Is it possible to extract scientific and practical information from UAP databases? This was the main question that motivated the preparation of this article. So far ufology is just characterized by an interminable succession of qualitative descriptions furnished mostly by witnesses. Such descriptions are sometimes interesting and detailed; indeed that which is reported therein is often so exciting that one would like to try to see how much real such descriptions are. The only way to do so is to try to identify measurable variables so that a quantitative analysis is possible. In such cases a quantitative analysis of a single case, whatever its importance and interest, is almost always impossible, except for very few cases [Refs. 38, 39, 45] . This just remains a sort of “tale”, which certainly often affects the reader emotionally but cannot be brought to more grounded bases. If information given in certain single cases are sufficiently detailed it is very often easy to verify if the phenomenon reported is really anomalous or not. For instance, it can be possible to check its location in the sky just to see if it is the result of the misinterpretation of a known astronomical object [Refs. 52, 65], in case seen through some aberrated atmospheric filter. Many of these cases can be interpreted as fireballs or meteors. Many other cases can be explained as human artefacts such as aircrafts, cars or even cottage lights seen through the fog or other filtering cause [Ref. 86]. Not-a-few other cases can be – more or less easily – explained as plain hoaxes and fakes [Ref. 88]. But several other cases do not furnish an immediate prosaic interpretation.

Skilled investigators can go deep into a single case in order to try to reconstruct an UAP incident – whatever it is – in the most logical and coherent way: most often this kind of investigator is using substantially the same skills as the ones used by a professional police inquirer or by an investigative journalist. In other cases proper scientific skills are used indeed [Refs. 17, 38, 39, 41, 45, 74, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112]. These two samples of serious investigative methodology – when driven by the search for objective facts and not by the necessity to demonstrate pre- constructed “truths” – can reveal themselves to be absolutely necessary for a possible further action that may be in case carried out by scientists wanting to take data directly on the field. Preliminary quantitative results may be interesting and also illuminating, especially when they are absolutely necessary to prepare the ground for on-field missions where it is reasonably possible to do them. But still we do not have in our hands any really quantitative proof of the concrete existence of the UAP phenomenon per se, considering in particular its possible exogenous technological nature [Ref. 14, 17, 41, 103].

As it has been already mentioned in a previous recent conceptual paper [Ref. 88], real scientific evidence can be obtained using only measurement instrumentation, deployed in areas where the reported phenomenon is reasonably recurrent both spatially and temporally. In order that this is rendered possible a joint collaboration between serious ufological investigators and scientists is still strongly invoked, despite the fact that here we are treating a phenomenology that is very difficult to survey due to its highly elusive and irreproducible intrinsic nature.

In the absence of detailed investigations of single cases and/or as a complement to them, it seems natural to think that the best way to start an investigation that might subsequently bring to a possible spatial and temporal localization (with an acceptable margin of error) of a given UAP phenomenology is to start to examine in detail the existing databases. The question now is if such databases – in spite of the meticulousness and richness of completeness with which they may have been built up – are sufficient alone to permit the extraction of some scientific information on UAPs as a global phenomenon reported from a given area, or not. This test has been done and the answer that can be immediately anticipated is that, whatever the sophistication used to analyze this kind of data, the information that can be extracted is little compared to the waste of time employed to carry out this work. The constructors themselves of the most important UAP databases now available in the world confirm this very honestly, and this, in addition to their huge and constant effort in collecting data, is highly praiseworthy [Ref. 101].

UAP cases reported in the world are really very many, and it was soon understood that the most economic way to carry out this test is to concentrate the attention on a few areas where many data are available. These locations were not chosen by chance, but this choice was done with a main goal in mind: preparing a field mission to be conducted to one of those areas.

So far the three areas that were chosen with this goal in mind are all in North America and they are geographically connected together. These areas are the province of Ontario in Canada and the US states of New York and Connecticut. All these locations have been, in the last 60 years, a theatre of quite important “UAP incidents”. Just to mention a few examples, none can easily forget the monitoring of unexplained aerial phenomena in Ontario since 1997 [Ref. 31], the events occurred in the Hudson Valley (especially in the eighties) [Refs. 26, 28] and the recent cases reported in Connecticut [Ref. 9]. Of course the three UAP database samples that have been examined are just only a little snapshot of the entire UAP phenomenon occurring sparsely all over the planet. These locations were chosen also due to the richness and completeness of the database describing them, despite the fact that the “strangeness and quality indexes” for these cases have not been usually evaluated according to a precise protocol that was set up by Hynek in the past years [Ref. 25]. Of course the number of reported cases in the entire world is so high that it may be virtually impossible to do this analysis for all. Clearly this work is much easier when the number of cases is much less and when diagnostics of all cases is done directly by researchers working on the field, such as the investigation carried out by Project Hessdalen in 1984, for instance [Ref. 70]. In fact, in reality the main goal of this research should be to try to measure the phenomenon directly on the field. This can clearly be done only if a certain area can be reasonably identified as a location where a given aerial phenomenon is recurrent, so that such a location might become a suitable “laboratory” using which some science might be constructed after using the appropriate measurement instrumentation [Ref. 71, 73, 74]. Therefore the primary goal of constructing a UAP database should be to prepare the ground for future expeditions on preferential sites. But in the reality of facts doing this is extremely difficult because only a few locations are characterized by a real recurrence.

An important question now inevitably arises. Are UAP cases – intended as “structured objects” – characterized by a spatial and/or temporal recurrence in the same way as Hessdalen-like (presumably natural) phenomena? There is no doubt that some specific cases, as, for instance, the Area 51 in Nevada (USA), have been reported as a typical example of possible “UAP recurrence locations”. This should offer the chance to place locally instruments in order to attempt to carry out scientific measurements of the aerial phenomenon. Unfortunately, it seems that such instrumented investigations have been carried out very rarely, even if valid exceptions do exist [Refs. 61, 68]. Moreover, it seems that so far the only data concerning alleged UAP recurrence locations are limited to witnesses and some videos. This is not certainly sufficient to build up some science. Videos and photos of UAPs that are being shown on the internet are nowadays very many and increasing more and more, but the number of frauds, fakes, hoaxes, and misinterpretations [Refs. 11, 27, 36, 40, 43, 51, 52, 63, 64, 86, 88] have grown as well in this field so that they alone seems to be sufficient to discredit, unfortunately, the entire UAP documentation. What is worldly propagated as an increasing “visit by aliens” seems to be in reality the result of the increase of human dishonesty mixed maybe with a “deception mechanism” [Ref. 88] of unknown origin whose scope is to avert the citizens of the world from being concentrated on more concrete problems of the everyday life and society.

In addition to good investigations of isolated UAP cases and related documentation, it seems to me that the only way to try to proceed seriously here is threefold: a) to ignore systematically all that which is propagated by the media and by journalists without scruples but their public visibility and money earning (“UFO” is a prolific business indeed); b) to analyze as much accurately as possible well selected databases in order to attempt to get a glimpse of the “UAP phenomenon” from the overall picture and also to see from all of this if a real UAP phenomenon does exists; c) doing missions on chosen sites using all the appropriate scientific instrumentation.

Before starting the presentation of this work it is necessary to describe the general characteristics and quality of the used databases. The New York and Connecticut UAP testimonial data have been obtained mainly from the NUFORC database with some addition concerning cases reported in the eighties taken from a Hynek & Imbrogno’s book [Refs. 26, 50]. Therefore the criterion with which these data have been collected is just the same for these two states. The Ontario testimonial data have been acquired both from the NUFORC and from the UFOINFO [Ref. 96] databases, where most relevant UAP reports were accurately screened by a UAP researcher [Ref. 32], who has a deep knowledge of the cases occurred in the area where she lives due to her frequent monitoring activity carried out directly in several of those locations and to her careful study of every specific UAP report concerning those cases. Her contribution in furnishing and screening the Ontario data has been invaluable, especially due to the precision with which the Ontario reports can be located on a geographic map. In the specific Ontario case, UAP sightings are not only generally ascribed to specific cities, towns or hamlets but also (in many cases) to specific streets, roads and intermediate locations among two or three inhabited centres. The procedure with which the Ontario cases were pondered produced inevitably a much better quality of the data to be used then for analysis. For instance, for this specific area the geographic positioning of UAP cases furnishes consequently a much better “spatially resolved” picture than in the case of the two US states. This better picture for the Ontario cases has the advantage of showing a very precise geographic positioning of UAP sightings, but has the disadvantage of not being suitably comparable with the two US databases: this happens when statistics on population of specific inhabited centres is compared with the number of UAP cases occurred in those specific areas. Therefore when evaluating the spatial distribution of UAP cases the New York and Connecticut areas have been subject to a different treatment than the Ontario area. On the other hand, in the evaluation of the statistics in the dimension of time the two US states and the Ontario province have been evaluated all together. The reason of this is that what we are searching for here is not so much the intrinsic number of UAP cases occurred at a given time, but the general trend with which these data vary with time. For instance, if more data are added to a specific database it is expected that these additions do not alter the trend. On the contrary it is expected that a given trend (in this case, the trend in time) is showed with a much higher detail.

In conclusion here we’ll show the analysis of two “low resolution databases” and of one “high resolution database”, where the “low” and the “high” are compared together mostly when the *time* and *UAP shape* parameters are considered, while they are subject to separate examination – except for some indicative general plot – when the *space* parameter is considered.

But let’s start now to describe this (very limited) attempt of database study, which certainly has not the pretension of being all-comprehensive, but which might be maybe useful if used as an additional tool to analyses of the same kind carried out by other researchers.