Author: Cheryl Costa

I’ve heard many UFO enthusiasts complain that the Changing UFO category is useless, or that the observers are flawed in some way.

I have previously reported that UFO sighting reports have been on a steep decline for three years. 2018 is continuing this steep dropoff.

32.8 percent of 17 years’ worth of UFO sighting reports featured exotic UFO shapes — shapes that have a high probability of not being man-made.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines xenophobia as fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign. Since xenophobia is such a big word, let’s break it down to a word we’re all familiar with: prejudice. It often starts in grade school. Parents tell a child that a classmate lives on the wrong side of the railroad tracks or the wrong side of town. Sometimes parents tell their kids that they shouldn’t hang out with that creed or nationality, or the ever-present taboo of racial skin color. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II took on the…

In June 2017, a contingent of congressional representatives recommended dividing the Air Force’s Space Force mission into two separate undertakings: to focus on terrestrial aviation-related matters and to concentrate operational matters in the realm of space. When President Trump announced that he was directing the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the armed services, the proposal was met with skepticism, lots of rolling eyes and plenty of comedic jabs by late-night TV comedians. In the UFO community, there were many who viewed the Space Force call as another step toward UFO and ET disclosure. The doomsters saw the effort…

The setting was a conference room at the U.S. Department of State. A podium displayed the seal of the Department of State, and few feet behind it was a riser platform with a large leather armchair. Seating was arranged theater-style to accommodate credentialed members of domestic and international media. Perhaps 35 people dressed in business attire took seats near the podium. They had badges that bore the journalists’ names from the domestic and international news outlets. No television cameras or live feeds were allowed. Cellular phones had been sequestered by security. A uniformed guard was posted at the door. Then…

The June 5 New York Skies article “Close encounters with UFOs are getting harder to find” discussed the falloff in UFO sighting reports in the United States during the early months of 2018 but only featured National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) data as a quick snapshot. At this writing, I have more interesting, and indeed serious, data to report regarding that drop-off. Since that time, the kind folks at the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) have supplied me with their data for the January through June 2018 timeframe. The MUFON sighting numbers have been suffering as well. In 2016 their average…

People ask me all the time why the government won’t come clean about UFOs and perhaps the ET presence. After all, based on a 2012 National Geographic poll, 80 percent of Americans think the government is not being square with the American people. After the Dec. 16, 2017, New York Times and Politico revelation that the Pentagon had a formal program for monitoring UFOs with regard to military bases and fleet operations, the story took the news media by storm. There was a major news cycle about the Pentagon effort, the congressional folks who got them the money and the…

UFO sightings are in a slump! Longtime researchers have known that there is a six- to seven-year up-and-down UFO sighting cycle. During this cycle the UFO sightings seem to rise incrementally from a baseline number, hit a peak, then decline back toward the baseline. Then the process typically starts all over again. Using newly compiled numbers based on NUFORC (National UFO Reporting Center) and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) sighting databases, we now have a national picture of sightings spanning the first 17 years of the 21st century. Between 2012 and 2014 we had a peak average of 13,500 yearly sighting…

Over the past year I’ve given numerous regional presentations about UFOs. Of the several hundred persons in attendance, the most noticeable feature of my audience was the significant gray hair of the attendees. In 1979, The Buggles recorded a song titled “Video Killed the Radio Star,” with its meaning that radio had been king in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s until it was dethroned by television. In the 1980s and 1990s, those interested in exploring the paranormal would have attended a gathering like a Fortean Society conference. If you were transgendered, you might have attended an annual convention hosted by…

Cheryl Costa isn’t the only well-known UFO researcher in New York state.

In the 1840s the topic of germ theory in medicine was laughable and considered fringe thinking. Then in 1850, a prickly Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis told his doctor colleagues in Vienna Medical Society’s lecture hall, “Wash your hands!” Over the next few years, thanks to the pioneering work of Louis Pasteur and later Robert Koch in the 1880s, the science of germ theory finally established firm footing and became less laughable in the field of medicine. Prior to 1900, the experts said the idea of a man flying in heavy aircraft was laughable. But on Dec. 17, 1903, Wilbur…

For five years I have been hearing people in UFO-related social media criticizing and crying about money. I posted a meme last year encouraging members of the UFO community to reach out to their regional library systems and request that they add a copy of my book, UFO Sightings Desk Reference, for their collection. I received a twofold barrage to my suggestion. Some accused me of just trying to sell books. Yet I also heard from people who told me it was “too hard to do that” or that “my local library would never listen to me.” I suggested printing…

Many of us at work have tried to communicate some critically vital information up the management chain of command. But it always seems that either the big boss just never gets the message or the boss does get that information but it has been watered down and made palatable by somebody between you and the big boss. So to ensure that the boss isn’t made unhappy by bad news, middle-level management and staff do their best to filter, spin and squash troubling information from ever reaching the big boss. So what does this have to do with UFOs? Everything! Let’s…

New York Skies Blog