SPATIAL-DISTRIBUTION OF THE UNIDENTIFIED EGRET SOURCES OFF THE GALACTIC PLANE

About fifty unidentified gamma-ray sources, from the first EGRET catalog, lie above a few degrees from the Galactic plane. Yet they correspond to no attractive counterparts. A statistical analysis has been developed to study their spatial distribution, including the effects of the non-uniform detection threshold and exposure. As a result, the source positions are not consistent with a uniform distribution at medium and high latitude, but they appear significantly correlated with the structure of the nearby interstellar medium. Most of them seem to belong to the giant molecular clouds and their HI envelopes. Only very few Geminga-like pulsars in our vicinity may be present in this sample.