Cheryl Costa Is a two-service military veteran USAF & USN and a retired professional from the aerospace industry. Cheryl, as a journalist, wrote the wildly popular UFO column “New York Skies” for SyracuseNewTimes.com (2013-2019). She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York at Empire State College in Entertainment Writing and Production. She received the "Researcher of the Year-2018" award from the International UFO Congress. Syracuse Times: 7 years of Cheryl's newspaper column https://syracusenewtimes.com/?fbclid=IwAR0dfXY4hud-brxJVr_oCd6k8lXmqEHMSbu1khSLDmfXL-0JSlxSIdS6G7Y
Amazon: Due to the amount of books Cheryl has written it's just easier to share a search: https://www.amazon.com/Books-Cheryl-Costa/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ACheryl+Costa

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Disclaimer:
Neither The Host (Rye Voss) nor the podcast (Codega's Codex of Curiosities) are responsible for the views and opinions of any of the guests.
* All claims made by individual guests are at their own discretion and may not reflect on the overall views of Codega's Codex of Curiosities or Rye Voss