Oregon is the No. 4 state for UFO sightings
National UFO Day is July 2 — and if you’re in Oregon, you have a higher-than-average chance of spotting something strange in the sky.
Oregon is the No. 4 state for UFO sightings, according to a study produced by casino.ca. While perhaps a casino website isn’t the world’s foremost expert on mysterious objects in the sky, the data for the study came from the National UFO Reporting Center. The casino.ca researchers combined that data “with scraping social media for sighting details” and “worked out the UFO sightings per capita for both U.S. and Canada.”
Anyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest is unlikely to be surprised by the results.
The West Coast collectively accounts for the most UFO sightings in the country.
California is the No. 1 state for UFO sightings, according to the report. Washington state is No. 2.
That’s not too surprising, considering that the first modern UFO sighting was reported by a pilot flying above Washington in 1947.
Thousands descend upon downtown McMinnville, Oregon, for the annual McMenamins UFO Festival on Saturday, May 18, 2024.Sean Meagher/The Oregonian
Oregon is also home to the world’s second largest UFO festival. The annual McMinnville UFO Festival celebrates a famous 1950 sighting in the Oregon town.
Photos of the McMinnville UFO, taken by local farmers Evelyn and Paul Trent, were investigated by the Air Force and dubbed “difficult to explain in a conventional way.”
Paul Trent and his wife, Evelyn, took two UFO photos outside their McMinnville home in 1950. The pictures ran in The Oregonian one month later.The Oregonian archive
In December 2024, a mass UFO sighting was reported, with multiple pilots seeing mysterious red lights in the skies over Oregon.
While some experts believed that those lights were most likely Starlink satellites, which have caused UFO panics in recent years, others disagreed.
Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, said in 2024, “Most pilots who see Starlink, they know they’re seeing Starlink.”
“Something is happening we don’t fully understand.”
