PORTLAND — Cheryl Costa has been thinking about UFOs for years. In 2013, the retired aerospace analyst launched a weekly column called “New York Skies” for The Syracuse New Times.

“It ended up being quite the hit,” Costa said over the phone.

Costa likes to look at the data, so she started adding numbers of reported sightings in the state.

“About two years later,” she said, “we had some fantastic data and regional researchers were looking at us saying, ‘We didn’t know there was a cluster there. We didn’t know there was a cluster there either,’ that type of thing.”

So one night, she and her spouse, Linda Miller Costa, were at their favorite pub, talking through things.

“She’s got the science degrees,” Cheryl Costa said. “And I’ve got the arts and entertainment writing degree. But I’ve got a heavy analysis background from the Navy and from 30 years at Lockheed Martin.

“She says, what if we did everything we did for New York for the whole country?” Costa continued. “I looked at her and said, ‘That would probably take us a year.’ Ended up taking us 18 months’ worth of weekends because we were still both working at the time.”

So, they created “UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001 — 2020.” Then, to get even more granular, they created a book for every single state detailing where UFO sightings have been reported. Oregon is No. 28 in that series: “UFOs in Oregon and Where to Find Them.”

Oregon, by the way, is ranked 13th for most UFO sightings in that time, with a grand total of 4,239.

We may not know what these UFOs are — and the Costas doesn’t answer that question with this book. But we can say that unidentified flying objects were reported in Oregon. And the most were reported in … the ZIP code that contains The Oregonian’s downtown Portland office, 97201.

Coincidence? Or the result of the fact that downtown there are a lot of weird lights? We may never know.