Spotted a UFO? There’s an App for That

The tech startup Enigma Labs wants to turn UFO sightings into data science. 

Previously, people who had seen strange lights darting around the sky could do no more than tell their friends—or call intelligence agencies. Soon, anyone with a smartphone will be able to use an app to report an unexplainable event as it happens.

Enigma Labs’ mobile app was released today, initially on an invitation-only basis as they work out the bugs, although they plan to make it available to the wider public. For now, it’ll be free to download and use, although the company could later charge for additional features. The company will not just be amassing new data—it has already gobbled up data on around 300,000 global sightings over the past century and included them in their system—and while their dataset will be available to the public, their algorithms for assessing it will not.

“At our core, we’re a data science company. We’re building the first data and community platform exclusively dedicated to the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena,” says Mark Douglas, chief operating…