The North West was the part of the UK with the most reported sightings last year
In the past four years there have been close to 2,000 reports of UFOs spotted over the UK. Our interactive map shows how many UFO sightings were reported across Merseyside in that time.
In its annual report, the research group UFO Identified documented 395 sightings in the UK in 2023 which is a 20% drop from 497 sightings in 2022. In 2021 there were 413 alleged sightings and 2020 had 484 sightings.
That adds up to 1,789 sightings in four years. Information was taken from social media, newspaper reports and moer thn 50 Freedom of Information requests, as well as from reports made directly to UFO spotter groups around the UK.
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The area of the UK with the most reports for 2023 was the North West with 41, followed by the South East which had 40 reports. The North East wasn’t a UFO sighting hot-spot with only 13 reported last year.
The data shows that the “best” time to see a UFO last year was on a Monday evening between 9pm and 10pm. The most common sighting was a “star-like” UFO, followed by an orb – with several different witnesses reporting clusters of orbs in the skies across different locations.
The vast majority of sightings were of far-off objects in the sky but there were 27 “Close Encounters of the First Kind”, more than double the previous year.
It has been an interesting time for UFO enthusiasts as just last year American fighter jets shot down an unexplained flying object – which was later identified as a Chinese balloon, suspected to be on a spying mission – as well as three other objects in or near American airspace.
Former Air Force intelligence officer turned whistle-blower, Major David Grusch, claimed the US was concealing a long-standing programme that retrieves and reverse-engineers unidentified flying objects.
You can take a look at the interactive map below and find out what what areas of the UK the flying objects have been spotted in over the past four years. You can filter the map to Merseyside areas as well as other regions of the UK.