tech start-ups Enigma Labs wants to turn UFO sightings into data science.
In the past, people who had seen strange lights circling the sky could do nothing but tell their friends—or call intelligence agencies. Soon, anyone with a smartphone can use an app to report an unexplained event as it happens.
“Mysterious Lab” mobile application was released today, initially only to invitees as they find the bugs, although they plan to make it available to the wider public. For now, it will be free to download and use, although the company may later charge for additional features. The company will not only accumulate new data—it has collected data on some 300,000 global sightings over the past century and feed them into their systems—and although their dataset will be available to the public, but their algorithm for evaluating it won’t.
“At our core, we are a data science company. We are building the first data and community platform dedicated to the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena, said Mark Douglas, chief executive officer of the New York-based company.
Courtesy of Enigma Labs
Part of their goal is to reduce the stigma of reporting something inexplicable—even if viewers don’t really think they’re visiting aliens. (For the record, some government agencies and companies like Enigma Labs now use the term UAP instead of UFO: unidentified anomaly, rather than unidentified flying object. intended to include a wide range of objects that may not be of extraterrestrial origin, and to make the term sound less pejorative.)
Identifying a distant and unknown object or explaining a phenomenon that has never been seen before poses a unique challenge. However, the app will ask the user structured questions, such as when and where the user saw something in the sky and the shape of the object. It also gives them space to tell their sighting story and provide more details, and they can upload photos or videos. It’s like citizen science projects where volunteers help sort out astronomical images of galaxiesbut in this case the images are submitted by volunteers and most of the classification is done by an algorithm.
However, the company wants to do more than just import a lot of data: It wants to apply its proprietary models to exclude things that are not UAP, such as by determining if there is a lightning bolt or a machine. fly nearby unclassified or not. And they also wanted to filter the reliability of the data sources, distinguishing between “highly reliable military pilots, trained observers with endorsements from multiple sensors, and then at the top opposite of the spectrum… a single witness could have had too much to drink and see a bright spot in the sky,” Douglas said.
“The core issue for studying this is the data problem: ‘What is reliable, what is not, who is trustworthy, who is not?'” he argues. “What we’re trying to do is bring a level of standardization and rigor to that.”
The challenge, of course, will be to apply scientific standardization to something that may not be scientific at all. Witness testimony is notoriously unreliableand people interpret what they see based on factors such as current events and their scientific, political, and cultural background. University of Pennsylvania historian Kate Dorsch, who specializes in producing scientific knowledge, said: “The data you get is socially constructed.
Courtesy of Enigma Labs
UFO sightings begin as American obsession after World War II and the Roswell incident of 1947, when people in New Mexico found mysterious debris that may (or may not) have come from a crashed military hot air balloon. The sightings quickly spread around the world, and interest in Roswell, as well as the new US and Soviet space programs, may have encouraged people to see lights in the sky, Dorsch said. alien technology. However, she continued, there were fewer UFO sightings after the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957—when people saw something strange in the sky, they assumed it was a spaceship. created by humans. And the geopolitics of where you live matters, too. Today, when Germans witness strange phenomena, they often attribute them to Russian and American crafts, she said. “When you’re looking for something specific, that’s what you see,” she says.
Government agencies are always interested in UFO reports for national security reasons, as sightings of flying saucers could actually be sightings of secret enemy aircraft. (Or, if the ship is indeed a nationally classified project, descriptions of the sighting might reveal how it appeared to others.)
