Codex Origins re-release: UFO researcher, journalist, and author Cheryl Costa goes through 20 years of UFO sighting data, 167,632 reports from 2001 to 2020, broken down by state, county, and ZIP code. Cheryl explains which ZIP code leads the country (85001 in downtown Phoenix), why Los Angeles County ranks number one overall, why most UFO sightings are reported between 6 and 11 pm, and why she believes only about 1 in 257 people actually report what they see. She also lays out the five drivers behind where sightings happen, from population to broadband access, plus the influencers she ties to bodies of water, geological faults, and toxic waste sites. Cheryl is the author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference books with co-author Linda Miller Costa, a former UFO columnist for the Syracuse New Times, and spent 32 years at Lockheed Martin. In this conversation she also covers a 17-page report she sent to a congressman’s office, a CIA scientific division paper from around 1950 that already spotted the summer pattern, and her own theory on how visitors might actually get here. This is a Codex Origins episode, an early conversation from the Codega’s Codex of Curiosities vault, back with remastered audio. New Codex Origins episodes land every Sunday.
In This Episode
• Cheryl says she has talked to about 150 major newspapers in the country and none would publish her sighting numbers, because they told her it would scare everybody. She talks about her first book, the UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001-2015, and the New York Times story that ran on April 24 and 25, 2017. She also tells how she flunked geometry in high school, then taught herself algebra and trig in her late 20s after making a mistake balancing her checkbook, and ended up publishing a book of statistics.
• Cheryl walks through a CIA scientific division paper from around 1950 that plotted about 130 sightings by month and wrote “summer madness” in the margins. Her own data, with far more points, shows the same peak in the northern states in June, July, and August, a flat line in the Deep South with a dip in the summer heat, and February as the worst month in the country. She also covers April 16, 2008, when Indiana logged 25 sightings in one day against its usual three or four a week, the Kokomo lights clusters, and a Texas spike across about 12 communities that never got press.
• The pink book covers 2001 to 2020, weighs two and a half pounds, and ranks all 50 states down to the county level. Cheryl explains why it is bright fuchsia (so you can spot it from an aircraft, and because two women published it), who asked her to testify in Washington in 2019, and the congressional hearings push tied to a spending bill. She says she sent a 17-page technical report to a congressman’s office and has heard nothing but silence since, and that she may end up testifying before Congress. The book is dedicated to Coral Lorenzen, whose group APRO came before MUFON.
• Downtown Phoenix, ZIP code 85001, is the number one ZIP code in the country for UFO reports in the 20-year period, with 1,500 more sightings than the next closest ZIP code. Maricopa County ranks second among counties, and Los Angeles County ranks first, even though downtown Los Angeles itself only ranks around number 25. Cheryl also explains why TV producers keep asking her for a hot spot where they can park camera crews on a rooftop and wait, and why it is not that easy.
• Cheryl names the drivers behind sighting numbers in every state: population, temperate weather, leisure time, hours of darkness, and an observer’s access to broadband. About 70% of sightings happen between 6 and 11 pm, and about 60% of those fall between 8:30 and 10:30 at night. Of roughly 3,530 counties, 105 reported no UFOs at all in the 20 years, and she says mostly rural farming states lack the broadband that makes reporting easy. North and South Dakota rank 49th and 50th.
• Then come the influencers, which only some places have. Cheryl says states touching the Great Lakes logged thousands of sightings, and that Florida’s 1,200 miles of coastline against Texas at about 450 explains a lot. Her colleague Tom Conwell pinned sightings on a giant wall map and found they seem to cluster around Superfund toxic waste sites. She also points to geological faults, calderas, and volcanoes, South Carolina earthquakes lining up with the state’s top sighting counties, military sites with nuclear weapons technology, the Navy fleet, high media coverage that sparks more reports, and the generational effect, where grandparents’ stories of the Battle of Los Angeles or the Phoenix Lights send families outside to look up.
• Cheryl explains how she and Linda built all 50 state editions, each titled UFOs in (State) and Where to Find Them. They published them in about six weeks between Halloween and the winter solstice, starting with Ohio, and color coded each cover by census region: powder blue for the Northeast, orange for the lower South, green for the Midwest, and purple for the West. She credits a college course in methods engineering for helping her organize the work.
• Cheryl runs the big numbers: 167,632 reports from 2001 to 2020 works out to about 8,400 a year, 700 a month, 161 a week, and 23 a day. She then asks what happens if you throw most of them away. If only 30% are real, that is about 210 a month. If 1% are real, it is still around seven a month. Her own swag is about 5%. She also explains how she and Linda estimated that only about 1 in 257 people report what they see, which lands near 43 million, and how that lines up with the Gallup figure of 16.74% of adult Americans saying they have seen a UFO.
• Cheryl gives her own take on how visitors could get here, pointing to recent work coming out of the CERN laboratories that she says could mean a 20 minute trip into the fifth dimensional bulk covering a 50,000 year journey. She talks about interdimensional travel, whether the UFO flurry that began after the 1945 nuclear tests came from outer space or inner space, and why she thinks the hidden material sits under atomic energy rules that never expire.
• Cheryl shares her own history with the subject: seeing her first UFO at about age 12 in 1965 with her parents in upstate New York, a sighting on Christmas Eve 1971 at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, and her service in the military. She tells how a government review of her security clearance played out after she publicly came out as transgender, and how she answered it. She says she has been an experiencer since around age five or six, that things still move around her home, and that she no longer sees it as the negative experience she once did. She also covers her seven years writing the New York Skies column, which ran 238 articles, and her move to the Roswell Daily Record in 2023.
Best Line of the Night
“Don’t you think it’s press worthy that we’ve got 210 starships a month, every month for the last 240 months, coming to the United States?”
(Cheryl Costa, on what happens if just 30% of the reported sightings are real)
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