This article about cigar shaped UFOs has been making the rounds a little bit - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/14/pentagon-ufo-alien-object-00092108
After I read it, I wondered - how common are cigar shaped UFOs? Being a data geek, I dove in to the NUFORC dataset I maintain over at data.world (https://data.world/timothyrenner/ufo-sightings) and decided to find out.
The orange bar represents cigar-shaped UFOs. Obviously the simpler shapes dominate the counts, with "light" far and away being the most common. Cigar shaped UFOs are comparatively rare, about 2.6% of the total sightings in the dataset. So the answer to the original question, "not very common."
Joey ChampionGreat work and research Tim!
Data scientist, such as yourself, have an analytical mind and look closely at things most people would miss. Visualizing the data is an awesome way to quickly identify various shapes and percentages for each unidentified object. Excellent work.👍