When pilot Kenneth Arnold took off in a single-engine plane one afternoon in June 1947 from Cheharis, Washington, he was searching for a lost military plane that had crashed. But what he found was completely different. Today, it is what sparks cultural obsession in the United States.
While flying around Mount Rainier, Arnold reportedly encountered nine curious and wingless objects that speed up the sky at 1,200 mph. Arnold spent years trying to explain what he saw. It reportedly uses a term that has soaked into American lexicons since “flying saucer.”
Since then, Americans have been independently pinned to the idea that aliens are somewhere in the sky above us, and the number of people they believe to be true is growing. In 2019, a Gallup survey found that 33% of Americans consider UFOs to be an alien spacecraft, while 60% felt that everything could be explained by human activity or natural phenomena. Just two years later, in 2021, 41% of respondents said they thought at least some UFOs were alien-related.
There are two main reasons why alien beliefs have become so common in the United States. Government hearings and pop culture.
The American film industry has always been one of the most influential in the world, a wave of science fiction films from the 1950s, perpetuating the idea that there are other living beings, such as “The Day the Earth Stopped” and “The Invasion of the Body.” This continues today with alien-centric sci-fi staples like the “Avatar” franchise and the “Silent Place” movies that dominate the box office.
Rather than leaving the flying saucer to the Hollywood realm, the US government is tackling the issue of UFOs and simply adding more speculation. In April 2020, the Department of Defense released multiple videos filmed by military pilots who were thought to capture UFOs. In July 2023, Air Force veterans came to the House of Representatives, claiming that since the 1930s, the US military has maintained important information about the secrets of “non-human” sightings.
As did in the 1950s in Cold War delusions, UFO lore is also undergoing a revival now as many Americans are concerned about national security. The infamous Chinese spy balloon panic in 2023 led to many reports of people seeing UFOs in the sky, fearing it would permeate the Russian government. People also misspiking Starlink satellites due to extraterrestrial activity. In November 2024, the Pentagon announced that most reported sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, as is now known) resulted from balloons, drones and other regular objects, but noted that many objects lack sufficient explanations.
UAPs and UFO sightings in the US are particularly concentrated in the West. This is easier to find objects with less light contamination, as there are plenty of dark sky locations. Anyone who believes they have seen something else in the other world can report it to the National UFO Report Center.
New Mexico and Nevada are probably best known for their UFO sightings, but data from the National UFO Reporting Center show that as of April 25, 2025, California is the most witnessed state.
Stacker has compiled city rankings using data from the National UFO Report Center for Florida’s most UFO sightings. The data includes all reports of UFO sightings dating back to 1995. Sightings with locations listed in multiple cities are not included in this analysis.
For now, the official US government stance is that extraterrestrial life does not exist. But if the last century is some kind of indicator, it does little to curb the obsession of American aliens.
