Somewhere in the Skies - The Truth Is In The Numbers with Cheryl Costa

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

On episode 51 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan welcomes author, journalist, and UFO researcher, Cheryl Costa to the show. Along with Linda Costa, Cheryl recently published UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001-2015, which includes over 121,000 sightings. She lists the top UFO hot spots, according to the data, and sighting reports down to the county level. Anyone can use the book to find out how many sightings there have been in their area, and how it stacks up against other parts of the US. In this interview, Cheryl talks about her discoveries while compiling the data. She also digs deep into where the UFO topic is heading in terms of mainstream coverage in the media. We also get a sneak peek at a play Cheryl's written about UFOs.  Guest Bio: Cheryl Costa is a native and resident of upstate New York who saw her first UFO at age 12. A military veteran, she’s a retired information security professional from the aerospace Industry. She’s been a speaker at the International UFO Congress and at the MUFON Symposium. Cheryl writes the UFO column “New York Skies” for SyracuseNewTimes.com. Besides being a journalist, she’s also a published playwright and author. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York at Empire State College in entertainment writing. To read her articles, visit: www.syracusenewtimes.com. To find her other work, www.cherylcosta.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Official Store: CLICK HERE Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Closing song, "Wars Among Galaxies" by Caleb Hanks SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey y'all. Ryan Sprague here. As you all know, the Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is always free to consume, but it isn't free to create. That's why I've started the Somewhere in the Sky's Patreon campaign. On a monthly basis, you give what you think the show is worth. You'll be helping the show continue, grow, and to be something truly communal. And remember, there are rewards for each level of contribution, and the list is only growing. So please, help Somewhere in the Skies now by becoming a patron. To contribute and to learn more, visit www.patriot.com backslash SomewhereSkies. Thank you for your support. And now on with the show. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. On April 24, 2017, an article was released in the New York Times titled, People Are Seeing UFOs Everywhere, and this book proves it. The article, which long preceded the Pentagon UFO program story, was one of very few UFO-themed pieces to be covered in a very serious and credible manner by this prestigious news outlet. And it immediately went viral.

People from all over the United States were treated to a release of data on UFO reports, unlike ever before. And it all came from the rigorous and tireless work of two women from Syracuse, New York. Cheryl and Linda Costa are the authors of the UFO sightings desk reference, United States of America 2001 to 2015. The book includes over 121,000 UFO sightings. Listed are the top UFO hotspots, according to the data, and citing reports down to the county level.

Anyone can use the book to find out how many UFO sightings there have been in their area and how it stacks up against other parts of the U.S. Today, we talk all about how the book came to be, Cheryl's discoveries and revelations while compiling the data and what the sheer amount of reports may mean as we head into the uncertain future of UFO studies and possible disclosure. So, without further ado, let's talk numbers with Cheryl Costa.

Cheryl, thank you so much for joining me today somewhere in the skies. Ryan, happy to be here. This interview has been a while in the making as my crazy schedule, your crazy schedule. It's made it extremely difficult. More on my end in the worst of ways, but it certainly is going to be worth the weight because today we're going to be talking about your massive, massive undertaking of a book, UFO sightings desk reference, United States of America 2001 to 2015, which has quickly become not only

a reference for many UFO researchers, but a Bible in some way, Cheryl. But before we even get to that, I met you for the very first time, a few years back at the International UFO Congress, where you were speaking. And I have been following your work ever since. I was hooked immediately for many reasons. And then they invited you back this year to speak again. And some amazing things happened this year at the event. So I would love to hear all about the 2018. I, UFOs. and the incredible news that happened out there for you. Well, they sent me up the talk on the first day. So I was the second speaker of the convention.

And that was fun. And, Chris, my presentations tend to be very, thank God they gave me a wireless mic this year, because I tend to dance around the stage quite a bit. Oh, yeah, I remember. And, you know, a lot of people came up to me after the thing. And I could hear the audience with the humor with the humor and that they were digging the humor. And so, you know, I do it presentation while it's factual. In this case, they had a lot of statistics and everything.

I did it with a great deal of stand-up comedy humor. And I used to do stand-up comedy many years ago. Really? I didn't know that. It's a dark area of my life. But I did do everything from open mic nights, even had a few normal. Well, Kings as a stand-up comic. Nothing I'm really proud of, but it was fun.

It was interesting, and I understand a great deal about it. I didn't want to make a career of it. So I gave my presentation, and I was fine. Alejandro was just doing cartwheels. He loved it, you know, and all these other people were coming up to me. And I didn't think much more about it than that. I spent some time in the dealer shop, you know, the dealer-deer thing, passing out cards. we couldn't take books with us because the book is a two and a half pound book.

And if we took two crates of these things, you know, and it took a hundred of these books with us, do the math, you know. We had all we could do to get our bags out there, a little, little long card of, you know, a hundred pounds worth of books. So that was pretty much it. I was just hanging out in the dealer's suite talking to people and things like that, handing out these little business cards. We had printed up. They had all the information they needed to order the book. And so we get to the banquet dinner, and I'm sitting there. I'm sitting there with Lauren Fenton.

And I had Dr. Oh, goodness gracious, we had an all-star table really did. And Dr. Gordon Spear was sitting with me. And all of a sudden, they're talking about, oh, we're going to now do the researcher of the year, you know. And all of a sudden I see my picture flash up on the screens and going, oh. my God. And it wasn't necessarily for the book. I mean, the book was a contributing issue. But the whole overall thing was the fact that I've been writing this column for almost five years.

And as it was put in the video they did was, you know, doing nothing but generating positive press about the UFO community, about UFO research and getting positive press in the process. Right. And then when the book came out, New York Times, who had never had a nice thing to say about UFOs for the last 70 years, there was the situation where the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Times walked in, throws a two-and-a-half-pound book on their desk and said some ladies in Syracuse did science. You know, so it was all of that. And it was the whole community, the thing. And what was special was it was all women that won this year. It was really, really fantastic. The lady who won for films, she won two awards.

Wow. And she won on two separate films. And there was a Lifetime Achievement Award for a long. I don't remember the lady's name, and I apologize for that. But she won a Lifetime Achievement Award. Her daughter accepted it for her. And she was like, when I'm going to say, one of the old-time UFO researchers. We're talking 60s, 70s kind of stuff, you know.

And she got this life. Wifdom Achievement Award, and I was delighted to see it, you know, and so it was a really wonderful convention this year. I did have my bad moments at this thing. Really? Would you mind talking about that? I'd love to hear the drama that goes behind these things. The trauma goes two levels. Okay. I had a number of people who were physically bigger than me, men, corner me a couple of times out in hallways where, like, in a box corner going like by a door or something like this and tell me they were from the air force and we're watching you you know that kind of thing and uh it got it got a little intimidating and such and a lot of people said well

i would have punched them out you know no i wasn't about to get myself arrested in arizona yeah you know and so that was that and then i hit one guy that came by was looking through our book and then he he he says you ladies had some man check this work right oh my god God. And he was pounding on my book. You know, pounding on the day, you women didn't check this out with some man, you know. And I just looked at him and said, no. You know, I said, you're talking to two brilliant people here. Don't bother me with your ideas, you know. That was probably the ugliest thing that happened. And I can't, for keep your show somewhat PG, I can't tell you what I said to him. with the extensive career and things you've done with your life share i could really imagine you know what that did and uh what it conjured up and who man i'm glad i'm glad he decided to keep the peace for sure you know you know something one of the guys that really got this guy was six foot six he had to be uh and he was built like a freight train big old bubba right you know

and he's got me cornered in this this one area out there in the hallway there And it was during the change of, like, between lectures and things. And he's up there and giving me this whole hard time, we're watching you, you know. And I said, if you're trying to intimidate me and frighten me, I said, you're barking up the wrong tree. What are you? And I said, well, I'm a combat veteran, and I went through a sex change. That a lot scares me anymore. Right.

So, and I got them all flustered. He went toddling away. You know what? That's enough for some people, for sure. So let's talk about UFOs. Let's do it. Yeah, I mean, as much as a playwright myself, I know you've done some playwriting in your time, drama's great, but we're here to talk about UFOs.

And I kind of want to start. For any of my listeners who may not be familiar with your work, Cheryl, I learned about you through my local newspaper, the Syracuse New Times, which is amazing. So I would love to hear, first of all, how you, got started on this journey to researching UFOs, how it ultimately led to journalism, and then the Syracuse New Times. I know that's a lot to throw at you, but let's hear the origin story, if we're going to go comic book style. The origin story is kind of fun. Okay, I had my first sighting back in 1965 when I was about 12 years old. A real short story, we were visiting some

relatives about three weeks before going back to school from the summer vacation. We were coming down a hill from their farm, and the sky was clear. blue, and a cloud in the sky, and my mother suddenly has my father pull the car off the dirt road. She points at this thing out in the sky and sitting out there like a rock is this silver ball. Now, I'll give you an idea how big it was. Hold your arm out and look at your little fingernail. That's how big that sucker was. Okay.

My mom explained, of course, NASA was new at that time, you know? It's only about five, six years old. So it says it might be something the Air Force is doing, something NASA is doing. maybe it's a weather balloon. It might be people from another world. And she was very gentle about explaining that. And I was fascinated. So finally, my dad gets the car back on the road.

We get down. We get down the hill. We turn it on to the state paved highway. So I crawled up and my brother and sister were toddlers. You know, I crawled up in the back window of that old Chevy and Palin just sat there staring at this thing, wondering who they are. And when that thing decided to go, it's like something like you see in a starship movie now. gone and that changed me and and i think my next sighting was about six seven years later i was in

the air force and i was going it was uh christmas eve 1971 i was going uh 11 30 at night i'm going down to go to midnight mass with one of the guys from my barracks tom and we were walking along and again it was one of those clear night skies uh because there was low light pollution uh it was a gazillion stars a galaxy was overhead all that stuff you know And we're walking along, sort of facing westward, and we see this streak going across the sky. And we're afraid, what's a jet, you know, we're Vietnam, you know. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it stops.

And then Thomas says, wait a minute, jets don't do that. And we thought, well, maybe it's a chopper. He's up there high. Yeah, but choppers don't fly that fast. And I said, well, maybe it's a UFO. Maybe it's going to start dancing. Suddenly it starts dancing like a little fairy up there. did zit, zit, zit, you know, everything, and then gone.

Tom and I were just sitting there just stumbling for words. And when we got the midnight mass, certainly we did not have our minds on midnight mass when we got to the chapel. Yeah. And, but, you know, I didn't tell anybody that story until about 15 years ago. That's amazing. It was some Native American friends. You know, I shared it with one night over a campfire.

But up until then, I never shared it. Now, that didn't mean I wasn't well read on the topic. In 1998, 19, about 2000, I'm sorry, 1990, I was away in a business trip and I used to travel a great deal. I was in the aerospace industry and I traveled a great deal and I was out in Ohio and I got hospitalized and I had to have abdominal surgery. And what was the problem was my, I had packed up my apartment, put everything in storage because I was going to get a new apartment when I came back from this two-month period. business trip and I came back after 10 days in the hospital and I didn't have a home to go to. So I called around and this one friend of mine said, hey, wait a minute. He says, hey, my father's on chemotherapy and treating him for cancer. He says, I'm staying with him on the other side of town. He says,

tell you what, here's the case in my house in Laurel, Maryland. Go up there, feed the cat. You know, stay as long as you like. So I did. Well, when I got into his house, it was a disaster area. I had to do a picking up and cleaning up, you know what I'm saying? I mean, honest to God. I mean, this guy had 45 shells on the floor in his living room, you know. Jesus. He was a gun collector and everything. But this guy had first edition hardback books of every major UFO book that had been published up to 1990.

He had about everything Stanton Friedman had published that time in hardback. Wow. It was a floor to ceiling bookshelf, four feet wide, packs out with nothing but UFO books. Wow. And some of them I had read in high school, things like this. So, hey, he didn't have cables, so I had nothing better to do to sit back and read these books. So it was kind of like a six-month college education in UFOs. All right, so I'm well read on the topic, but I wouldn't say I was any kind of an activist.

All right. Fast forward, 2011, I retired from Lockheed Martin, unceremoniously. A bunch of us got walked out the door and said, ah, you're retired now. We were 30 years and above. Okay, they started with the 45-year guys, came down the hall of 40-year people, and they got to me and 30-year people, bam, gone. So I took a job with another newspaper.

It was the Post-Standard, and I was working in the technical department. and I made the plates to make the newspaper every night. Imagine cookie sheets without the edges on them. And this thing is like a laser printer and it burns it into the metal. Okay. Or an emulsion on the metal. So I would make about anywhere between 100 and 400 of these plates every night. And presses were rolling.

Everything was on. The presses were rolling. All I had to do at this point is about 11, 30, 12 o'clock at night. All I had to do was sit back for about the next. two hours and let them roll that 700 tonne Swiss press. So they're rolling along. Everything's fine. I decided to go on.

I'm online there in the office there in the tech room. And I go on to CNN.com to see if there's any interesting news, you know. And there was this little sidebar story, November 5th, 2012. And the sidebar story said, UFOs have been declining since 1980s. Maybe they were always just an urban legend. And my gun instinct said, wait a minute, that feels like misinformation in a big way. So for the first time in my life, I Googled out and found the National UFO Reporting Center. And I looked up from about 1980 up to about 1995, the number, just the year in summary.

And I dropped them into a quick, you know, Excel spreadsheet. And the thing went up like a rocket. And I'm sitting here looking at this bar chart. And my first impression was, what memo didn't the UFOs get? So being it was the first time I'd ever been out at a New Fork site, I started over the next couple of evenings. When the presses were rolling, I'd sit back and read somebody's accounts. Now, I'd been told like everybody else, only nuts and cooks and crackpots filed these reports. And I'm reading these reports, and they're all very sincere.

Most people are just average people saying, I didn't believe in this stuff, but this happened to us. And we saw this, and they explained it sometimes very detailed, sometimes only two or three lines. But the thing was, everything I saw was very sincere. You could tell the crackpot ones, you know. Most of them were just average people trying to get something off their chest. So my degree was in entertainment writing. I'm not your classic journalist. And entertainment writing and production that's coming from the playwriting and radio writing

and television writing background that I had. So I took a couple of these accounts. Now, I couldn't tell you who they, you know, the who, what, win, when, why is what the press, the journalists have, right? Right. For the rules. I couldn't tell you who because most of these reports are anonymous or are shielded out from the reporting service. They won't tell you who it is.

Okay. I can't tell you why. And if I could, I'd be getting a Nobel Prize. Right. But I could tell you what went and where. So if a report came out and said, oh, me and my girlfriend were on the hood of my car and we were watching this guy, I suddenly became Tom and Susie. We're on the hood of their car, you know.

The facts were always correct. Sometimes I had to embellish the story a little bit to be able to tell a story. And I went around to about 12 different newspaper editors in upstate New York. I got thrown out of offices. I got escorted out by security. I got laughed out of offices. I had one editor look at me. She was the nighttime internet editor.

And she looked at me and said, what brand of tin foil do you wear? Of course. And I was feeling pretty down about this. And finally, I had worked with. the guy by name of Larry Dietrich. And he had been a copy editor over Post Standard for years. And they went through a whole big downsizing and bought a

whole bunch of people out and gave him early retirement, all this stuff. I heard he became the editor-in-chief over to Syracuse New Times. So I made an appointment to go over and talk to him. And when I got in to talk to him, before he even looked at my four or five sheets worth of proposal,

poured me a cup of coffee, we sat back and he started talking to me about UFOs. He had read about every major book I had ever read. By the end of 25, 30 minutes, he says, I am sympathetic. Show me your slides. So we get done. I show my pitch and what I think the demographics are, and I'm proposing it not for his printed paper, but for his newly developed online edition. Because I figured I had, there was more, as they say, column space available on an internet webpage versus columns that takes up the cost money in a newspaper.

Right, right. And that kind of real estate is very valuable. So he said, okay, we'll try you out for a month. I said, okay, so I gave him five articles, and here you go, we'll talk. And end of the month, he calls me up, Cheryl, I want to talk to you. Come on over the office. Well, that's it. You know, and I get in there. I'm a little late getting into the meeting because the parking was terrible.

And I get the parking taken care of, and I get upstairs about five, ten minutes late to the meeting. And I walk into the office and he stops and sees me come in. And so, well, there's our rock star. And I looked at him, I said, Rockstar? He says, yeah, you're drawing more page views than everybody combined. And that's where it went. So they said, just keep doing what you're doing. And then eventually I ended up with Ty Marshall as my digital editor.

And we found out a bunch of things. We found out when I was getting, we could figure out when I was getting censored, not by the newspaper. If I told you in an article that we posted and we said something like, Susie and her parents went to the ice cream store. And while they were ordering their custard, they saw three shining discs fly over the ice cream store at high speed, followed by a couple of Air Force jets. On Google, you couldn't find the article. Of course, Mr. Snowden explained to us much later that the NSA had had its fingers into Google for years. And at first my editor thought, you know, I was just being a little paranoid.

Then he started noticing it. So after this happened six or seven times, you'd Google the name of the article and you couldn't find it except on Syracuse New Times. But other articles would get posted by UFO pages and things like this and reposted and it kind of had a little life of its own. So we got a hold of the guy runs Dirk, who runs the UFO Digest up in Toronto. And he noticed also that this is happening. So what he would do is if he saw he couldn't find it on the internet, he would go directly to Cirque's New Times, copy the article and we gave him permission to post it up at UFO Digest so it could be seen internationally. Wow.

That's how we worked around it. Right. Oh, that's so cool, though, that they were able to cooperate and do that, knowing full well that clearly, you know, you were getting censored from like some unknown entity. And, you know, that doesn't surprise me at this point, you know, that they're able to control the search engines and all that in terms of like certain. key words, I would imagine that you're using Air Force, UFO, this, that. I can only imagine. If it mentioned anything military, it got squelched. Right.

So the bottom line was that went on like that way for about a year and a half, two years. And then by early 2015, Ty Marshall came back to me and he said, I want you to get a Facebook account. And I said, I want you to promote on Facebook. And that's when we really took off. Okay. And so we've been enjoying very, very wonderful page view quantity for, since we did that, went through Facebook. I share with upwards of about 35 to 40 UFO groups on Facebook on a weekly basis when my articles come out. And we went from there. And then coming out of 2015, and you'll love this, 2015, I speak at the International UFO Congress. That's the one

where I met you. I'd been to the one in 2014, you know, but during one of the mixers they had for like speakers and like that, I met Dr. Gordon Spear. At the time he was the chair of the astronomy department at Sonoma University in California. He's now retired. He said, could you get me county data? He said, I had some county data from New York State, but it was kind of spotty. And I said, boy, that's a tall order. Mufon sort of collects it, but it's not very good and New Fork certainly doesn't collect it. In fact, I wrote a letter to Mufon and said, or not Mufant, but New Fork. And I said to him, I said, to you guys, is there any way you can make county data available but we don't collect it? You know, is well, how can I get the

information? Stick a pin in a map. That was their answer, you know. And so I told him I would research a way to do this. And the way we decided to do this was I spent the next three or four months, pulling down, I pulled down all of the New York State information. At the time, it was about 4,200 records. And we sat there with Google, and we looked up the county city cities. Took us four or five months, okay? And we said, we can't be doing this. But then we started sharing some of our charts with other investigators here in New York

State, guys like Bob Long, a former state assistant director, things like that. And everybody knew that there was a Lake Erie effect. We all knew that. But we did, my chart showed that there was a Lake Ontario effect too. It's just you couldn't see it until you put county dated to the sightings. Then suddenly you started seeing all these clusters. And there was all this stuff we were discovering. And so one night in October 2015, Linda and I were sitting down having a beer in our pub.

And we're sitting here saying, you know, kitty hoines for anybody who knows, Syracuse. Oh, I know Kitty Hoins will. Unfortunately, and fortunately. Yeah, same here. And we're sitting there in Kenny Hoynes. We're having a pint and having a bite to eat and sitting there talking. So look at all the cool stuff we discovered. And he said, what if we did this for the whole country?

Because the trick was we're both former government contractors. I was a military industrial complex type of contractor. She worked for a firm that supplied research librarians to government libraries. Wow. Okay. She used to work at the National Academy of Science for a number of years. And then she was the head librarian at the Environmental Protection Agency for 14 years. Okay.

Now, that's a research position. She can tell you more about toxic chemicals and economic poisons than you can shake a stick at. So the bottom line, we said, well, it would take a year to do it. But we said, yeah, let's try. Because when we were doing New York State, we figured out what we were doing wrong. And we wrote down processes. spiral notebook. This is how you clean up the data. Step one. This is how you clean up the data step two. This is how you add county data to it. Step three. This is how you fix this. This is how

you fix that. Okay. Because the data is the data we downloaded was very dirty. And we did. So if you count the time we wrote the processes and the time we actually worked on the UFO citing DEF reference, it took about 18 months. Oh, wow. Okay. Every weekend for 16 months. That's a lot of work. Like, I mean, to a lot of people, 18 months doesn't seem like a long time, but when you're doing something that you guys are doing, compiling data, that is a huge undertaking. This isn't writing pros, you know, like coming out of someone's imagination. This is doing hard research. I can't even imagine what that must have been like. Just numbers everywhere. You probably saw them everywhere you looked. It was crunching. It was cleaning up the databases. Do you know what the number one problem was? that's within the databases, 3%. 3%, 3% now, 3%. And we had 121,000 records for the entire United States. 3%.

People either didn't give us the city or they would write in something like, I'm afraid to tell you, or my wife tells me not to tell you. My husband said I should not tell you. I'm afraid the sheriff will come find us, you know, and stuff like that. And then some, a lot of them just left it blank. Now, that's the first major problem with the city. The second major problem is people cannot spell the name of their town. That could be a problem.

And we had major issues with that. It leads on to one of our future projects. So we got the county data in there. We cleaned up things as best we could. You can't run a spell check because you'll unfortunately change the spelling is something you shouldn't probably. So we cleaned it as best we could, got everything ready to go. I started generating charts and I gave them to Linda. She had the government publishing background and said, we're going to, the first thing,

I got to qualify in this thing. Linda, you know, people say, oh, what did Linda work on? You know, she's just the little lady in the background, right? Yeah, okay, she's short, but she's not just the little lady in the background. She was the brains of the entire operation. I've got an entertainment writing degree. She's got the real science degree. She's got a master's in the library science, for God's sake.

She's a trained researcher. So she kept me honest on a lot of things. And she said, this is stuff. This is what we have to do to make this a valid book. And oh, by the way, we're not just going to have a cute little book with some cute aliens on the front. We're going to publish a real reference book because that's sadly lacking in the UFO community. And everybody's crying, oh, we need more science. Well, this was science.

And that's how we're going to do it. Right. Linda was the brains behind the entire operation. I had the spreadsheet background from two sources, one working at Lockheed Martin for 30 years, but to learn how to do the pivot tables for those charts and graphs, I was working at a bank part-time here in downtown Syracuse that was a corporate bank. And I was in the back room in the invoicing department, and I learned how to do pivot tables from bankers.

and they know how to really manipulate Excel like you would not believe. So that's how that part of it came to be. So I guess my next question for that would be then. So you got this experience, you know, with the different areas that you and Linda, you know, came from. Where did the source material for the actual reports come from, Cheryl? National UFO Reporting Center was easy. In fact, what we decided to do was we made the decision to do the book, okay? in October of 2015.

And we said, Tayaua, let's wait until January 1st, download the new forked data. Now, that was easy because in spreadsheets, if you've got a webpage and it's broken up in the columns, things, if you go into Excel, you can go into the data feature and pull a webpage down into it

and it will pull right into a spreadsheet. And we downloaded every single state in the union individually into separate spreadsheets, and we did it starting at 5 o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day morning. Now, you would not believe the bandwidth you have on New Year's Day morning. Everyone's hung over, right? Nobody's on. Yeah, yeah. I had the entire, all 50 states in the district downloaded in about three and a half, four hours.

Oh, wow. Okay, so I started cleaning that up, and I was probably into late April, early May, And that's the point where I needed the Mufon data. And we went through some hoops with them to get the stuff fine. And I was not making any headway. They kept coming back with more and more questions. They wanted to know what I was doing. It was getting to the point where it was starting to infringe on what I considered our proprietary product.

I don't want to tell them what I'm up to. Okay. And Linda did Linda. So Linda's the executive. So she got on the telephone and 20-minute phone call. I've mounted monkeyed around with these people for four weeks. the emails. She gets out on telephone. 20 minutes later, I had the file. Wow. You know, she was talking boss talk. I guess it worked out. And so we started cleaning up the moof on.

Now, that was another whole can of worms because the data was dirty in a different way. The dates didn't always jive with Excel. Okay. Anybody's ever worked with Excel knows that dates, if you import them from databases or other sources, sometimes the date times. The date times. thing doesn't sink and it gets messy and the date isn't right, things like that, or you can't process or scan the date like with a sort or something like that. It gets missing. So that took a lot of extra effort. But in most cases, Mufon, this is the interesting thing. New Fork for most states was about 60 to 70 percent of the data. Mufon was 20 to 40 percent of the data.

Okay. Depending upon the state. There were three states where Mufon was the dominant state, and they had most of the data. The ratio changed. Okay. But that's something most people didn't know because I had people trying to tell me that Mufon and New Fork, oh, they had equal numbers. No, no, no, no, no. New Fork has by far most of the sightings. Well, I guess, you know, let's sort of get to that data. So how many reports total are we looking at in terms of what you guys covered in this reference? Now, understand, there were some corrupted data in there. Probably we lost maybe about 130. Okay. But in the scheme of things, I would say more like 150. In the scheme of things, that was nothing because the amount of reports that we had worked out to about $121,000.

Now, in the book, we published $121,36. If you quoted me now, I'd say $121,000 because we lost 18 in there because of spelling. of corruptions and things like this. And actually the number is around 121,000. Wow. I mean, from 2001 to 2015. Right, right. And that's a staggering number.

To think that that's what was reported, what did not go reported, I can only imagine in terms of that. We've come up with statistics since then that suggests, you know, if you go to a UFO community, people will stand up and tell you one in ten people reports what they see. But usually that is determined. at some kind of UFO talk. Stanton Friedman or somebody will go up there and say, how many people have seen a UFO? All the hands go up.

They say, how many people report them? Most of the hands go down and somebody counts the numbers, the hands that are still up, and it works out about 10%. The thing is, at a UFO convention, you're preaching to the choir. Right, right. Okay.

So I saw some other surveys that were done, one by the National Geographic. Another one was done by Fox Pictures last year. And the best number we're coming up, with what's what a couple of investigators suggested, it might be out around 40 or 50, one in 40 or 50 people reports what they see. All right, so if we're averaging, take a number like in 2001, the reported numbers were about 3,500 for the whole country.

That is accurate, but it's a lie, and I'll tell you why in a minute. Now, you times that by, we'll say 50, and that's 175,000 potential sightings. And only 3,500 got reported. Now, you come out to 2012 where we had like 13,500 reported sightings total for the country, times that by 50. And we're talking about 675,000 sightings a year. And only 12 or 13,000 were reported. So also the other thing we had to point out in the book, the early years of the 2000s were in that 3,500, 4,000. 5,000 range.

And a lot of talk shows, particularly these morning disc jockey shows, wow, it went up in three tiers across, you know, 15 years. Yes and no. Okay. We've correlated it to people having broadband. Okay, okay. More people had, we're just starting to come online, 99, 2000, 2001, we're just coming online with regular, regular dedicated broadband instead of dialogue.

So more people had the ability to report these things. And then about mid-2000s, around 2005 to about 2008, it takes another jump up. Well, more people in the burbs started getting it. And then when you got out towards the late 2000s from about 2010 to about 2015, just about everybody has broadband except for some rural areas. Right. So we extrapolate back and say, we think we've been averaging around seven. 700,000 sightings a year. That's an approximate between about 575 and about 850,000.

But right now we're saying our guess is about 750,000 sightings a year and only about 10 or 12,000 are being reported. In reality, it's just a number. But when you think about that, like, that's so many people seeing something in the sky. And so many skeptics and debunkers saying there's nothing up there but conventional aircraft. I mean, that's insane to think that on average there's that amount of sightings per year. Yeah, but, okay, let's take that $675,000 number, okay? Yeah. Times 0.04, 4%.

The most conservative guys, guys like Ben Moss, the chief investigator for Mufon, Virginia, okay? He's one of the more conservative guys. The range of people that say the amount of sightings out there, which ones are the real thing, comes down to somewhere between 4 and 20. 20%, which the really strong investigators will say between 4% and 7%. I went with 7%. Ben tells you 4. Okay, okay. That 600 and 75,000, 4% works out to about 27,000, where maybe the real thing.

But remember, that's a guess. Right. They can all be the real thing for all we know, you know. And then if you take that 27,000 and divide it by 15 years, it's about 1,800 a year, and this is this is this is of that 4% okay and then you divide that by 12 which is monthly that means in the united states there's about 150 of these biblical events happening a year uh in fact if you divide it happening a year uh yeah yeah and then if you divide that by 12 you're dealing with you're dealing with how many you got per month it's still a staggering number and that's using the most

number that any of the investigators gave me. Right. Well, I'm glad that, you know, you went that way with the most conservative because it's still overwhelming to listen to that. For you, I mean, in my book, we said it was 7% in our book. Yeah. And some of your radio talk hosts that, you know, still want to be consoled that maybe they're not real.

Yeah. We'll say, well, in her book, she says 97% are misidentified. And I didn't say that. I said that 7% is what the experts tell me. I'm not sure what is misidentified. Right. So, who knows? Yeah, who knows?

I mean, well, let's go with the data right now, Shell. So we've got, uh, okay, because you sent me something in the mail there and you quoted that you were calling quoting cities. Cities, cities, yes. Yeah. Okay. So there's a big difference. Okay.

Okay. This is what blows everybody's socks off. Okay, the top five states, California, 15,836, Florida, 7,787. I can do that, roll that one off the top of my head in my pajamas. Texas, 7,58, Washington State, 5,226. Pennsylvania, 5176. And of course, we got to say New York, it's number six in the country, 5141. Okay, now, that's the states.

Now, what's important, because we added county data, we can tell you what the counties are. Right. And that is a very different animal. And I explain why. Okay, now, counties, where do you think the most populous county for UFOs is? 3,000 counties, over 3,000 counties in the United States. Hmm. I'm going to say, I want to say like one of the coasts for sure.

I don't know if I'm way off on that, but I don't know. I have no idea, to be honest. Okay. Los Angeles County. Now, we're not talking Los Angeles City. We're talking Los Angeles County, which is considerably bigger area. Okay. 3,212.

Now, that number is more than 40 of the individual states by themselves for their sightings. one county. Okay. Now, the second most county for UFO sightings. Now, in our book, we say it's 2019. But after the book came out, we found out that over 500 sightings, the people spelled Phoenix wrong. Okay. Yeah.

I do that myself sometimes. Instead of spelling it, P-H-O-E, they did an E-O, and we didn't count them. Now, if we were to put that same chart out now, it would be about 2563, about 2,500, okay? Okay, that's Maricopa County, Arizona, essentially Phoenix. Okay. Okay, now, and then Cook County, Illinois, okay, to Chicago area, San Diego, California, and King County, Washington State.

Now, those are the top five counties. Now, and you noted my cities. Phoenix is the number one city for sightings in the United States. Right, right. followed by Las Vegas. Now, Las Vegas as a state came in about number 26, and I got all kinds of hate mail when the book came out from people in Nevada. Oh, but we've got all kinds of UFOs.

Yeah, every 51 fans, I would assume. Oh, God, they hammered me. Yeah. But the consoling factor for them was Las Vegas came in number two. Seattle came in number three, Chicago number four, and Portland came in number five. And I don't even think that's correct. Come to think of it, Portland is not correct because we found out that there's a dozen Portland's and they all added up when we did the spreadsheet. So what we have since taken that out, we did have another city and off the top of my head I'm not drawing what it is.

I think it's Pittsburgh. No, it's Philadelphia. So that gives you an idea just because a state had the majority of the sightings doesn't mean that their cities necessarily have them. The other thing that came up out of all of that was people asked me, what about Maricopa County and Los Angeles County? Why do they have so many? Yeah, that's my question. Okay. That's where I live right now. We have a theory about this. Okay. Okay. I saw, in fact, I didn't even know this until I was watching, you know, one of our, you know, upper channel, some UFO documentary, okay? Los Angeles has had UFO sightings since before we had manned flight back in the 1880s,

these things flying up and down the valleys. All right. Now, then in February of 1942, they had the Battle of L.A. Right. And so what we figured, there was grandpas and everybody telling their kids and their grandkids, you know, about all the stuff we used to see. And then they had the pedal of L.A. He went 1,200 artillery shells and oh my God, you know.

And it became a cultural phenomenon and people sort of just became conditioned to look up. Maybe we'll see something cool. Kind of backed it up, Maricopa County. 20 years ago, Phoenix Lights, you know, two football field long triangles going over, blotting out the stars. And what are we got? We got the same thing. We got people, the kids, parents telling their kids, you know, this is what we saw, years ago before you were born and everything and everybody's looking up and that's what we think's

going on we think it's a cultural phenomenon yeah yeah absolutely i could definitely see that and i mean there's so many variables when it comes to in terms of like the amount of sightings being reported things being cited and one of the things i found interesting in other interviews that you've brought up shirle is the idea of weather being a big factor in all this you know in terms of like climate and how clear the skies are what time of the day it is like these all factor into this so i guess Linda discovered that. Yeah, yeah. I would love to hear what you guys sort of tripped on upon when it came to that aspect.

We had already done the charts and graphs. Okay? I had all these objects all on a big disc for, and she was laying out the book. And we were doing this, like the New York Times reported, in our sewing room. We had a very big sewing room up there in Strathmore from the big house that we were in. My parents live. Yep, okay, just a few blocks away, actually. Small world.

Small world. The room we were in was the, uh, It was the warmest room in the house, and that's where we put kind of like an upstairs parlor, and we had our sewing machines up there and everything. Of course, the day after the New York Times article reported that we had all of our computers in our sewing room, and he described it with like many sewing machines and cutting tables. Vogue.com published an article about UFOs, essentially ripping off a lot of what the New York Times article was. They had a pretty girl in a lovely dress staring off into space, you know.

Yeah. It was a cute article, and if you Google Vogue. com, UFO, you'll probably find it. It's still out there. I'm going to do that. We were looking, Linda looked up over her terminal. I was writing the analysis chapters. It was the last thing we did.

And I was writing that. And she says, uh, Cheryl, did you notice that there's a latitude issue with the, with the monthly charts? I said, what? Now, I had originally been told by several investigators in New York State. I had this chart where I did UFOs by month, January through December. And everybody thought it was a stupid chart. why are you going to bother to put it in the book?

That was the attitude. But we decided to put it in there anyway. As it turned out, if you're up in the New England states or New York State and go all the way across Michigan and all this northern states right there on the Canadian border going down into Pennsylvania, there's a quiescent number, January through about May, it starts to tick up a little bit, June, and then July, and there's a little peak, July and August are through the roof, and then starts ticking back down again in September and in October and November. November, December, I backed down to this quiescent level, some basic level, okay? And it's a consistent basic level. Now, who are those people? Those are the dog walkers and smokers. They're out there, day in, day out, rain or shine.

And Mufon investigators, when they're looking at a month's worth of UFO sightings, the first thing they tell me they scan for is smokers and dogs, because those people are out day in, day out. They know what the sky's like and they know what's not. normal. So I looked at the chart and Linda shows me a chart like from Maryland and then a couple samples all the way across on this roughly the same latitude going across the country all the way to California. And we see that peak is coming down, that middle peak in June, July, August is coming down. It's flattening. When we get into deep south states, it's statistically flat. Those bar charts are statistically flat. Oh, they're bumpy, but they're statistically flat. And what

we came out of this was temperate weather and leisure time. Now, how did we come up with leisure time? Have you ever heard of the Wednesday effect by John Keel? Very, very little, but I am a little familiar with it. Yeah, please explain. Back in the mid-1970s, the late John Keel, he is the author of the Mothman prophecies. Now most people will know that. Okay. Okay. He had about 800 to 1,000 punch cards with UFO sighting information on them. He got some professor at a university out in Colorado someplace to run them through one of those big warehouse size, you know, 360 computers they had in those days, right? And they came up that all the sightings were on, the majority of the

sightings were on Wednesday. Hence, for 40 years, we had the Wednesday effect. Everybody said, oh, the UFOs are all on Wednesdays. He suffered from a small data set. Here we are in the 21st century. We believe in big data. Big data tells us big trends. So we crunched those same numbers. It came up before we put the book out. And when I was talking to some people on Facebook, a couple of researchers reached out to me and said, what about the Wednesday effect? And we ran the numbers and son of a gun. It's statistically flat during a week. It's bumpy, but it's statistically flat during a week, starts to tick up on Friday, goes through the roof a little bit on about 7 to 9% on Saturday night on Saturday and then it ticks back down on Sunday to about what Friday was.

But it's still statistically above the rest of the week in most states. Now, there's a couple places in the southwest like Colorado where it does tick up a little bit more on Wednesdays for some reason. But it does not surpass the Friday, Saturday night numbers. So that we discovered that the weekends when people are off. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Now, the only place that this kind of got goofy is we went down to Florida, deep south state, statistically flat, except for one thing.

January and December were spiked. Okay. Snowbirds. They go down to Florida and they all clear blue skies that's warm. Hey, Harvey, look at that. You know, I mean, that's what a boils down to. You go to Hawaii and you see these spikes four times. I went to a travel agency and said,

does this look anything familiar to you? And he said, yeah, those are tourist cycles. Okay. And again, they get out there in the islands, clear dark sky in the Pacific Ocean, and oh my God, what's that? You know. Now, Alaska, I had an Alaskan Mufan investigator talk to me at the convention. We had a nice long chat because Alaska, all the sightings are in January,

February, March, April, May, June, July is like in the dirt and that starts going back up again. Well, what's the deal? Well, the first thing I figured out, having worked up in those latitudes at one point when I was in the military, they suffer from a thing called white nights where it's dark six months out of the year. It's also very light a number of months out of the year. Right, right. So it doesn't get dark. When do people see UFOs? Predominantly when it's dark.

and they see something shiny going across the sky. Yeah. So that's why when you look at the Alaskan monthly chart, you get January through December, and you look at this thing, and it goes over, and it goes down to a dip right in the middle around January-A-August, or July-August time from it. And I had a Mufon-A-Laskan Mufon investigator back me up on it.

That makes sense, yeah. Wow. We didn't know until we plotted the numbers. Exactly. And again, you know, proving the point that the numbers do not lie. I mean, that's a really. really interesting. And those, again, are variables people don't think about. And another one I found really interesting was, okay, so we all know about Pine Bush, you know, everything that happened in the Hudson

Valley area, huge, quote, unquote, flap at one point. So, of course, that's got to be a huge number, a hotbed, right? But you actually found that that's not really the case in terms of the surrounding areas in New York State. Could you touch on that a little bit? Yeah, I'm supposed to speaking pine bush this coming may i'll probably get lynched there were five other counties they had far more sightings than pine bush did and i went nine rounds with a bunch of people i wrote an article about it in my in my column and oh god all kinds of hate mail he said but we had five thousand people see that sighting i said yeah but that particular sighting on that day it's five thousand people seeing the same sighting i don't count that it's five thousand sightings i see that as one event yeah

Right, exactly, exactly. And then I ask them, did all these 5,000 people report these things in New Fork or Mufant? Oh, they're crap. Okay, fine, that doesn't, if you don't report it, I can't count it. Yeah, exactly. You know, and so I run up against this problem. In New York State, the major places for citing UFOs in New York State is Suffolk County, Long Island. Interesting, Montauk Point.

Hmm. Yeah. And then it's New York County, which is essentially Manhattan, and then Erie County, and then number four is Nassau County Long Island. So Long Island itself has got, you know, over a thousand, almost a thousand sightings in that 15-year period just in those two counties. Right. So that's a big deal. And I'd been writing about Long Island for a long time. In fact, I identified a thing down there called the Great River Triangle.

a cluster at the Great River Inlet and it seemed to be kind of a triangle and I called it a Great River Triangle. But that was more of a journalistic. I needed a good headline. But now let's go one more step further. Where are all the sightings in New York State? 19% of New York State's 5,141 sightings follow from St. Lawrence County. up on the St. Lawrence Seaway all the way across Lake Ontario and down into Lake Erie into the end of what they call the St. Lawrence Seaway. Right.

19%. If you come down the Hudson from Lake Champlain all the way down the Hudson, ignore Long Island and just go to the Atlantic Ocean, it's 32%. 51% of the sightings in New York State are on those two waterways. Whoa. Yeah, see, I mean, I had my personal UFO sighting, same as you at age 12, on the St. Lawrence River. I mean, there's got to be something to that. We could guess, we could make speculations, but yeah, that's really interesting.

What do you think about that, the idea of like maybe U.S.os or, you know, the bodies of water having something to do with it? Canadian Navy chased the number of U.S.Os up to St. Lawrence Seaway and out to the ocean, out to the bay. They chase the number of them. You can just Google Canadian Navy U.S.Os. You'll find stories out there on the Internet. What we did find, though, remember I was telling you about we found there was a Lake Ontario effect? Yes. When we put the county data to it, we found out that there was almost as many sightings in Monroe County, essentially the Rochester area, as there were out on the Niagara Frontier in Erie County area, almost as many sightings.

Okay. and a little bit of research back in the 19th century, even going back into the 18th century, 1700s, they talked about, there was people thought that there was evidence that there was, and I got this from the Canadians, this is not an American side, I got this from the Canadian side. There's Lord, Lord says that they have suspected that there's a civilization living under, in fact, the Native Americans said this,

there's a civilization living under Lake Ontario. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so that raises all kinds of hairs on the back of your neck. Oh, yeah. So that's part of it. Now, if you add into the Finger Lakes, no one individual Finger Lakes lake area had anything

that stuck out by itself. In fact, they were rather lacklisher. We just looked at a county on Seneca Lake or something like that, right? And there was usually a county on one side and a county on the other side. You know, these things go up 22 miles and just. border between two counties. But when you took the entire Finger Lakes region as the state defines it and count those counties, you come up with another 27, maybe 30%, so God, does that mean that 70% of the sightings in New York State are around major bodies of water? That's a really good question.

It rattles you to think about it. Yeah, there's got to be something to it. Now, you brought up a question about time of day. Yes. Okay? Yeah. We didn't really have data on that person. We have it, but we don't have it. You know, first thing, when we got done with the database, we had county, state, we had national

state and county data. We could have taken it a step further and given us a municipal city breakdown per county. The problem was, it would have made our book about 900 pages. It would have been like one of these underbridged dictionaries. Right. And the two and a half pound book by itself right now is a lethal weapon. And so we said, no, we're not going to bother it. Plus it would have probably added about another eight months for us to complete the book.

And we wanted to get it out there. So the problem was people don't spell the city's rate. So since we can't just easily do a fix on the spelling, I've had to go a few hundred sightings a day, maybe a half hour to an hour a day for my eyes go crossed. and I have to literally touch every single record of 121,000 records to make sure the cities are correctly spelled. Yeah. Now, that's easy because once you get down, say you get a stretch of two dozen cities or something like the same name, you look at the best spelling there and the most common spelling

and then you, and also look at the fact that people might have the wrong cases in there that type of thing. I'll do it all capital letters or all small letters. And you pick one that's the proper case of a capital letter and all lowercase letters. And you just kind of drag and drop it in, you know. It's not a big deal. But it takes time and it's tedious work. So, okay, here's where I am right now.

Linda and I are talking about putting out several books. One, City's Directory. And the City's Directory has none of the charts and tables, but it has a breakdown. by state to the county level alphabetically and under each county a breakdown of all the municipalities in that county. So say a county had 75 sightings over the 15 year period. We can give you a list of whatever, maybe it might be five counties and villages, that that type of thing, or it might be 25 or 30, you know, and it has a breakdown. Now, we did this for a couple of journalists.

Philadelphia of newspaper asks us for this kind of information so we went in. and just cleaned up the Philadelphia area spelling. So it gave us the mornings, you know, a couple hours worth of work. We did the same thing for Cook County. And the county, just below Cook County, which slips in my mind right now. And we did it for a newspaper out there in the Chicago area that wanted to know what the municipal breakdown was. And as a reporter would come to me, I would look at the scale of it. If it was an easy thing to do in an hour or two, I would do it for them.

But what we're hoping to be able to do is put out what we call a city's desk reference where you can look up a state, pick a county, and it goes right down to the municipal level in that area. We have it broken down for all C&Y right now. I do it in presentations when I do talks here. And Anadaga County is in the center of the state has the most sightings in this area. We are 161 for that 15-year period. If you go back all time all the way back to 1890, we have over during that 15, from 2015, all the way back to 1890, there's about 191 to 200 sightings total. And that's a lot for a single county. Yeah.

See, that's what's cool. I mean, that's the county I grew up in my entire life. And that's a sense of pride to hear that, that it had like the most in that area. And I think that's what's really interesting about your book, too, Cheryl, is that. Every county, every city, every state, you know, they take pride in hearing these numbers. And I think that's why it got so much attention when it came out. Every, you know, newspaper was picking this up and making it, you know, kind of making it their own, which was really interesting. And I can imagine pretty tough for you, you two as well, having to kind of like cater to each city, each state.

I had just retired a couple of months before. Yeah. This book came out in March and we just started getting a little bit of press. And then the New York Times guy came up, Ralph Blumenthal, one of the guys who wrote the December 16th, 2017 articles. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And he literally came up on the train and a pickle hotel room and spent a day with us in our front room there in Strathmore. We don't live there now.

But he spent a day with me, four or five hours vetting me. Linda came home from work. He spent another three, four, five hours vetting her. and then we packed up and went down to kitty hoins and had dinner and drank the evening away and talked the evening away as they say and the bottom line was you know he was just blown away and so was his editors and that's why there's been this shift that they're actually doing serious research on this stuff now and trying to break this whole disclosure thing down and I'm pleased that Linda and I had something to do with getting them to thaw out absolutely I mean that's what a lot of people don't realize is, yeah, like, this whole Pentagon UFO program thing, like, it's interesting and it's extremely like, I look forward to where it's heading in terms of, like, the way journalism is approaching it, but a lot of people don't realize that, like, your book and what you're doing sort of paved the way for that, that ridicule factor had been shed already in order for

this Pentagon story to come forward. Yes, yes. And the goofy thing was, and one of the things that they remember what their head was, was with our article. And a UFO, did you ever think you'd live to see today, the New York Times printed a UFO article in Science Magazine? Nope. Okay.

I mean, I had to prick myself. I really did, you know. And remember, the title of the article was, people are seeing UFOs everywhere, and this book proves it. And that just flattered the hell out of me and Linda. Believe me, it really did, you know. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, you know what's interesting, though, with this whole thing with the book?

I've only been invited to one conference, one convention. Yeah. Let's talk about that. It's really goofy. I've had a number of them push back and say, oh, well, you're just talking about data. That's boring. But, you know, I had 2,000 people rolling in the aisles over there at the I UFOC because I have a great deal of humorous presentation when I'm sharing the numbers, you know? Yeah. And I made it interesting for them. And it's not just dry numbers. Now, the book has all the charm of a bank ledger.

You have to admit that. This is not a get a cup of tea and curl up with this book. Unless you're doing research or you're really interested in what the secrets of the universe, which is what we've got in this book. You know, it's not like my old editor, Larry Dietrich says, this isn't exactly a page turner. And I said, yeah, I know that. But remember what the title is, Linda specifically said, we're going to make a reference book, a book that will sit in the reference section of a library just like the census books. Right. And that was the focus.

And I mean, again, like I met you at the conference and, you know, your presentation in 2015 was, it was so captivating that you were the first person I came up to after it and was like, oh my God, I want to learn more about your work. Now, you know, in terms of this book, like you're saying, you know, it might be dry to the layman person who doesn't find it entertaining, but that's not, like you said, that's not what it's about. It's for anyone. And I'm talking like, so you dropped off a copy of this book to my parents home in Syracuse so that it was waiting for me when I went to visit them. And I'm not kidding you. The minute I walked in the door, my mom, of course, gets up, hugs me. My dog jumps in my arms. My dad's sitting there, you know, on the couch. reading your book, you know, and he was like so amazed and looking at like, oh, I've been there. I want to see how many sightings were there. Oh, I grew up here. I want to see that. Like, that's what it's about, like the individual looking at these numbers and then the researchers using it when we want to refer to something, when we want to find out what happened where and when and how many. Like, that's what this is. But in terms of presenting this to the public show, How do you think the best way to go about that would be?

Like you said, you've only been invited to one conference. That's ridiculous, in my opinion, especially when they hear you on interviews or they see you in person, see how animated and passionate you are about this stuff. What do you think needs to be done to change that? There's two schools of thought. One school of thought says that I'm not famous enough and they want a name, okay, and they're not interested. I already had one prominent producer of UFO conferences tell me, oh, we're not interested in data. That's the most asinine thing I've ever heard. Yeah, but I'm not going to tell you who it is on the air.

Trust me. I'm not going to tell you who it is because you would fall off your chair if I told you. I'll tell you, I know who went bananas about this book? Was Stanton Friedman. Awesome. He held the damn thing. I had a preliminary version with a couple of chapters with me at one of the cons. I was a Muthon conference sometime before that.

And he looked at it. He says, my God, you're publishing data. I says, is that a good thing? Yes. He stood up waving the papers over his head. Somebody's finally publishing the data. And it was so cute. You know, the next two we're working on, one, we had the city's directory.

I've had a lot of requests for international information. And two weekends ago I cleaned up the National UFO Reporting Center's international data base. You only had about 8,500 records in it, but still, that was pretty telling. Because of the way they collected, they didn't have like a column for cities. They didn't have a county for countries. What they had was the initial field would have like a city and then in parentheses the country. But sometimes they would say the city and the parentheses near. in parentheses and then

parentheses the county the country sometimes they didn't put the parentheses in any number of things there was all this extradrenuous verbiage in there okay so it wasn't easy to pick it out thank God I used to be an IT professional I had to say here and write some

code in Excel code to go in there and sort that out and it was about 88% effective it cleaned up most of it and then I've had to go down and probably 5%. I literally had to go through and touch about 5% of every 100 of the sightings. And they're pretty much cleaned up. And I made a request about two weeks ago,

over the last two weeks, two different directors of investigation at Mufon, and I specifically gone to them and said, would you please give me a dump of the international data from 2000 to 2017. Now, I've done this to 2017. We're trying to do an update, so to speak. Okay. And so we hope to have, and we're not going to do a lot of charts, but what we are going to do is we're going to organize it in such a way. And we had a lot of, I don't want to say hate mail, but we had a lot of serious mail that said, why don't you make this a Kindle book? Well, the charts and graphs didn't, we had one Kindle book. It's on my Kindle book. It's on my Kindle. It looks like hell. Yeah, yeah. Okay, charts and graphs don't do well on Kindle, but the way we're going to build it out for this, we think we've got a good model for what a Kindle book should look like for a quick reference book. And so we're hoping to have the city's directory in a Kindle format. We're hoping to have the International in a Kindle format. Oh, cool.

Yeah. See, that's the kind of thing I think will appeal to the younger generation a little bit more because they're so, you know, like giving them a paper book now. And they're like, what do I do with this thing? But in terms of that, let's talk a little about the UFO field in general show before we wrap things up here. The lack of attention that the data gets, but also the lack of attention that female researchers get. I don't bring this up often on the show because, like you know, it's a very, it's a boys club. So, you know, I don't want to ask a guy why they think that is because we don't experience it. We don't go through that adversity every day of having our work scrutiny.

10 times more than a female researcher would. So why do you think that is and what can we do to maybe alleviate that and change that? Well, you know, Justice Ruth Gader Ginsburg was to ask how many women that should be on the Supreme Court? She's nine. And the reporter said towards, but don't you think that's in balance? She said nobody thought it was in balance when it was all men. Okay. I brought the point up to a bunch of people because I've heard.

heard, okay, I've heard several things. Now, we got two issues going here. Okay. We have issues of women not being given the time of day in the research. We have an issue with, well, and I first started putting my data up, sharing some of it before we wrote the book, I had all kinds of trolls coming in. And I'm not just saying trolls. I had all kinds of investigators coming at me and telling me, well, you didn't bet this, you didn't bet that. Well, okay, let's talk about that a minute. To this vet question, I didn't go out there and vet 121,000. One, I didn't have a time machine and go back to 2001. But the other issue is, and the point that I made out to people, I said, this is the era of big data. For how long have we in the UFO community, all the books were

out there about this crash or that crash. It sounded like an FM radio station. The best UFO crashes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, you know? And it got old. Linda, when we were talking about doing this book. Again, we were talking over dinner and a beer, and she said, you know, let's do something nobody else has done. One, let's add up all the numbers for one. Nobody's done that. She said, I went out and researched it.

The only compilation there is out there was part of the Condon report, and it's, what, 50 years old? Yeah. The other problem was, she said, all the books tend to be centered, focused on one crash or one incident and some of these authors seem to almost own those things like that's my crash you know you know and they don't want anybody else to write about or anything like that they won't share data you know and so we decided to do strictly 21st century data now so a reporter asked me this recently on a radio show he said but you didn't it's been said that you didn't vet these and

I said I don't have to they were they were put out there on the internet okay it wasn't my responsibility to vet them. I knew a certain percentage of them might be hoaxes, but I left it in there because there's a formula that says some percentage is hoaxes. And if I took them out, it would have messed up the formula. And it's a very tiny amount. It really is. And then I looked at this and I said, okay, what we've got here is a situation a lot of people in the UFO community with the books they're writing and everything are looking at an ant hill and they're doing individual books and study on an individual ant, okay? What did we do?

We backed the camera back and we said, wow, look at that pattern of all those ants marching around the ant hill. That's big data. Yeah. And other sciences are using big data. Who cares if it's not 100%. We wanted to see the trends. Now, here's a discovery we got made recently, and we presented it eight slides at the UFO

Congress. Okay? And this was new data. At the time that I presented those slides, the information was two weeks old. Okay? That's how new it was. Yeah. We did several very low level, low level states.

And then Dr. Spear did California. It took them like four or five days. His wife was about ready to divorce and when he had done with it. Oh, I felt so bad about this. The question was this. And what is scientific method, right? What? You ask a question.

That's what this is about. I ask a question. And I said, Dr. Spear, do you have any idea whether or not we could convert all of these times we've got to star time, sidereal time, LST? The time when the stars are overhead, it's a 23-hour 56-minute day. It's shorter than a 24-hour day. So a star you might be directly overhead with you today will be. overhead four minutes earlier tomorrow and four minutes earlier eight minutes earlier the day after that okay it keeps creeping back four minutes every day so it's a moving target so I said to

him is there a predominant time when the UFOs are coming are being seen against sidereal time star time do they all come over do they all come when torus is overhead or something statistically the whole chart should have been flat it should have been a bumpy statistical chart it wasn't there's a specific time people were seeing all the UFOs according to star time now civil time normal civil time what's on your clock most the sightings is just low rumble through the day and it gets up after about six o'clock seven to about ten o'clock at night essentially bedtime um that's when most the sightings were seen and most people say well duh you know yeah there's That's when most people see these things.

Okay? That is what you would expect. Cedarial time, he cranked it. He had to convert the times in the states where it was daylight savings time. So he had to look at the months that were associated to those sightings. Yeah. And he had to convert them from daylight saving time to standard time. Then he had to correct the spelling on those states. Remember I told you there was a problem there.

Then he went out and bought a disc with all the latitude, longitude information, and we inserted that into the data. base and he crunched it. And guess what? There's this time called about 1830 or 1800 serial time. That's 6 o'clock star time. Well, guess what's overhead from about quarter to 6 to about 630 star time? The galaxy.

Dead straight overhead. Wow. It was consistent from Iowa and Miami, which was the first ones where he tested the program out and then he crunched California. He did New York for me and we did Arizona. And it was consistent. It shouldn't have been if it was a fluke, if it was nuts and crackpots. Are we going to do the whole rest of the country? No, because it was too time intensive. Now, maybe once we get all the spelling corrected, we might take a shot at it, but he values his marriage to his wife. And I don't have those skills. He does.

Okay, but we've got a snapshot here. We know there's something here. Maybe somebody else with more time and resources living in their mom's cellar will be able to do this. But I don't have the time for it and neither does he. Right, right. But we do know there's something here. And how many scientific discoveries started with one little tidbit somebody discovered and 20 years later somebody said, wow, you know, look what they found.

Let's see if it goes bigger than that, you know. And how many things like that were discovered like that? Exactly. It takes like one person to pick up the ball and run with it. And I think that's, that's what's very important. And one of those people you mentioned was Stent Friedman. I mean, we now know that this dude after 80, you know, he's turning 84 this year. He's finally retiring from the UFO field. That's a big deal to a lot of people out there. And, you know, we start seeing this new generation kind of cropping up, Cheryl. And before we get to what's next for you, I'd love to know your thoughts on what would you tell these younger people getting involved right now in UFO research. How should they get involved? Where should they turn? And what should they expect when they get into this crazy thing we've all decided to do? Well, there's an awful lot of doozism.

You didn't pay your dues. Yeah. Oh, I heard this over the last three years. I had all these people just ragging on me on the groups on Facebook. Oh, she's just, you know, she hasn't paid her dues, you know. She's not established like so and so and so and so, you know. And I wrote one article out there and said, gee, is it so devastating to the field of UFOology that a few women are out here doing their own research that's not nuts and bolts research? A lot of guys only go with the nuts and bolts.

They only want to see what the cockpit of that UFO looks like. We decided to go study something else, something nobody else was looking at. We found our own niche. and sometimes some of this stuff is too squishy for what I'm going to call the white male community of the UFO community. And that's an issue. For new people coming in, my advice to them up until this point and continues to be. If you like this stuff, find yourself a niche that somebody else isn't, and this is what people in astronomy will tell you. Remember Vera Rubin who discovered that the galaxies are flying apart and, you know,

Nobody else was studying that. And her attitude was, you know, in those days in the astronomy community, if you said something like people say, what are you studying? And you said something and everybody laughed. You knew you had a niche. Yeah. Okay. So I told these, I've been telling these kids that if you want to study this stuff, don't go where everybody, don't go where everybody else is. Find something that's a niche and go drill on it until you get some answers.

And then report and then publish it, then report it. The other big problem we've got in this community, we don't have any clear institutions for peer review. Amen. Yeah. I caught so much crap from what I'm going to call the nuts and bolts, researchers and investigators, because I didn't vet all 120,000. I said, that was never the objective. Yep. You know, and I had these people come to me and say, oh, you didn't do this and you didn't do that.

And I said, yeah, but you didn't do this. It didn't matter because in the scale of things, the. the big data trends were more important than the individual sightings, which is what all the investigators will beat you up on. Oh, yeah, but we've got it right down to 4%. I didn't care. I, as a journalist, had noticed that most people were very sincere where their sighting. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to sit here and cross-examine them and say, oh, you probably

just saw an airplane with one running light out or something. I'm just going to say, I think maybe they saw something amazing because 39 other people. people or 49 other people didn't report what they saw. But these people were moved enough to report what they see. Very good point. I say that makes it more unique. Absolutely. You know, being compelled to actually report it, something happened. And it was an, it was extraordinary to that individual. And I think that's, that's very important, that human aspect to all this, how it changes a person, how they perceive it. And what, what impact it leaves on them. I mean, I think, you know, the aftermath of a UFO event is just as intriguing as the event itself.

Yeah. Yeah. There is a fallout event for individuals. You know, Spectrum Cable did a special on me up here. Yeah, a long form piece. Yep, I saw that. And I thought they were just going to run it one day. Well, they ended up running it the day.

I sent a reporter over to talk to me in the apartment, which I wasn't expecting. I had just gotten back, you know, and I had to run around here and clean the place off. Yeah. But she came in and put a microphone on me and talk, and we just talked about the topic matter, and I showed her some stuff from the books and everything. And she had that for B-roll footage. And then they came over to the Liverpool Library where I gave a presentation to about 100 people. Now, something you said about, you know, millennials getting in this, that audience was very gray.

There was maybe four people, what you would consider millennial in the audience. Everybody else was my age. Now, what does that say? Okay, but I had about 100 people in there. But the 100 people, the library didn't budget enough time for questions and answers, and we had to be literally thrown out of the place. And so the bottom line is they shot foot. They sent two film crews over, and they shot footage,

and they put it all together in a nice, long form piece, and they ran it on the 11 o'clock news. But then the next day, actually for the next four days, it was a holiday weekend, and they ran it 55 on the hour for the next four days. I got 75 freaking phone calls from people all over and not just here in Syracuse. I was getting them, Elmira, Bingham, Corning, you know. Apparently they were running all across the entire state, and I was getting calls. And you know what the calls were?

I know you'll understand. I had a sighting 10, 20, 30, 50, 60 years ago on one case. Wow. I needed to tell somebody and get this off my chest before I die. And this is what I listened to for over four days. Spectrum and I are talking about the idea of me doing a UFO road show. And basically going around to all the places here in New York, keep it a New York-centric thing,

and go around to all their news areas, as their crew would support me, will do a talk at some big library or VFW or something like that in that area, and then talk to people afterwards on camera. kind of a grassroots disclosure. Yeah. Okay? Trying to get people out of this idea that they had to hide what they know.

And that's what we've proposed. And they're chewing on it. That's awesome. Again, those are the types of things that just, you know, spread the word and get more people to come forward. The more we get this out to the mainstream public, the more they're going to be accepting and come forward, you know, and up that data, up those numbers. And I was excited to learn. And this is kind of an exclusive on somewhere in the sky. You haven't talked about this much yet, but you have a new endeavor that is only going to multiply that by, God, who knows how much.

So I'd love Cheryl, if you could tell us a little about what's going on with K-C-O-R. Okay. There's a lot of really good hosts and K-C-O-R digital network. And they're a well-run radio station, but they're a radio network. I used to be a talk host in Washington, D.C., so I know what a well-run radio station is like. And I wasn't going to get involved with broadcasting again. And then I had a couple of other talented people, people like Erica Luchs and things like this. I said, God, we'd love to have somebody like you on with us.

So I reached out to the director, Tina, I can't pronounce her last name, but she built K-C-O-R. and I proposed an idea for a particular show and a particular time slot. And we had a good hour and a half talk this afternoon. We're in a process of trading contracts and all that right this minute. And around May 1st, I'll be launching a show. We're not going to do it on the weekends like everybody else. I'm going to do it mid-week and in the middle of the day. We're like about 11 or 12 o'clock in the morning type of thing out there.

It'd be about 2 o'clock in the afternoon in our time. And the idea was for those people who are, they can't stay up late, you know, and have the same energy talk and the same content talk that a show that's on at, you know, kind of like midnight in the desert, you know, who can stay up to listen to that? Oh, not me. You know, and I used to be able to listen to it only because I worked at a newspaper and got out of work at 2.33 o'clock in the morning, you know. Yeah, yeah. But I can't. In fact, when they had me on, when George Knapp had me on, I literally went to bed. about 6 o'clock at night and then got up so about 4 o'clock in the morning so I could do that last hour of midnight or the art bell show with him or the no no no no coast to coast right and now I'll give you another one George Norrie won't and his producers won't have me on why do you think that is well I've heard two stories one they thought the day when they talked about the data when the book first came out but so is it is it they think the material's too boring I personally gave a copy of

of the book to their producer. There's another camp of people saying, hey, sure, you're transsexual and they don't want you on. You're too weird for them. Too weird for coast to coast. I know that's a cop-pot calling the kettle black here, you know, but it's, we don't know why, and I can't get a straight answer out of them, and I've asked them. I said, why haven't you? I've got the sem, this is a quote from somebody else, I've got the seminal book on UFO statistics, and you guys won't talk to me. Yeah, I, I, I, you. It is the seminal book. And what I think, you know, George Norrie is an entertainer.

George Knapp is a journalist. And I think that's what's important. And I think, you know, thank God he's the one who interviewed you. I can't even imagine what, you know, kind of hack questions Norie would come up with, you know, to ask someone like you. I've got one more cute one you like. Oh, let's do it. You know how I got the interview a couple of weeks ago? I hit him for an hour.

Luis Alessando Yeah The Pentagon guy that retired and went to work to the stars And I sat here and talked to him For about an hour And of course their PR guy

Was listening in and everything And what we did not ask The questions other people asked In fact we had seen the interview That he taped for the International UFO Congress For Alejandro And they basically ask everything I thought of asking

And Linda and I talked about this And said No, no, no, no. We're going to ask a different set of questions. Okay, first thing, this is a girl thing, okay? You don't ever ask a direct question. You ask us kind of a question around the edges, and you get the answer you're looking for because you ask a question around the edges. It's sneaky.

You know, women have been doing it for years. And Linda wrote 30 questions for me. I didn't, you know, all these other interviews, people saying, well, I can't tell you because my security, my security oaths. I didn't get that. I got an answer to every single thing I ask. Wow. Okay? And we haven't completely typed out the transcript yet because I got the flu a few weeks going and have time.

But I'm getting ready to type out that. My editor at Circus New Times is thinking about publishing the entire transcript. Yes, please. But one of the questions that came up, I said, look, I've been telling people, people say, well, has anybody else done this kind of a book like you've got, the desk reference? I said, in a non-classified environment, I'm the first one. In a classified environment, maybe they have. So I asked him, I said, I've got this fantastic book on UFO's sightings,

121,000 sightings using both national databases. Did you guys have a classified database? And the answer was simply yes. But at the end of the interview, he wants a copy of my book. And I told him I'd send him and Tom both won. Wow. See, okay, so the fact that you, this book is going to be in the hands of, you know, essentially the face of

euphology right now to the stars whether that's a good thing or bad thing we you know that's yet to be determined but the fact that they have it in their hands I think that's going to open doors that I can't even imagine well I know Lewis I had I had just won the researcher

of the year well Tom the Long won it last year so Louis said wait a minute didn't Tom didn't he get that last year and I said yes he did I got it this year wow you guys are in the same club you know so So maybe I'll get an interview with Tom at some point. But I'm excited about some of the stuff that's coming out and everything to stars is doing. I know they get a lot of criticism, but I think there's some fantastic stuff still to come on.

And my sources at the New York Times tell me that there's a lot of other stuff still cooking. Yeah, I have no doubt. I mean, again, yeah, I'm trying to be hesitant and careful with getting too excited about it all. but at the same time, like, they're producing. They're producing data. They're producing videos. They're producing information. And not a lot of researchers can say that.

Oh, that's something else for the millennials. I'm an old-time activist from the GLBT community. Okay? If I had the communication tools on these computers, when I went to film school, it took you months to make a film. These kids shoot it on a cell phone these days and have it edited and got a soundtrack on it and out on YouTube in a couple of hours. If I had had tools like that back in the 70s and 80s,

I can't imagine the things I could have done with the activism effort I was doing. So I'm excited that these millennials are coming in because they've all the most best communication tools this culture has ever had. And something's going to give. I really think disclosure is very much in our future, but I think it's going to continue to be a drip, drip, splash, a drip, splash, Kind of like we had with December 16th, it was a splash, and we're going to get more. And as long as people don't riot in the streets because of the information, most people I talk to,

that not of the UFO community went, oh, Jan, we already knew that. The government lies about everything, wind up UFOs, you know. That was the attitude from non-UFO people. Exactly. That's the other thing is like, you know, for so long, many UFO community people, you know, they say, I don't trust the government, I don't trust the government, whatever they say it's a lie. And then this story comes forward where the Pentagon saying, look, we did investigate this. And here's what we got.

And now people are like, oh, okay. Yeah, we believe it. We believe you. Yay. It's hard. It's a hard, it's a, you know, between a rock and a hard place, I think. What bothers me right now in the UFO community is the two national databases have some problems. And I'm trying to communicate the information to them.

And they seem very resistant to make any changes to improve the way they collect the data. I'll give an example. When we published the book, people noticed on our chart for the shapes, there was a D-I-S-K and a D-I-S-C, disc, both of them were disk. And they said, well, why did you do that? I said, that's the integrity of the database. One organization had D-I-S-K, one organization had D-I-S-C, and we were trying to preserve

that integrity, even though they spelled it differently. And I'd like to see them get together and start standardizing their shapes. The other thing I would like to see them do is like Mufon has this problem rather seriously. A lot of people think there's lots of UFO sightings at midnight. Know that if you don't put a time in, it automatically defaults, it gives you a midnight indication at the time. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, we didn't know that either until we started noticing how many of them were. And then we started asking around some people told us that was default. And appears Newfork has something similar So, you know, there's got to be a way to improve this.

But just me, giving example, I have made two letters right now in the past three weeks trying to get a dump of the international data. And it's being met with silence at Mufon. Why do you think that is? I don't know. Maybe they're, excuse me, French, but pissed off at me and Linda because we beat them to the punch and thought something up they didn't. That could be it. We've had a number of people say that to us, and they're being very, very stodgy. Again, the Mufon's gotten into this business of being very, excuse the expression in business.

Okay, but I wrote an article last week that basically said the illusion of money, and basically the flavor of it is, hey, everything costs money, guys. You want a database, we've got to support it. You know, if you want research, we've got, there's got to be some money generated. You want conferences, there's got to be some money generated. You want conferences. There's got to be some money. generated to make all this stuff just paying the reservation rates just to reserve conference room space at a major convention hotel is more than most of us making three or four months you know it's

huge i mean we looked at doing a conference here in new york state a one-day conference and there was some staggering problems with that both either we found a cheap way to do it but then the insurance got too expensive you know it was a lot of little things that you have to look at in a big organization like Mufon has found a way to get around that, but then everybody says, oh, they're only, they're money hungry and everything like that. No, I don't think everything costs, costs money. It does. You know, and people sit here and tell me up in the, the groups and everything, oh, they're

just money hungry. No, no, no, no, no, no. Things cost money. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's a good point. Again, those are the things you've got to break down and realize any UFO conference or organization putting on a conference, like, there may be breaking even if they're lucky. And the speakers are not living in. Trust me. They fly us out there. They put us up.

We have to pay, most of the time, we have to pay for our own meals, but we get an honorarium. So if you're careful with how you feed yourself, can come away maybe with $100 worth of profit, $50 or $100 with the profit. But no. We're not, you know, and Dr. Alexander made a good case of this, but the 2015 one, you and I were at, that, you know, don't kind of making a living doing this, you know. Yeah. No, this is not a career. This is a passion and a journey, an individual journey. I'd have to say for each person to find their own discoveries.

You know, if you're in this to make money, go do something else because this is not the place for that. Absolutely. It's just, it's too niche. And it's too scary for a lot of people, too. The fact that we might not be alone is scary enough. The fact that they might be visiting is, oh, and. And our here is a whole other story. So money aside, it's a topic that many people don't want to think about from day to day.

But we find ourselves doing it every single moment of almost every single day. Yeah. And that's the issue. So I would like to get to the bottom of the answers. But the UFO community has a tendency to want to drink from the fire hose. And most people can only handle a little cup full or teaspoonful at a time. Yeah. But the word I'm hearing from most people is they're very interested.

The word I hear from a lot of elders, I'm 66 and I go to, I got invited to a senior center here the other day to give a presentation at a senior center. This is the kind of invitations I'm getting. And that crowd really aided up and the attitude they had is, God, I'd like to know the real truth on this before I die. Yeah, and I think we all think that from time to time. And I think that's what's interesting about Tom DeLong is you've got someone, yeah, he's not, you know, he's no young in, but he's also not, you know, a senior citizen. And I think that's, that representation is showing younger people, yeah, yeah. See, this is a cool. This could be a cool topic. And I have no doubt that that's going to change for you as these drip, drip splashes happen, Cheryl, that you are going to get invited to speak at more events, that what you're doing is going to be more respected. And it's going to be the book and the books, plural, that researchers in the next 10, you know, 5, 10, 15 years are going to use. Like we do. did with Stanton Friedman, you know, for so many years. So I have no...

That's what we did, a reference book. So, yeah. It's amazing. The book of, if you look up UFO sightings desk reference on Amazon, that's where it is. We published through Amazon. And so they'll get it to you in two to three days, depending upon what time of day you order it. You can get it through Barnes & Noble, but they get it right. They got to get it from Amazon anyway.

But Amazon's the easiest, fastest way to get it. And one thing I'm recommending people. And this is a very strong thing. We brought the price down from $39.99, down the $29.95 at the holiday period. And it seemed to be a sweet spot for the book. And we've sold a lot of books. So we said, well, we'll leave it there. Okay.

But one thing we're encouraging people to do is print off a copy of the Amazon listing for the book. Print off a copy of the April 24th New York Times UFO article, which is about me and Linda. And this book, print those two things off. staple them together, go to your local neighborhood and library, go to the information desk, and said, I would like to see a copy of this in your collection, either in the reference section or in your general collection. Yes. Two things.

No, emails get ignored. But if you walk in with a book listing and a positive article written about the book, and you are a living, breathing human being looking at that lady or guy at the information desk, they will take you seriously. Here's the reason why. Now, some people, the cynics out there, you know, don't want anybody to make any money on this stuff. We're saying, well, you're just trying to sell books. Yes and no.

I said, if we are trying to do disclosure in this country, non-governmental disclosure, grassroots disclosure, data is important. There's 125,000 libraries out there. 120,000 or public libraries, about another 4 or 5,000 are college libraries. 125,000 libraries. The average UFO book is in less than. 10. Stanton Friedman's maybe make it into 200. I'm presently with this book, we're presently up around 25 or 30. And I went out with a mem on Facebook and said, do your duty for disclosure. Talk your local library into buying a copy. And I had all this horrible mail come back at me saying, oh, I don't

have a responsibility to do that. You're just trying to sell books. And they just didn't get the little point that I made there. This is a way of doing grassroots disclosure. If you really want this discredit disclosure, let's get the information out there for the average person to be able to find it in the library. Exactly. See, that's enough to compel me to do that like tomorrow. You know what I mean? So that's awesome. No, I think you're right.

It's easy. It's the two articles. You go to Amazon, you look up the UFO settings desk reference. Yeah. You get their little listing on it. You print it off. You Google New York Times UFO Costa, okay? and you'll get the April 24th article, print that off,

and staple them together and go to the information desk and say, I would like to see this in your collection. So all of my listeners right now, please, please, please go do that. For Cheryl's sake, for Linda's sake, for my sake, please do that. Because, again, that grassroots disclosure is where it's at, for sure. Yep, yep. Well, where can we find your articles, Cheryl? Articles, if you go to Syracuse New Times,

and when you hover over the navigation bar, there's, drop down there for blogs. Go down on the blogs. It says New York skies and in parentheses it said UFO column. You click on that and whatever my current article is is there. And then usually there's a link that will take you out to the archive and there's four and a half years worth of articles out there on the archive. Exactly.

And what's cool is every, you know, every week I have these algorithm things set up where I get UFO headlines, you know, anywhere across the internet. And I'm not kidding you, every single one I follow always has one of your. articles every single time, which I think is amazing. Funny how that worked out. In fact, that was one of the points Haleandro made when they were justifying the giving me the award was that I've dominated. Somehow I've managed to dominate the narrative out there with a continuous stream of good

press. Yeah. And that just humbled me to beat hell. Absolutely. I mean, in today's world, like journalism is such a, you know, a malleable word. But you are a journalist talking about your. UFOs on a weekly basis in a respected, you know, news outlet. And that's super rare. So again, like, you've paved the way for that. And you've, you've taken the hardships and you've taken the

successes, the failures. And you've done that. So I think, you know, you know, that's rewarding enough to know that anyone out there, just because I'm from Syracuse, you know, I might be a little bias, but everyone out in the world is reading way of writing. I think that's amazing. Well, you know, because it's an internet blog, it's an internet newspaper blog, it's possible. And and management was doing this, they have numbers that I don't have. And I managed to get into that site that looks this stuff up. And at one point, this is back in 2015, my editor told me, says, do you know you've got over 400 readers in Russia?

You've got like 1,700 in Europe. You've got like 500 in Singapore, you know. Yeah. And hell, I've got a following in Vietnam. and there's a web group on Facebook for the Vietnamese UFO group. And whenever I post something special for them, I put it to Google Translate and I put it up in Vietnamese for them. Oh, cool. They think it's just so sweet that they go to that extra trouble to do that.

And I've developed quite a following in there. That's awesome. Yeah, just always going that extra mile. That's what I love about your work. Well, Cheryl, this book by you and Linda will surely be one that I and so many other. researchers go to from time and time. The sheer numbers alone. If this isn't enough for people to wake up and realize something extraordinary is happening, I don't know what will make them wake up. Please understand. I've got a book. I'm a mystery writer and I'm a playwright. I got a mystery

coming out in June and we're doing a collection of my collected short stories is coming out probably sometime between now and fall. Okay. And I wrote a novel in 2000. and we're just now finishing up the editing everything I put on the shelf while we were working on this book. So a lot of stuff that I would have normally have had published by now is just now going to get to come out because this isn't the only thing I write. So people say, what's your next project? I said, well, two more mysteries, another collection of short stories. And I've got a play I want to write. And, you know, there's a lot of other stuff that I've been writing over the years because I'm a media, I'm a performance media writer.

So I'm looking forward to do it. I did do a story about UFOs in a form of a play. And I wrote it in 2003. And it was a very dramatic piece, too. Yeah. It's a very nice, it's called the debriefing. It's set post-World War, just post-World War II. And it's a really good piece.

I would love to see that. Read it first and see it. If you go out to my website, Cheryl Costa.com and Cheryl with a C, Costa with a C, Cheryl Costa.com, on the first page, you'll see a menu, it says, read her plays. And if you go to that page, you'll go down and look for it, the debriefing. And there it is. Well, I know what I'm doing tonight. So this has been incredible. You are truly a Renaissance woman and one of the most extraordinary people. I'm so blessed to have met in this field. So I have to thank you. for coming on, and I know this will not be the last time. So again, thank you for coming on somewhere in the skies. My pleasure, anytime, and we'll see you at Kenny Hoyens when you come to Syracuse again. Perfect, perfect. We'll tip one back for sure. All right, that's it for this week's episode. Again, be sure to check out all of Cheryl's work at syracusenewtimes.com and order her

book through Amazon. Somewhere in the skies is climbing the iTunes charts, and we can only continue to do so with your help. Please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing today. All past episodes can be streamed through the website. You can find articles, news, and suggest guests and topics through the website as well. SomewhereInThe skies.com. Merchandise is available right now through T-Public. All different designs and items.

Go to T-Public.com and search for the Spreg-5-1 store. That's T-E-E-E-Public.com. We're on Twitter at SomewhereSkies and Instagram at SomewhereSk. Skies pod. Don't forget to join our very active Facebook group where I and many others post the latest news in the UFO and esoteric world. Just search for Somewhere in the Skies podcast

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