Geographic distribution
173 of 212 records geolocatedOnly records with a usable location appear here. Hollow, faded markers are placed at a regional centroid because the document redacted or omitted exact coordinates — treat their position as approximate, never precise.
Toggle the nuclear-sites layer to see proximity; the panel reports the share of currently-shown incidents within 100 mi of a major nuclear site. Proximity is context for inquiry, not evidence of a link.
Geographic patterns — and why to read them carefully
latitude, hemisphere, proximity to strategic sitesTwo patterns are measurable in the geocoded records. Both are real, and both are dominated by the same fact: this is a U.S.-government corpus. It records where the government observes and mandates reporting — not where the phenomenon is.
~74% fall in the 30°–50°N band and 64% are in the Western hemisphere — which is also the latitude of the continental U.S. and its main military theaters. The band coincides with jet-stream latitudes, but we have no wind/altitude data to test that, and it cannot be separated from simply being where the U.S. operates.
Tested against 4,000 random U.S. land points (so it controls for base density): incidents sit a median 226 km from a major installation vs 396km for random points. The clustering is real — not just “the U.S. is full of bases.”
That installations attract incidents is established. That they attract objects is not — because the same map is predicted by where we are able to see and obligated to report:
- It is a government dataset. Every record originates with a U.S. agency, so locations are concentrated where the U.S. has jurisdiction, installations, and operations.
- Reporting is mandated near assets. Military aircrew and base personnel are required to file; a sighting over a base enters a channel that a sighting over open country does not.
- Monitoring density is wildly uneven. Bases, nuclear sites and coasts carry radar, FLIR and trained observers. You can only detect what you have sensors pointed at — so detections concentrate where the sensors are.
- ~31% are maritime, but that largely reflects naval operating areas (carrier groups, fleet exercises), not an independent affinity for water.
So the honest statement is the 15.2× clustering within 50 km is consistent with two explanations we cannot separate here: objects drawn to strategic sites, or strategic sites being where observation and reporting are densest. The pattern narrows the question; it does not answer it.
Yes — the 33 near-installation records are not spread evenly. 30 of them fall before 1960, concentrated in 1947–1954, with a tight 1948–50 cluster of 11 incidents around the New Mexico nuclear-weapons corridor (Los Alamos, Sandia/Kirtland) — several logged within a few km of the labs. The most repeatedly-visited sites in the record:
Same caution, sharper: that 1948–50 window is exactly when the “green fireballs” alarmed the Atomic Energy Commission enough to stand up a dedicated instrumented watch (Project Twinkle) at those nuclear sites — and 1947 was the original nationwide sighting flap. So the space–time cluster reflects a burst of monitoring and reporting at sensitive sites at least as much as any concentration of objects. A genuine spatio-temporal cluster exists in the record; its cause is not separable here.