SAN DIEGO (KSWB) — Have you experienced an aerial phenomenon? You aren’t alone.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) is a non-governmental, nonprofit corporation that investigates sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The center says it receives, records, corroborates and documents reports from individuals who believe they have witnessed an aerial phenomenon, and that roughly 2,000 sightings were reported in the U.S. so far this year.

Since its founding in 1974, NUFORC says it has processed over 170,000 reports, which are listed online by date and location. The center explained that guaranteed anonymity to callers is a longstanding policy of the corporation.

NUFORC makes available to the public all of its data in summary form with the time, location, duration of the sighting, and a short summary describing the UFO. The organization notes that it can’t validate the information provided in reports but it does remove “obvious hoaxes.”

In 2023 alone, hundreds upon hundreds of UFO sightings have been reported in the U.S., according to an analysis of NUFORC’s data. Sightings have also been reported in every state, but some see much more of the alleged activity than others.

In New York, 81 UFOs were spotted this year, making it the state with the fifth-most reported sightings. California, the most populous state in the U.S., boasts 237 sightings in 2023 alone, followed by Florida at 170, and Washington at 108. As for individual cities, Portland, Oregon, had 12 reported sightings this year, followed by Seattle with 11, and Los Angeles with 10.

The interactive map below shows how many UFO sightings were reported in each state, according to NUFORC’s data.

The fewest sightings were reported in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia—two and three, respectively—and Montana and North Dakota each only had four reported sightings each. Just 23 UFO sightings were reported in Nevada, home to the mysterious Area 51 and a recently reported “non-human being” encounter.

Some of the sightings can be explained away, like Starlink Satellite trains or Venus and Jupiter, two common night-sky occurrences NUFORC asks people not to report. The organization also asks that you don’t report an object you can see in a photo but not with your naked eye, noting the UFO is “probably a camera anomaly or artifact such as a lens flare.”

Congress talks UFOs

UFO sightings have been a popular topic among even federal lawmakers recently. In late July, the U.S. House Oversight Committee held a hearing on whether the U.S. has been concealing evidence of non-human aircraft.

A whistleblower—retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch—testified that the nation concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse-engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.

Yet Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick—a career intelligence officer named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to centralize investigations into UAPs—called the claims “insulting” to employees investigating sightings.

The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Department of Defense spokeswoman Sue Gough said. Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in recent years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.

The Pentagon, as well as the White House and NASA, have previously stated they have no reason to believe unexplained objects are extraterrestrial while National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby said there are “no hard and fast” answers after the hearing, but that it is being taken seriously.

The Associated Press and NewsNation’s Stephanie Whiteside contributed to this report.