Social factors and UFO reports: was the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic associated with an increase in UFO reporting?

The ongoing SARS-Cov-2 pandemic had many drastic effects upon society beyond the illness and death it caused. Pandemic mitigation measures disrupted and altered behaviors related to social mobility, significantly increasing the time spent at home compared to the pre-pandemic period. Further, it was well documented that social anxiety and stress increased at a population level. Early in the pandemic there was speculation in the popular media that reporting of paranormal phenomena (e.g., UFOs, ghosts, etc.) increased due to factors associated with the pandemic. Past research on UFO/UAP reporting has theorized that increases are triggered by social factors, and so the pandemic provided a natural experiment to test these claims. To measure UFO reports we utilized two public databases of UFO reports for sightings in the United States, provided by the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network. To estimate the impact of the pandemic we utilized two measures, one for social mobility and one for pandemic/disease severity. Google Community Mobility Reports provided a metric of social mobility for people who use Google Maps on their cellular telephone (i.e., amount of time spent at work compared to home), which we aggregated to a state level to estimate time spent at home. Second, we used new weekly SARS-CoV-2 cases and deaths, both absolute counts and per capita, which can be considered to be an indirect measure of anxiety and stress. We find that UFO reports did increase in 2020 compared to 2019 (p