Number of reports associated with paranormal or supernatural activity 2020-2025

Request

Regarding the below request, please note the date should be 1st January 2019 - 31st December 2024 (calendar years). Please ignore previous typo.

For each calendar year (1st Jan - 31st March) between 2020 and 2025:

Q1) Please advise the number of reports your force has received that have any of the following terms in their description or classification. Please give the individual number for each term rather than grouping them together: UFO's, Aliens.

2) For the above data, please advise which post code areas the most reports came from. Break this down by month/year, too.

3) How many reports did you receive from Police Officers for each of the terms in Q1.

Response

I approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police's Incident Management System. The Smart system records the majority of calls to South Yorkshire Police requiring the specific deployment of police resources, whether reported by members of the public via 999 or 101 or 'happened upon' by officers and staff in the course of their duties. The log runs as a running commentary of an incident as it unfolds and has limited search capability. They have provided me with the below data tables:

Question 1

Question 2

There is not enough data to be able to provide a monthly breakdown as it could possibly lead to identification which would trigger a s40 exemption. I have instead provided a yearly breakdown. I cannot provide a further breakdown of postcode as this would trigger a s40 as some full postcodes may refer to a street with only 1 or 2 houses.

Please note: of the 120 combined results above, 8 have blank postcode data and therefore are not included in below data.

Question 3

No Information Held – we do not require a 999/101 caller to provide their occupation when calling so cannot filter this data by ‘Police Officer’.