You Asked, We Listened — The Latest Product Improvements Across the Enigma App

At Enigma, we are always listening to our sightings community. We do frequent calls with users to gather input on our product, which you can join through our Discord here. We also receive feedback via email at [email protected] and [email protected]. We really appreciate you sharing bugs or requests for features. We are a small but mighty startup team and we do our best to get these suggestions in our product roadmap and backlog.

We’ve been busy working on making it easier for users to find and absorb the latest UFO sightings. Today our database has grown to over 270,000 unique anomalous sightings, and these can be hard to parse through. One thing we know is that we have a lot of media that people want to explore, and much of this media has been hard to find. We have over 47,072 sightings with media in our platform. Of our approved UGC sightings that got published, there are 6,670 that have video, 3,836 that have images and 2,751 that have audio. In the last few months we've shipped exciting product updates in the app to highlight interesting media and make them easier for you to find. Read on to learn more about the latest enhancements to Enigma, designed to improve the experience for you: our valued skywatching community.

Differentiated Map Icons for Media: Find Sightings Quickly

The Enigma database has grown to over 270,000 UFO/UAP sightings. With hundreds of new sightings being reported every week, it became challenging to navigate our global map.

Sightings with media (video, audio, and/or photos) are the top-viewed, and to help users navigate the map more easily, we expanded the map's icon set to better represent sightings based on their attributes.

Now, quickly find the sightings you're most interested in, whether that's a stunning video or a wild audio story of an encounter. We will add more in the future as we learn what users are looking for:

Audio Reports: Hear Personal Encounters Recounted by Actual Sighters

Capturing an anomalous sighting on video or with a photo is much harder than it sounds. Often sighters are in the moment watching, and if they have the opportunity to get their camera out at all, the object is far away or moving and appears blurry in the media. But plenty of users have a lot of fascinating details to share about their experience. Typing that all out can be a lot of friction. That's why we introduced audio record for sighting submitters, enabling users to recount their experiences in their own voice with ease. The details and circumstances and how the sighter felt are often what bring these stories to life and help us empathize with the sighter's unexplained encounter, so these audio stories bring a new dimension to reporting. However, these audio stories were hard to find and digest within the app. So we have created easily visible audio modules in the Content Feed, the first tab of the app, to highlight some of the most captivating audio stories. The new format also auto generates captions so you can read along as you listen to the story. Check out the content feed today to listen to some our sighters' top audio stories:

Search on the Map: Pinpoint Sightings Anywhere

We’ve heard your feedback! This was a much requested feature from our users. You can now search for sightings by location on the map. Simply tap the search bar at the top of the screen, type in a place name or a zip code, and select the location you're interested in. The map will select that area with an orange rectangle on the screen, showing just sightings within that box. At the bottom left you will see the sightings counter showing how many sightings are in "view" within the box. Simply hit the X in the search bar to see the full map again. Whether you want to check out recent sightings in your hometown or explore UFO activity around Taiwan, you can now search for sightings in any specific location across the globe:

Updated Sighting Card Visuals: Day and Night at a Glance

When we came up with the sighting card concept at the outset, we knew we wanted to create a standard format, as a consistent presentation makes it easier for the viewer to quickly digest information about each sighting experience. But we also recognize that every sighter's experience is different and unique, and we want to bring these differences to life over time. Not all sightings have video or audio, which is why we created the auto-generated shape at the bottom of each card. This visual is auto-generated based on the shape information the user provided. Now, we have updated these shape visuals to also reflect at a glance the time of day the user saw the sighting. This is represented by a day or night background behind the shape. In future we hope to be able to add a dawn / dusk background as well — we just need to do a little additional work, time zone and sunrise / sunset math, to add that next:

Personalized Titles for Every Single Sighting: Snappy Summaries

We had the realization that reading three lines of an address at the top of every sighting card was high friction for the user to read. More important is to summarize and highlight what is special and unique about every sighter's experience upfront so the reader can quickly absorb if they want to read the full card. We decided to harness new AI tools to help us and selected Llama3, the latest generation of large language models (LLMs) developed by Meta. It was released in 2024 and reaches up to 70 billion parameters. We deploy Llama3 in our backend to read the body text of the description and summarize it into a title. We wanted the titles to be easy and snappy to read, so we fine-tuned certain parameters of the model, for instance tuned it so that every title is less than 100 characters, and tuned the system not to use "UAP/UFO" in every title, which is repetitive. We ran this across our existing 270k+ sighting dataset. Now, you can quickly browse real sighting titles such as, "Triangular object disappears at high speed over family car", "Large, glowing disk hovers above witness's home." and "Pulsating Orb Brightens and Dims Over Gulf of Mexico, Drops 15 Degrees." A before and after image is shown below so you have a sense of the difference:

We’re thrilled to bring these new features to life, improving the way you explore sightings on Enigma. If you haven't yet, you can download our iOS app—or sign up for our Android waitlist (coming soon)! Dive in today and as always, keep sharing your feedback—we’re listening!