This shows a world map with archived sightings. There’s a lot of flaws to it, areas with no activity doesn’t mean no sightings - Just no data. Sighting density seems to align with population density and so on.
But still very interesting to browse what is available.
This is really cool! I assume that this heat map primarily reflects English-language reporting. If that’s the case, I wonder if there are similar reporting tools and heat maps for other languages that could be superimposed on this one. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the results.
I’m new to NUFORC so I haven’t checked out the sources of their data, but my first guess is the same as yours - Self-reporting for those who speak English. Considering most people probably doesn’t even know about the reporting tools I suspect the number of unreported sightings is astronomical, pun intended.
why would they be mostly in the us? they wouldn’t have any way to know about borders and countries…
It appears to be a U.S. based reporting organization. I would think it would be more shocking if the heat map wasn’t primarily showing reports from the U.S. or other English speaking counties.