The loneliest haunts

What the distance actually measures

The number beside each name is the distance to the nearest other dossier — not the nearest road, town or lighthouse keeper. Alaska supplies six of the top ten because Alaska's record is genuinely sparse: Amchitka Island, out at the far end of the Aleutians, sits 1,699 km from Nome, the next file east. Nome itself ranks second — the nearest thing to Amchitka is still432 km from everything else on file.

Median distance inverts the table. North Dakota's typical dossier stands48.2 km from its nearest sibling — the loneliest median record of any well-covered state — while Nevada (24.9 km) and Alabama (23.4 km) follow for opposite reasons: Nevada is empty, Alabama's file is thin. A high median can mean remoteness or under-documentation; the table cannot tell them apart.

And distance is not the remoteness of a legend. Alleged UFO Skip Site files a sky-watch story 97.2 km from anything else in the archive, and the UFO museum that hears about such things is itself its nearest file. Isolation here is a property of the record — where researchers bothered to go — as much as of geography.

One caveat, as always: coordinates carry a certainty class, and many dossiers sit on town centroids rather than surveyed points. The top of this table is robust — Amchitka is far from everywhere under any geocode — but fine margins between neighbors are approximate by design.