In the vast skies over Wyoming, things aren’t always as they seem. That’s why the Cowboy State is one of the best places to see and possibly explain the unexplainable.
The National UFO Center keeps records of every sighting of an unidentified flying object (UFO) or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) reported in the United States since 1995.
The website Stacker used that data to compile a list of the top 10 with the most reports of strange, inexplainable sights in the night sky.
The world of UFO and UAP sightings has gotten more serious in the last several years, and more people are looking up and looking for answers.
“I can tell you is that quite a few sightings in Wyoming remain unexplained,” said Richard Beckwith, Rock Springs city attorney and part-time UFO investigator.
He’s spent decades investigating UFO sightings in Wyoming, but had his first personal experience with one spotted near Green River earlier in 2024.
“The phenomenon is real,” he said. “Even the Pentagon has admitted UFOs and UAFs are real, and they can’t explain them. It was treated as a joke for most of the time I’ve been doing it, and now it’s become real.”
The List
Overall, the National UFO Center has 421 reports of UFOs and UAFs in Wyoming. Cheyenne tops the list of Wyoming places with the most sightings, reporting 50 aerial phenomena since 1995.
Seeing Cheyenne at the top doesn’t surprise Beckwith at all. One would expect more sightings in Wyoming’s most populated city, but Cheyenne is also home to a critical U.S. Air Force base.
“Wyoming’s UFO sightings, from my perspective, primarily appear over the Warren Air Force Base and the nearby missile silos,” he said. “There have been quite a few sightings, going back to the 1950s.”
Casper is second with 37 UFO sightings, followed by Laramie with 29, Rock Springs with 17 and Gillette with 15. Cody, Sheridan, Riverton and Evanston round out the bottom half of the list.
Yellowstone National Park sits at the bottom with eight UFO sightings. Sasquatch isn’t the only elusive and mysterious thing hanging around the pristine wilderness of northwest Wyoming.
The state that’s seen and reported the most UFOs is California, with more than 16,500 sightings. The Pentagon attributes most of these sightings to balloons, drones, aircraft and other terrestrial sources.
One thing Wyomingites won’t want to do is try to shoot down any UFOs they spot. If that UFO happens to be a neighbor’s drone, that would violate federal law and could come with a fine and a jail sentence .
Not Explaining The Unexplainable
It’s not a coincidence that the number of sightings corresponds with Wyoming’s most populated areas. Beckwith said that’s how it’s always been, but that doesn’t make these phenomena any easier to explain.
“As a kid, we had the simple explanation that these were aliens from another planet,” he said. “But the longer I’ve done this, the explanations have become more elusive. It’s much more complex than that.”
Modern-day theories for UFOs and UAP include black technology programs, foreign espionage and astronomical events in addition to the extraterrestrial. If there are any probable explanations for what’s been seen over Wyoming and elsewhere, the federal government has declined to comment or elaborate.
“They continue to say emphatically that we have no evidence that these objects are extraterrestrial in nature,” he said. “That begs the question — if they can’t explain it, how can they determine that these objects are also simultaneously not manufactured elsewhere? It's almost like, ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.’”
Recently, there have been three congressional hearings on UFOs and UAFs, and Beckwith said he’s spoken with two members of U.S. Congress about the phenomenon. Wyoming scientists are skeptical of their findings, but Beckwith described it as one of the rare bipartisan issues that has reached Capitol Hill.
“People who looked at this phenomenon were ridiculed about this stuff,” he said. “That’s changed since 2017, now that the government has admitted they’re real.”
Wyoming Watchers
Beckwith is one of four Wyoming field investigators for the Mutual UFO Network, an organization of civilian volunteers that follow up on and report UFO and UAF sightings. The number of investigators shows Beckwith how much interest has grown for these unexplainable phenomena in the last decade.
“I have investigators in Cheyenne, Riverton, and two in Rock Springs that investigate sightings all over the state,” he said. “Until a couple of years ago, I was the only one.”
Beckwith described his first experience with a UFO back in March. He used his Sony SR4 camera to capture a video of “anomalous nocturnal lights” hovering near Green River.
“I got the radar records from that night, but haven’t been able to correlate what I saw with any particular targets on the radar,” he said. “It certainly didn't have a transponder. So, to that extent, I can't explain it. But I saw and filmed it.”
Beckwith hopes more Wyomingites will report any UFO or UAF sightings to the National UFO Center or the Mutual UFO Network. Regardless of what people believe they've seen in the sky, he and many others want answers.
There’s a lot of space and open sky in Wyoming. Beckwith believes the Cowboy State could be the key to getting better data and information to shine more light into the darkness surrounding UFOs and UAFs.
“Wyoming is the ninth-largest state in land area, and we have the lowest population,” he said. “Still, we have sightings with several witnesses in different locations. They’re rarer than other places, but they still occur.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
