St. George Among Cities That Rank High In UFO Reports

One thing I've learned in this life is there's a lot of joking and speculating if there's nothing on the line.

But once money is involved, the frivolity goes out the window.

For example, folks around the country talk about aliens and UFO sightings as if it's an interesting, albeit, fictitious game of "Can you top this?"

But the betting website BetUs.com decided to up the ante -- put its money where our mouths are, so to speak.

BetUS crunched the numbers from the National UFO Reporting Center to come up with a list of cities were you have the best odds of possibly spotting an unidentified flying object.

As it turns out, Phoenix, Ariz., ranks first, followed by New York City.

In at number three is Las Vegas -- notably not far from the infamous Area 51.

Portland and Tucson round out the top five (that's right, three of the top five "alien" cities are in the Southwestern United States).

On the list, Salt Lake City comes in 23rd with 127 reported UFO sightings and St. George, with 37 sightings, was ranked 129th in the USA.

Notably, nine of the top 10 "UFO" cities are west of the Mississippi River.

According to the University of Utah, Western United States sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is because, "proximity to public lands, dark skies, and military installations afford more opportunities to see strange objects in the air."

And while Salt Lake City and St. George account for 164 of the sightings in Utah, people are seeing strange things in the sky all over the Beehive State.

From one report out of South Jordan from last November, "Took my dog outside to pee at approx. 0230 hrs, looked up to see a UFO going directly over my home blocking out the stars as it passed leaving a heat trail behind. No sound moving north east. I could run faster than it was moving. Just a little over a standard telephone pole height as it went right over me and my dog. As it got directly over the top of me it turned due north and slowly moved forward blending and disappearing into the dark sky (no lights or markings)."

Here's one from Wendover, Utah, just a few years ago: "A friend and I were camping west of the Bonneville Salt Flats. We were located eight miles west in the mountains above Bonneville. We had been looking for meteors and satellites. Just before bedtime we looked up into the sky at 10:30 in the evening and discovered a flashing object very high up in a very clear night sky.

"The direction from us was the Northwest. Prior to the discovery we had been following satellites, jet airliners and meteors. I saw an airliner going by and the object appeared to be much higher than the airliner, and lower than satellites.

"The object flashed 1,2,3 stop 1,2,3 stop continuously I watched it from 1030 to midnight I went to bed woke up at 2 a.m. and it was still up there flashing, and not moving, It never moved from its spot. I watched it for another 10 or 15 minutes and went to bed. We both were watching with a pair of binoculars. Without the binoculars the object was very faint. The color of the flash was like a white strobe light."

And finally, one from St. George/Enterprise: "I was driving home from St. George to Enterprise, heading NW on highway 18 at approximately 2:45 am. At approximately mile marker 38 I saw two green lights to the SW of me, as I drove through the canyon the lights came closer towards me and was descending from the dark sky. My initial thought was, “What a weird place to see a drone,” but as I thought through it I realized nobody would be flying a drone in this area at this time of morning. Then as the lights got closer I realized this was a bigger object than I thought and it began hovering next to me as I drove.

"I reached for my phone to take a picture and the object hovered above me then hovered just ahead of me hugged up to the mountainside, I wondered if it was going to land because it was so low then it hovered up and over the mountain, keeping close to the treetops and then out of sight in a northern direction. As I came out of the canyon I scanned the dark sky looking for the green lights again but I didn’t see anything but stars.

"As I continued driving home, I was questioning what I saw and my own sanity. Then as I turned right down my street there were the two green lights again, about 150 yards in front of me and approximately 20 feet above the ground coming at me so I turned my lights off and grabbed my phone.

"As I snapped two pictures the object just hovered in place for about 15 seconds, this is when i noticed the green lights spinning into and out of sight and the first time i saw an orangeish red light blinking below the green lights, then it floated away in a SW direction.

"When I got home I could still see the green and red lights in the distance. I was so creeped out and was afraid of abduction because of the object “following” and “watching” me that i sat in my car with the lights and engine off for 5 minutes before running into my house and locking all the doors, and shutting all the blinds."

All-totaled, there have been more than a thousand sightings of unexplained objects in the sky in Utah in the last decade or so.

Aliens? Military? Foreign entities?

Who knows/ But with the sheer number of sightings, there's absolute certainty that there is something ... unexplained ... up in the skies.

As the scientists at the U of U said: "The National UFO Research Center’s data is a public, self-reporting system with no real way to verify hoaxes, however, if the data were entirely invalid due to some psychological and sociological cause, then there would be no spatial pattern. But there is.”

But there is.

Cue the "Twilight Zone" music.

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