South Dakota: Flyover country for UFOs?

By John Hult, for Pigeon605

UFOs are having a moment.

On Monday, May 17, UFOs were trending on Twitter thanks to an extensive “60 Minutes” segment on military evidence of sightings. The New Yorker published a 13,000-word essay a few weeks earlier featuring some of the same sources. 

They’re just the latest in a series of UFO stories that picked up steam in 2017. That’s the year The New York Times first reported on the military’s “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP),” a now-shuttered Defense Department UFO investigation project pushed by former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. The military had, the story explained, compelling records of genuinely inexplicable events, including video.

Military footage of three such events was released in April 2020, alongside official Pentagon confirmation of their veracity.

We saw Reid again last October, appearing in a film called “The Phenomenon” about the military’s history with UFOs. The film also features Defense Department officials, presidential advisers and others talking about sightings over U.S. military installations, including at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. The 81-year-old Utah senator claimed that several sightings coincided with the shutdowns of nuclear weapons, and that most of the military’s “evidence” about those events had yet to see the light of day.

“If they had been called upon by the president to launch (the nukes,) they couldn’t have done it,” Reid says in the film.

There’s more to come as well. Some UFO enthusiasts believe a report from military agencies in July, one folded into an intelligence authorization bill with the backing of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, will blow the doors off any notion of alien activity as pure sci-fi fantasy.

Sioux Falls investigator: UFO disclosures will shock South Dakotans

Jack Cary is quite certain the UFO report’s presentation to Congress this summer will throw the worldview of South Dakotans into upheaval. 

“A lot of people have never, ever entertained the notion that UFOs could be real, and the intent is completely, utterly unknown, and we are at their mercy,” said Cary, a Sioux Falls-based author and paranormal investigator who looks into oddities such as Bigfoot sightings, hauntings and UFOs from a modest home a few blocks from O’Gorman High School. “People’s heads are going to spin.”

Cary is almost certainly one of South Dakota’s most experienced paranormal experts. He has been working investigations for 27 years, apprenticing before his move to Sioux Falls under JC Johnson, a man described as the “Indiana Jones of Cryptozoology.” 

A half-dozen times a year, the Navy veteran and Colorado transplant hops in a car or on a plane to perform investigations for clients, who “pay” for his services by allowing him to write about their case on his Paranormal Intelligence Agency website. He regularly gets 10 to 15 inquiries a month. His subscribers pay $20 a year for access to the newsletter and case files. There, as well as on his YouTube channel and on episodes of shows on the GAIA network, Cary pushes the “unified theory of the paranormal.”

“There’s a thread that runs through all these paranormal phenomena, and it’s aliens,” Cary said. 

Bigfoot-like creatures? Aliens. Gravestones marked “murdered by human wolves?” UFOs. Cattle mutilations? UFOs. Cary believes aliens are splicing genes, traveling between dimensions, harnessing the power of stars and otherwise altering our world with their advanced technology.

Not that South Dakotans are especially attuned to such narratives. Cary spoke twice at the former Books n Brewz Pizzeria’s “paranormal nights.” The room was crowded both times, and Cary was surprised to hear that no one in the audience had seen or read the reports about AATIP. 

“My experience has been that there’s just a huge deficit of knowledge here in terms of what’s occurred in paranormal research over the past 20 years and just how much evidence there is out there,” Cary said.

None were aware of the sightings over military installations, for instance, or of South Dakota’s outsized role in UFO history. One 1966 event at Ellsworth is touched upon in “The Phenomenon,” with retired USAF Maj. Gaylan King describing a red, laser-like light from a UFO scanning the ground over a missile.

“(The Ellsworth case) was one of the major incidents that got Harry Reid involved in all this,” Cary said.

South Dakota lags other states in UFO sightings

Cheryl Costa isn’t quite as convinced that a cultural reckoning will follow the release of the military UFO report this summer. The Syracuse, New York-based author and her wife, Linda, have just published the second edition of their book on UFO sightings in the U.S., which stacks up as the most definitive compilation of UFO sighting data ever produced and now runs through 2020. 

“Will (nonbelievers) take everything in stride? Will people start jumping off bridges because of aliens? I doubt it,” Cheryl Costa said. “About 80 percent of people will say ‘OK,’ and move on to the next thing.”

She suspects that those who do take note won’t be especially frightened, in part because several generations have grown up with UFO fiction and some measure of comfort with the idea that we’re not alone. 

As for South Dakota, the Costas’ research suggests that the state’s just not that into UFOs.

South Dakota ranks 49th in the number of reports since 2001, ahead of only North Dakota and the District of Columbia. South Dakotans are responsible for just 418 of the 167,632 UFO sightings logged nationwide by the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, and the National UFO Reporting Center, or NUFORC, since 2001.

The Costas’ book crunches those two data sources together, making it easier to search for trends like clusters of sightings in certain locations or a spike in sightings, which occurred in 2020. The 2017 edition of the book represented the first time anyone had combined the datasets, and it earned the couple a profile in The New York Times.

The Costas include dates, times, locations and the reported shape of each craft, a factor they use to cull genuinely inexplicable UFO activity from objects that could easily be conventional aircraft — a cigar shape could be an airplane in profile, for instance. Assume that 70 percent of the reports can be explained, subtract the aircraft-like shapes from the remaining 30 percent, and the Costas landed on an average of four “legitimate” UFO sightings per state per month.

“There have been a lot of strange things happening in vanilla America,” Costa said.

South Dakota doesn’t hit that average. The Costas’ book puts its monthly average at a paltry 1.74 sightings from 2001-21.

It may not be especially surprising that the Dakotas would bring up the rear on such a list, even without the observations of people like Cary. There’s a preference on prairie farmscapes for the earthly over the ethereal, the Earth being the giver of our agricultural and economic bounty and the ethereal being the stuff of Hollywood and science fiction.

 Costa’s take on the state’s low ranking is decidedly more earthbound than cultural.

“I have states that get (South Dakota’s numbers) in a month or a year,” she said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not a lot going on, it just means people aren’t reporting on it, probably because of a lack of broadband.”

The number of sightings nationwide jumped significantly with the spread of internet access, she explained. The Costas only crunched numbers from then onward for their book, even though the databases stretch back much further. Figures from 1960-2000, which would have added around 20,000 reports — relatively insignificant compared to sighting reports in the post-internet era.

“The internet has been key to UFO reporting,” she said.

The low ranking for the District of Columbia is about where people live and how they report sightings. Reports typically come in the evening and are reported from homes. The suburbs, which have clearer nighttime views and where a large share of the people who work in the district actually live, logged plenty of sightings. 

Photo by Wes Eisenhauer

Most sightings nationwide occur between 4:30 and 11 p.m., and 60 percent to 70 percent of those happen between 8:30 to 10 p.m.

“Smokers and dog walkers are the most consistent reporters of this stuff,” she said. 

Dog walkers and smokers but not the inebriated, Costa said. That’s a common misconception, she said, but it’s one that’s easily dispelled by a visit to one of the reporting websites.

“People who drink and get drugged up don’t report UFO sightings,” she said. “Filling out a report is about as exciting as filling out a credit application.”

Most people who see something inexplicable don’t report it at all. Costa didn’t. She had her first UFO experience as a child, staring out the back window of the family station wagon. Years later, in her days as a government contractor, she saw flashing lights in the sky over her home. She didn’t think to log the details with MUFON.

Cary didn’t report the sighting he filmed in 2008 through the kitchen window of his Colorado home, either. Cary did post the video, taken with a Sony Handicam, to his YouTube channel. It has pulled about 10,000 views, but it’s “just another UFO video,” he said. “There are so many of them out there.”

The bulk of videos is evidence of the public’s interest. As is Costa’s second career after retirement from government service, first as a popular columnist for the Syracuse Times, where she’d write up MUFON narratives and pull more page views than all the paper’s other columnists combined, and later as the author of the UFO Desk Reference and frequent guest on UFO podcasts, the venerable AM radio show “Coast to Coast AM” or at UFO conventions.

Events suggest high interest in UFOs

Even in South Dakota, with its relatively small tally of UFO sightings, there does seem to be a thirst for information. Cary has been contacted about leading a course for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI, a continuing education program focused mainly on retirees.

His earlier foray into public education in Sioux Falls was also a clue. The investigator was surprised to learn how little his Books n Brewz audience knew about UFOs, but he was certainly pleased at the attendance.

Travis Graham, one of the managers of the recently shuttered pizzeria at Eighth and Weber wasn’t fully prepared for how popular the paranormal nights were in the pre-pandemic days. Cary’s second appearance in January 2020, Graham noted, “was the biggest one out of all of them,” filling the bar side and restaurant side of the divided building.

“We had the first one out of curiosity, and it filled the place,” Graham said. “It was standing room only the second time. We had to put a TV in on the (pizzeria) side so people could see what was going on.”

Unlike Cary and Costa, Graham did report one of his UFO sightings to MUFON. It took place in the early aughts, on a trip home to Sioux Falls from Humboldt. He had to submit contact information on the form, and he remembers getting a call from investigators about the incident.

“They followed up on all of those,” Graham said. “They wanted to go over everything I’d put in there.”

But even Graham, who has stared at the stars in fascination since childhood, hasn’t report all  his sightings. He remembers seeing UFOs in the sky over a lake near Madison as a teenager, for example.

He also didn’t report what he saw in the summer of 2017, when a white orb floated overhead as he rode home from Grand Falls Casino near Larchwood, Iowa.

“I was on a motorcycle and didn’t want to look at that and not look at the road, so I pulled over,” Graham said. 

He has heard from others about sightings, but rarely do such conversations cover a report to MUFON. Some of the stories came out during the paranormal night events at Books n Brewz, which Graham hopes to revive in a larger space, but he hasn’t found the right one yet.

“There were so many people into this stuff that I really do need a bigger venue to keep going,” he said.