Enigma Labs, a tech startup registered in Delaware, seeks to help facilitate investigations into unknown aerial phenomena by creating a repository of UFO sighting reports.
According to Bloomberg, such a repository would allow to crowdsource, catalog, and evaluate suspected UFO incidents, and to expose hoaxes, essentially allowing to separate the proverbial wheat from chaff.
“The internet is full of nonsense and it’s very hard to get good information,” Enigma Labs founder Alex Smith said, as quoted by the media outlet.
By implementing tools such as artificial intelligence and “every cutting-edge technology,” as Smith put it, Enigma will screen and verify suspected UFO sightings, using a veracity score system to rate them.
“Anything that is identifiable — we use our technology to screen that out,” Smith said. “We can be rational about what people are seeing and focus on those 1-5% that aren’t as identifiable.”
The startup’s chief technology officer reportedly said that they have already initiated a private beta test of the project, and that they intend to launch a public iPhone app in the fall.
Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, however, reportedly suggested that obtaining high-resolution images may be somewhat problematic for Enigma, since even if one has “a million cellphone images, they will always be blurry, because the cameras are not great.”
“The cameras cannot resolve an object at a distance of mile and that’s why you need telescopes,” he remarked.