Is Texas a hotbed of UFO sightings? Here’s what reports to a national data bank describe

Texas has had 156 reported UFO sightings so far in 2023, the fourth highest number in the country after California, Florida and Washington, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.

Texas had 6,107 sightings reported on the database throughout the years, with the most recent being an unknown object flying in Houston on Sept. 5.

The group has received more than 170,000 reports of UFOs in the 49 years since it began recording reports of sightings. Just this month, there were 147 reported sightings across the country, with three being in Texas.

UFO sightings in Texas

In the Lone Star State, the ghost town of Lobo in West Texas is frequented by UFO enthusiasts because it’s on the way to Area 51. Then there’s the small Texas city of Aurora, about 27 miles north of downtown Fort Worth, where according to local legend the remains of an alien killed in a UFO crash were buried.

There’s no lack of reported UFO sightings in North Texas, but some are easier to explain than others. A line of more than a dozen strange lights seen one night this August wasn’t an invasion of UFOs, but SpaceX’s Starlink, a high-speed internet service using a constellation of satellites operating in a low orbit around the Earth. Last September, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites were likewise to blame for what some North Texas residents mistook as alien visitors traveling over the night sky.

Years earlier, in 2018, a blog tracking UFO sightings in Texas published a video purporting to show a UFO that was said to hover over Keller for roughly 20 minutes. In 2008, dozens of people around Dublin and Stephenville — about 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth — say they saw flying objects that they could not identify and did not move like conventional aircraft.

NASA UFO investigation

Last fall, NASA launched a nine month study of UFOs to venture into understanding these unexplained sightings.

“We are not shying away from reputational risk,” said the space agency’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, during a National Academy of Sciences webcast. “Our strong belief is that the biggest challenge of these phenomena is that it’s a data-poor field.”

This month, NASA released a 33-page report that found no evidence that unidentified anomalous phenomena had extraterrestrial origin. In its findings, the 16-member team cautioned that the negative perception around UFOs hinders data collection. NASA says the study of UFOs will require new scientific techniques such as advanced satellites and a shift in the perception of UFOs, according to the Associated Press.

“I want to emphasize this loud and proud: There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with” unidentified objects, said NASA’s Dan Evans in May, per AP News.

Congress held its first hearing in 50 years on UFOs in May 2022, with lawmakers saying UFOs are a national security concern and the Pentagon saying it would try to destigmatize the issue and encourage pilots and other military personnel to report anything unusual they see. The Pentagon office that started tracking UFO reports said in December they had received “several hundreds.”

A former Air Force intelligence officer told Congress in July that the U.S. is concealing a multi-decade program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, though the Pentagon has denied his claims.

“We have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” said Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. “Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety.”