From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
A series of reports have come out recently demonstrating that Washington State is NUMBER ONE in the number of reports per person of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects).
Below is the data. During the past year, there was one sighting for every 1021 people in Washington.
In contrast, in Louisiana UFOs are observed less than a third as often, something perhaps explained by the greater interest in Mardi Gras, alligators, and spicy gumbo.
Certain Washington (and Oregon) locations are favored for extraterritorial visitation, particularly east of the Cascade Crest and over the Olympics (see below, darker green indicates more events),
There are three reasons why Washington State could have more UFO sighting reports:
(1) UFOs really are more frequent here.
Perhaps extraterrestrials like our salmon or are interested in Boeing. Perhaps they think Washingtonians are particularly interesting. I would doubt it.
(2) Washington State has a mental health issue.
Some political commentators might agree with this. Perhaps folks in this state are so worried about the future of the world and the current administration that they yearn for intergalactic intervention.
(3) Our meteorology often produces features in the sky that look like UFOs.
This is the one I would put my money on.
It all started here.
Did you know that the UFO craze started HERE in 1947, when a pilot of a small plane (Kennith Arnold), flying between Chehalis and Yakima, spotted a group of “saucer-like” objects over Mount Rainier?
A faculty member in my department analyzed the situation and demonstrated that Arnold actually saw lenticular clouds forced by Mount Rainier.
Such clouds form when relatively moist air is forced over a mountain barrier and then oscillates up and down, with upward motion producing the lens-shaped cloud (see schematic below).
As an aside, during a presidential debate on October 20, 2017, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich admitted to seeing a UFO while staying at actress Shirley Maclaine’s home near……. Mount Rainier.
Dennis Kuckinch
The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Washington State, is probably the best place in the US to see lenticular/mountain wave clouds.
You can see them here on many, many days–either by viewing the sky or on satellite imagery.
Why so frequent here?
We have big mountain barriers of sufficient height.
We have strong winds approaching the mountains.
We have air that is sufficiently moist to produce clouds.
Cloud like this:
Or this
Or this
So consider the meteorological explanation of our first rank in UFO sightings.
Or if you prefer:
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Oh rats, I thought it was Washington, DC, not the state. I figured there’s be a surfeit of scurrilous comments.
I did a double take too when I realized it was not DC.
I have memory visions of the 1956 movie, Earth versus the Flying Saucers where one of those saucers crashed into the Washington monument.
Its – the d rugs.
.
PS. I have seen a lenticular cloud here in the DFW area, back some years ago. Have a blurry cellphone picture of it too. It made its appearance along a mild rise in the vicinity of what we call the Preston Road ridge.
It’s not drugs – to my surprise.
Leading drug states are massively undereepresented in the top 10.
Too busy contemplating their navel to look up at the sky.
It’s something in the water.
It’s also pretty much no. 1 in Bigfoot sightings.
Maybe that’s why the state is low in terms of UFO sightings. They are all looking down for evidence of Bigfoot, so nobody’s looking at the sky.
In May, 1980, forty sasquatch carrying suitcases were seen leaving Randle, Washington, just before Mount St. Helens blew up.
It’d be interesting to know if there is an unusual high number of sightings in Seattle – considering the inspirational shape of the tower.
Also interesting that the state with the 2nd highest drug addiction rate has the lowest numbers of reports.
I’ve expected quite the opposite.
Anyway – I blame co2,methane,russia.
I saw lenticular clouds many times when flying. Those near mountain tops mean avoid or crash. The down slope winds can drive a light plane down to an very unpretty crash very quickly.
That happened to someone I knew when he was flying his new Cessna 210 Centurion back from Las Vegas to Santa Monica.
My guess is that’s the preferred route for Chinese “weather balloons”.
It’s about ten years since Roy Spencer showed aliens were more likely to cause warming than carbon dioxide.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/04/do-aliens-cause-global-warming-the-data-say-yes/
Warning, contains pictures of cute aliens.
Residing in the county just south of the dark green county (Jefferson) on the Olympic Peninsula, I can attest that the young ‘uns round these parts (and their parents/grand parents too!), have certainly gottn into the ‘champignons’.
Mix a drone with “shrooms”….. anything can be imagined. !
I reckon it’s electromagnetic plasma phenomena. Washington is sat on a huge tectonic fault complex, which will tend to generate all sorts of piezoelectric stresses in the crust that in turn induces pretty powerful electromagnetic fields. There’s other justifications well, but I’ll not get into that. Plasma demonstrates surprisingly life-like behaviours and puts on a wonderfully diverse range of appearances. It shows up on radar even when invisible to the naked eye, and vice-versa. It’s an underappreciated field of study.
However, in sediments and igneous rocks, the piezoelectric quartz grains are almost certainly randomly oriented, leading to a cancellation of charges. On the other hand, metamorphic terranes may have aligned grains, but folded rock fabrics that may also result in cancellation.
Interesting – if there are more sightings alongside the tectonic faults you may have sold the mystery( though mental illness and grunge are also good contenders)
One thing to keep in when discussing these things is: UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, which means you see something that looks like it’s up in the air but you don’t know what it is. Once you say, “That’s a vehicle of extraterrestrial origin.” you have identified it and we are talking about “flying saucers.”
This may be the case; yet the province of British Columbia just above the US border in Canada doesn’t have this phenomenon. Maybe it’s the because the aliens at the UFO controls have heard that living costs in Vancouver are among the highest in Canada driven by particularly high gasoline prices hose taxes are supposed to combat the apparent climate-change threat. So if their propulsion systems fail, they don’t want to get stuck with excessive bills for their back-up power. Nor do they want to have to rub shoulders with all the drug addicts that seem to favor residence in BC. Or maybe it’s just a case of Washington residents consuming too much Rainier beer which distorts their night vision.
It has to do with galactic political correctness..
Just as dolphins are considered gay sharks,
Canadians are considered , well, gay Americans.
(a look at Trudeau and Trump should end any doubt).
Aliens don’t kidnap those as they don’t want to be accused of homophobia.
Another problem is the language – Aliens only speak English as hundreds of movies have proven.
Catching a french speaking human would be counterproductive.
You don’t fly 10 trillion miles to install an analchip to fail at the very last inch because of language issues.
Unless the pilot was quite drunk, I don’t know how he would confuse any of the example lenticular clouds with a solid object with lights or portholes.
Been living on Whidbey Island for almost 24 years. No UFOs spotted. Lots of Navy jets, though. I’d guess that’s what people are seeing and are too dumb to realize it. There’s also McChord AFB (now Joint Base Lewis-McChord). And Boeing, and Seatac…
Also casual observers, human aliens, many animals, and sasquatch. Why make it political?
Decades ago when we lived in Louisiana one night our young son ran in from the back yard excited about the UFO he saw. Went out, sure enough bunch of unusual lights. Turned sideways to show a dark plain plane but never found out about it. Years later they dumped pellets to kill the fire ants. Didn’t work.
I am soooooo overrrr the dooming and into the Great Darkening-
New ‘dark sky’ law forces American homeowners to turn off their lights by midnight
Why Are the World’s Oceans Getting Darker? | Earth.Org
Well Ok Ok I was into nanoplastics for a time but GD is the future in communicating with the flying saucer personages and the great Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Very deceptive headline. One town in one whacko state.
Andy’s Gas & Go is in eastern Washington state south of Ritzville near the US-395 / I-90 junction.
“We have big mountain barriers of sufficient height.”
You realize that Florida is a very close third place on that list, right? Right below Cape Canaveral is Patrick AFB. We saw a lot of planes there in Brevard County.
A plane without propeller? Piloted by a gorilla?
I prefer the belief that visitors from other star systems are so advanced that they can devise small spacecraft that can traverse the galaxy. Awesome technology. Unfortunately, they just can’t keep from crashing into the ground (Area 51 and the like) because THAT technology is in its infancy for these aliens. Wait… how did they ever learn to leave their planet if they kept crashing into the ground? Don’t they have ground detection radar? Maybe we can trade some of our technology for theirs!
Much like climate saving decarbonization, alien visitation fails the reasonably possible test as soon as you do the math on what it would take to travel between star systems. First, the aliens would need to know we’re here. That would require picking up radio transmissions which started about 130 years ago so would not yet have reached stars more than 130 light years away. On the other hand if there were civilizations far more advanced than ours they would surely have been blasting out radio signals for hundreds or thousands of years and we’d have found them by now. Check with SETI – nope nothing. Now calculate travel time and distance and you find required speed, acceleration, power and protection from destruction by radiation or tiny physical objects moving at even a small percentage of light speed would be deadly to any conceivable organism. For example, to reach 10% of the speed of light you’d need to accelerate at 3gs for 11 days at which point you’d be traveling at 6.7 million miles per hour (way faster than anything we’ve observed other than radiation) and it would still take you 10 years to go 1 lightyear. Thus, sci-fi writers and astrophysicists postulate worm holes to make interstellar travel appear feasible without evidence that any such thing actually exists.
I’m quite convinced that even human travel to Mars will prove to be well beyond human capabilities in terms of cost and risks.
Whatever people are seeing or think they’re seeing flying around may be real, but it is not something piloted by extraterrestrial beings. Not saying that there are not such beings out there in the universe somewhere, just that visiting each other is beyond far-fetched.
You really think that Species’ with a 300+ IQ, who actually have the capacity to travel that fast would mind to risk their life and to leave all their beloved and fantastic place forever behind if they can get the unique opportunity to observe some hairless apes in return whose most powerful leader was a demented Biden?
You also don’t think that a structure like a wormhole appears for no reason , and that it connects for no reason 2 points in space through an inexistent dimension so that there is a shortcut?
Seems that darkmatter ain’t the only spacemagic that only exists to satisfy the fantasies and needs of spacenerds with a degree.
And it , of course, absolutely does not distort time,space,redshift or has any effects on quantum mechanics.
It only does the convenient/necessary stuff. That’s why we have no Anti-darkmatter.
But I think that a one-wayMars Mission, ignoring the obscene cost and that it absolutely does not make sense(except you want to do stuff you can do here at a 10000 * higher price somewhere else ) should be managable within a few decades – if the russian nuclear driven rocket works.
“First, the aliens would need to know we’re here.”
Nope. They could just be out joy riding or exploring.
On the other hand if there were civilizations far more advanced than ours they would surely have been blasting out radio signals for hundreds or thousands of years and we’d have found them by now.
While possible, it is not 100% certain. You are assuming their transmissions would be compatible with human technology. You are assuming their transmission power would result in a signal detectable in the noise. 1/r^2 applies to EM.
“Now calculate travel time and distance”
Again, based on human technology. We do not know everything. Worm holes you mention, but what else? We do not yet know everything that we do not know.
“visiting each other is beyond far-fetched”
Based on our levels of science and technology, of course. But we cannot assume they are the same as us in those areas.
You’re assuming that greater intelligence will lead to discovery of physics that is inconsistent with anything we’ve observed. Sci-fi writers have come up with all kinds of ideas to overcome the speed and distance problem – warp drives (multiples of the speed of light), space folding using drugs (Dune) or black holes, worm holes, suspended animation of travelers for thousands of years, evolution into energy based beings, etc. Might as well just assume the existence of a culture of Gods with powers beyond the limits of the laws of physics.
Some UFOs have no windows or portholes because they only fly at night. Just saying ….
Anyone know what these clouds are?
Clouds….
Water vapor?
I thought for a minute they might have been con trails from the hundreds of private jets heading from Europe to Brazil for CoP30.
🙂
About 1 in 1500 people is not significant. Check out how many people believe in angels, and about 1/3 of those claim to have had an “encounter”….or is that just a measure of how much of the population likes to josh pollsters….
The truth is obvious. The aliens are meeting with Bigfoot. WA looks like a great place to be a ‘squatch’.