What's Really
in the Sky?

Every year, thousands of people report seeing something unexplained in the sky. Fireballs streak across social media. YouTube videos warn of imminent asteroid impacts. But what does the data actually say?

At TerraPulse, we don't speculate — we measure. Over the past month, we've ingested NaNM observations from NASA, NOAA, USGS, and a dozen other scientific agencies, then applied rigorous statistical analysis to answer the question: What's really up there?

80,000 Reports. Three Filters. One Answer.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) has collected over 80,000 geocoded sighting reports from 1906 to 2014. We ran every single one through a cascading attribution filter:

After all filters: 75.9% remain unexplained. But that doesn't mean they're anomalous — it means our three filters are limited. The unexplained sightings show a massive summer bias (July has 2x February's reports), consistent with people being outdoors more, not with any physical phenomenon.

Are Fireballs Increasing? No.

Social media periodically erupts with claims of unprecedented fireball activity. We checked the NASA CNEOS catalog — the definitive, instrument-grade record of bolide impacts detected by government sensors.

The rate is 20-24 per year, every year, like clockwork. The apparent "surges" on social media are driven by increased reporting and attention feedback loops, not more rocks. When the American Meteor Society gets more reports, it's because more people are looking up and filing — not because the sky changed.

The Starlink Problem (That Can't Be Tested Yet)

SpaceX's Starlink constellation — 10,119 satellites and counting — is almost certainly generating UFO reports right now. But we can't prove it with the NUFORC data because of a hard temporal gap:

But we can see what happened with the previous satellite constellation. When Iridium launched 66 satellites in 1997, "formation" sighting rates jumped 1.6x (OR = 1.60, 95% CI: 1.32-1.94, p = 1.6 × 10^-6). Satellite keyword mentions increased 2.9x.

Starlink has 153x more satellites than Iridium, in orbits visible to 99.4% of NUFORC reporting locations. When post-2019 NUFORC data becomes available, we expect a substantial fraction of "unexplained" sightings to be attributable to satellite trains.

What About Actual Asteroid Risk?

We track 51,000+ near-Earth object close approaches via NASA's JPL. The vast majority are house-sized rocks passing at 10-50x lunar distance — routine and harmless. Today's closest approaches:

Real asteroid risk is monitored by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The named watchlist objects (Apophis, Bennu, 2024 YR4) are tracked daily in our system. None currently pose a threat.

The Invisible Sky: Space Weather and HF Radio

While people watch for lights in the sky, the real action is invisible. Geomagnetic storms from solar coronal mass ejections hammer the ionosphere, degrading radio propagation on polar paths by 0.29 dB — a measurable, statistically significant effect we detected using 21 years of WSPR ham radio data.

The equatorial null validates the method: storms hit polar paths (through the auroral zone) but spare equatorial paths. The effect increases monotonically with storm severity — the dose-response curve that good science demands.

The Bottom Line

The sky isn't falling. Fireball rates are normal. Asteroid flybys are routine. The "unexplained" UFO reports are dominated by observer bias, satellite constellations, and aurora from geomagnetic storms.

What IS real — and genuinely fascinating — is the invisible electromagnetic environment above our heads. Solar storms reshape the ionosphere, cosmic rays anti-correlate with solar activity, and the magnetic poles are drifting at 50 km/year. These are the signals worth watching. And we're watching all of them, 24/7, across NaNM observations and counting.

All data and analysis scripts are open source at github.com/isenbek/terrapulse