Report Sept 2025

 

REPORT 

Your September #16 eNewsletter

MUFON CMS Statistics for 2025: The First Seven Months

by Rob Swiatek

Generally, statistics speak best for themselves when seen in graphs, so herewith I’m presenting graphically two select categories of UFO numbers for 2025. We’re more than halfway through 2025, and inquiring minds need to know what’s happening in the skies. Has the phenomenon markedly diminished? Or does it continue apace, as it has for at least the last 78 years? Well, no suspense as to the latter: The phenomenon continues to be seen and to mystify.

The stats collected by MUFON are amenable to illustrating any of several trends. For example, one could compile the number of U.S. unknowns for each day of the week for a certain time period or note how specific UFO shapes vary per day or month over a year. For this article, however, and as I typically do, I’ve chosen to show MUFON’s incoming U.S. cases and unknowns for the first seven months of 2025. Basic as it is, this remains an important graph, in my opinion. And then I went a bit outside the box: the two pie charts that follow illustrate how a subset of the 24 shapes (which include the category “Other”) set forth in CMS vary between U.S. and non-U.S. cases

Unusual for a Winter month, January, with its cold weather and short daylight periods, is currently the high-water month for 2025 sightings—both incoming and unknown. Happily gone, one will note, are the three dispiriting months of 2024 when the CMS was shut down, resulting in the loss of hundreds of sightings that were never reported. Still, despite the robust number of 2025 cases, MUFON was outdone by the National UFO Reporting Center, which had 2,565 events—U.S. and international—versus MUFON’s 1,959 (U.S. and international) for the same time span and tabulation date. The difference is 606 events. (NUFORC sighting totals acquired from the nuforc.org website.

 

Turning to the pie charts, it’s an understatement to note the MUFON international total of UFO events is dominated by the U.S. numbers. For example, as of 31 August 2025, the CMS had 13 reports from India, the most populous country in the world at 1.45 billion, for the period 1 January 2025 through 31 July 2025; the corresponding number for China—with a population of 1.41 billion—is zero. Not one has yet come in! Nevertheless, with that understatement in mind, it’s almost eerie how cylindrical unknown UFOs are 8% of both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and star-like unknowns hover around 6.8%. Sometimes the statistics of UFOs can evince the phenomenon’s anomalous nature as much as an unknown trace sample held in the hand

The unknown percentages for discoidal and spherical objects are also close, considering that both spheres and discs are sometimes reported as circular UFOs, which occupy a separate slice of the chart. Combined, the latter three shape categories account for 42.4% and 56.3%, respectively, of the U.S. and non-U.S. unknowns.

I was a bit surprised the non-U.S. slate of unknowns didn’t include a single square or rectangular UFO, a category normally boasting a small, yet persistent number of U.S. entrants year after year. But the 3.2% of U.S. square/rectangular cases reflects only eight cases out of 250 unknowns, however, so they’re not common sights by any means. On the other hand, use of the trademark “Tic Tac” to refer to UFOs having the peculiar shape of the iconic mint seems to be confined to the U.S., thanks to David Fravor’s use of this term to describe the object he saw in 2004 over the Paci‹ c. Since 2017, when his case received nationwide publicity, U.S. witnesses routinely pronounce stubby-cylindrical or tablet-shaped UFOs as tic tacs. In the world outside the U.S., however, they’re still cylinders. 

 

AUGUST 2025 Sightings Report

UNITED STATES 379

UNITED KINGDOM 24

CANADA 21

GERMANY 11

FRANCE 10

AUSTRALIA 10

MEXICO 5

BRAZIL 3

SWITZERLAND 3

 ITALY 3

PORTUGAL 3

NETHERLANDS 2

POLAND 2

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 2

RUSSIAN FEDERATION 2

NEW ZEALAND 2

CYPRUS 2

HUNGARY 2

IRAN 2

DENMARK 2

ROMANIA 2

EGYPT 1

ISRAEL 1

ARGENTINA 1

CROATIA 1

GREECE 1

MACEDONIA 1

BELGIUM 1

INDIA 1

TURKEY 1

MADAGASCAR 1

VENEZUELA 1

BOLIVIA 1

ECUADOR 1

MOROCCO 1

SOUTH AFRICA 1

CHINA 1

JAPAN 1

PERU 1

BANGLADESH 1

ICELAND 1

MARTINIQUE 1 

TOTAL: 513

SHAPE

Circle 65

Sphere 58

Other 56

Unknown 53

Disc 42

Triangle 34

Oval 25

Star-like 22

Cigar 19

Cylinder 13

Square/Rectangular 10

Fireball 8

Diamond 7

Boomerang 6

Flash 6

Egg 6

Tic Tac 5

Chevron 4

Blimp 4

N/A 4

Cross 2

Teardrop 2

Bullet/Missile 2

Dumbbell 1

Saturn-like 1

Cone 1

UNITED STATES

California 40

New York 21

Pennsylvania 20

Florida 16

Arkansas 15

Colorado 15

Ohio 14

Washington 13

Michigan 13

North Carolina 12

Tennessee 12

Oregon 12

Texas 11

Indiana 11

New Jersey 11

Missouri 10

Arizona 10

Oklahoma 9

South Carolina 8

Connecticut 8

Illinois 7

Utah 6

Minnesota 6

Alabama 5

Georgia 5

Louisiana 5

Maine 5

Maryland 5

West Virginia 5

New Mexico 5

Wisconsin 5

Idaho 4

Virginia 4

Massachusetts 4

South Dakota 4

Kentucky 3

Nevada 3

Kansas 3

Mississippi 3

 Alaska 2

Iowa 2

District of Columbia 1

Montana 1

North Dakota 1

Hawaii 1

Nebraska 1

New Hampshire 1

Wyoming 1

DISTANCE

< 100 ft 70

101-500 ft 61

501 ft - 1 Mile 74

Over 1 Mile 86

Unknown 78

NO VALUE 24

ERT *Experiencer Resource Team

Most impressively there were 15 Landings, Hovering, or Takeoffs reported, and 33 Entities observed.

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