UFOs are going mainstream

SOMETIMES IT’S just a balloon. Or it might be a drone. Some travel at high speeds and switch directions; others hover, then disappear. Sensors pick up some of them. Others fly under the radar. Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have been part of popular lore for decades, but governments have lately been trying harder to figure out what is fantasy and what is fact. Private enterprise is starting to crowdsource UFO data, hoping to provide governments and other institutions with evidence they can investigate.

Enigma Labs, a private company founded in 2020, offers an app that enables users to upload images of UFOs, along with descriptions and other data about them. In the past 18 months it has received around 15,000 submissions (see map 1). Enigma assesses these, using both machine learning and a human moderator. It reckons that around two-thirds are unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), the new way of saying UFO that sheds the little-green-man baggage of the old term. In other words, they exist but are mysterious.