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The odds of a hostile close encounter have reportedly never been higher in the Big Apple.
New York was named the third most likely place to get abducted in the US, according to gambling guide Casino.ca‘s annual ranking, which it conducted to honor National Alien Abduction Day — yes, that’s real — on March 20.
The Empire State, which moved up a stellar two spots from last year, boasted a staggering 8,314 UFO sightings reported since 1974, or one for every 1,003 residents.
You could get abducted in a New York minute.
That places it just behind Washington (7,595 reported sightings, or one for every 977 peeps) and first-place winner Delaware (one for every 928 residents).
California — despite having more than its share of weird close encounters — landed at a slightly more respectable No. 22 on the list, with one UFO sighing per every 1,708 residents.
For reference, the likelihood of getting attacked by a shark clocks in at about one in 11.5 million.
The gaming site said some recent sightings in New York included a “white, Tic-Tac-shaped object in the sky” and another that one witness reported as a “silver orb flying overhead.” This comes as a trio of mysterious, luminous dots was spotted hovering over Corona, Queens — coincidentally (or not) the site of the climactic final encounter in the 1997 sci-fi hit “Men in Black” — sparking a fresh wave of conspiracy theories.
Among the most famous sightings in state history were the “Arthur Kill Lights” of 2001, where between five and 16 bright orange “ovals” were spotted flying in a “V” formation over the waterway between New Jersey and Staten Island.
“They were big, and they were only about 1,000 feet up,” Dennis Anderson, a former member of the Center for UFO Studies who investigated the phenomenon, told The Post.
And they weren’t all mere sightings, apparently.
Anderson recalled the highly-publicized Brooklyn Bridge abduction, in which aliens supposedly whisked Linda Napolitano out of her lower Manhattan high-rise apartment in 1989.
“She’s going up in this beam of light and there are these three little guys in kind of like fetal positions or something going up around her and going up into this thing,” Anderson recalled of the incident, which was chronicled in a 2024 Netflix docu-series.
Nonetheless, the UAP spotter feels it’s necessary to take such sightings with a grain of salt.
“Probably 99% of what they say they’re seeing in New York as a UFO is just somebody who doesn’t know what they’re looking at,” the former head of Staten Island’s Wagner College Planetarium told The Post. “They just look up and they don’t recognize something that’s common because they don’t look up very much. Plus, you got such light-polluted skies.”
Anderson chalked up many of the sightings to the fact that there are so many people who are unfamiliar with stargazing.
“They’re not used to seeing something, so they’ll call it in. Because there are more people, there’s more chance of somebody looking up and seeing something that they don’t recognize,” he said. “Whereas out maybe in the Midwest, say, or something where it’s nice and dark, people are more nature-oriented.
“They probably go out at night, look at the sky, they become familiar with it,” he continued. “Things aren’t so unusual to them.”
To conduct the latest out-of-this-world study, Casino.ca sifted through 150,000 sighting entries on the National UFO Reporting Center (between 1974 and 2026) and then cross-referenced them with current data from social media.
They found that the US boasted a total of 187,870 UFO sightings, putting the odds of an intergalactic snatch-and-grab at around one in 1,770.
As the site declared, “You never know when an extra-terrestrial in a big green spaceship might decide to make a surprise visit.”
Top 10 states for potential abductions:
- Delaware (one sighting per 928 people)
- Washington (one sighting per 977 people)
- New York (one per 1,003 people)
- Oregon (one per 1,054)
- Florida (one per 1,102)
- Texas (one per 1,119)
- Montana (one per 1,125)
- Vermont (one per 1,158)
- New Mexico (one per 1,169)
- Georgia (one per 1,260)
Fortunately, people can avoid a potential intergalactic kidnapping by decamping to Louisiana, which has recorded just 1,325 sightings, or one per 3,464 people — the fewest in the nation.
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