Here is some more info on where the data came from, NUFORC as Rory alluded to in the OP.
External Quote:
The National UFO Reporting Center was founded in 1974 by noted UFO investigator
Robert J. Gribble. The Center's primary function over the past four decades has been to receive, record, and to the greatest degree possible, corroborate and document reports from individuals who have been witness to unusual, possibly UFO-related events. Throughout its history, the Center has processed over 150,000 reports, and has distributed its information to thousands of individuals.
The principal means used by the Center to receive sighting reports is this website, which has operated continuously since 1994. Prior to that period, the telephone hotline and the U.S. mail were the primary means of taking reports.
Its data base is made up of voluntary reports.
External Quote:
The Center's independence from all other UFO related organizations, combined with its long standing policy of guaranteed anonymity to callers, has served to make it perhaps the most popular and widely accepted national UFO reporting facility anywhere.
I always thought MUFON was the "goto" organization for reporting UFOs. I'd never heard of this one until last week when the map came up.
External Quote:
The National UFO Reporting Center is a non-profit Washington State corporation, and it is applying for federal 501 C (3) non-profit status.
In reference to Mick's map, maybe the fact that the organization is based in Washington State helps explain the high number of sightings there. I don't know about Vermont:
These 2 guys have been running NUFORC for closing in on 30 years. Pretty much since it went online:
External Quote:
Peter Davenport has been director of the National UFO Reporting Center since 1994. He has also served as the director of investigations for the Washington Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network. He often presents lectures on specific UFO cases, most notably the Phoenix Lights sighting.
Peter has had an active interest in the UFO phenomenon from his early boyhood. He experienced his first UFO sighting over the St. Louis municipal airport in the summer of 1954, and he investigated his first UFO case during the summer of 1965 in Exeter, New Hampshire. He has also been witness to several subsequent anomalous events, possibly UFO related, including a dramatic sighting over Baja California in February 1990, and several nighttime sightings over Washington State during 1992.
External Quote:
Christian Stepien has had a life long interest in UFOs and is an avid student of the phenomenon. Since 1994, he has served as the webmaster for the National UFO Reporting Center web site, as well as the developer of the center's database and reporting software.
All above External Content from :
https://nuforc.org/about-us/
As for the origins of NUFORC, it also has Washington roots. Seattelite Bob Gribble caught the UFO fever in the '50s and ended up running various UFO newsletters and such before forming NUFORC in '74:
External Quote:
Seattle firefighter Bob Gribble's fascination with UFOs began in 1954 when he happened to pick up a copy of True Magazine. An article about UFOs grabbed his attention. Riveted, he quickly ordered Flying Saucers on the Attack by Harold Wilkins that was advertised in the magazine. Fascinated, he read it multiple times. Next came Donald Kehoe's book, Flying Saucers Are Real. Now, Gribble was thoroughly hooked. Reading these books began his life-long conviction: UFOs were real, and they were no joke. Most people satisfy their curiosity by reading about the UFO phenomenon. But Gribble was not your ordinary person. He wanted to learn more, to do more. Jumping into the UFO field, which was in its infancy, Gribble established and headed one of the very first UFO organizations, The Space Observers League, a Seattle-based organization he headed. This was before NICAP and APRO.
In early 1955, Gribble renamed the group Civilian Flying Saucer Intelligence. Upping his game, he began a newsletter detailing new cases, even though he had no writing experience. Energized by his passion to spread information about UFOs, he worked feverishly on the first issue of Flying Saucer Review: A Report on Interplanetary Spacecraft..
In 1957, Gribble renamed his organization Aerial Phenomenon Research Group (ARPG) and began publishing the A.R.P.G. Reporter.
Once again, Gribble saw a need and strived to fill it. In late 1974, he founded the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
Something interesting about the database though, is that most of the older, pre-internet stuff, was kept by Gribble until he gave it to a researcher, Wendy Conners:
External Quote:
By 2004, Gribble was drowning in tapes and archived materials. Feeling overwhelmed, and perhaps a victim of his own success, Gribble was about to toss out what we now recognize as a priceless historical archive. Instead of taking the treasure to the dump, he donated them to Wendy Connors, a respected UFO historian living in Albuquerque, NM. Just in case she might find them useful!
Conners is apparently a crypto-aeronautic researcher:
External Quote:
...Connors was a crypto-aeronautic researcher who specialized in the preservation of early historic recordings and photographs dealing with the UFO phenomena from the period of 1947 to 1973. She was instrumental in SHG holding one of the largest audio and photographic archives in the world dealing with crypto-aeronautics.
And it seems, she ended up deciding what of the old stuff was used (bold by me):
External Quote:
Amazingly, Connors listened to every single recorded call NUFORC received in order to create something usable from this unwieldy mass of raw data. She decided to organize and select reports that showed a broad-based overview of the UFO phenomena being observed and reported at that time.
All of which resulted in 44 hours of audio reports, which seems to skew Washington. So, if anyone is board this winter and wants to listen in on some early reports about Travis Walton and other "barn burners" from the mid '70s let us know what you hear:
External Quote:
The result of Connor's effort was Night Journeys in Ufology: 1974-1977, a 44-hour long compendium with 252 tracks that are indexed and summarized. Examples of reports Connors picked included a "barn-burner" event reported by a Naval intelligence pilot in 1977 whose FA-11 was paced by a large triangular craft with a porous foam-rubber-like surface; eight early reports concerning the 1975 Travis Walton abduction in Arizona; reports by no-nonsense truckers and mothers with children aboard whose vehicles are disabled by craft hovering nearby, with possible missing time; an egg-shaped object maneuvering around a police helicopter in Washington State, affecting the instruments; and another Washington State case involving a UFO chasing a car that also involved the appearance of something that looked like a tree crossing the road in front of the car.
External Quote:
The historic 44-hour Night Journeys in Ufology audio archive documenting the beginning of the modern UFO era is now in the public domain on Michel M. Deschamps's extraordinary site, Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study (NOUFORS)
All External Content above about Gribble and Conners:
https://nuforc.org/gribble/
So, it's possible that, the whole database is the result of one researcher's compendium of one UFOlogists collection of voluntary reports from some time up to 1994, and the continued on-line voluntary collections since, as reported to 2 other UFOlogists.