Enigma is proud to announce that we have hit a massive milestone. Fifty thousand unidentified aerial sightings submitted to us. This spans 80 years and 255 countries. We are hugely grateful to our community, who took the time to share their wild and personal experiences.

Enigma is honored to be the #1 destination where people go to share what they saw – people who were lucky enough to look up at the right moment and see something they couldn’t explain in the sky. When we hit 25,000 sighting reports, we published our first analysis of the data. Now, with 51,984 reports in the database, we have double the amount of data and context to dive into.

A human moderator reads and vets every single sighting that is submitted to us. At time of publication, 70% of these submissions have been approved by Enigma’s team. Every single approved sighting is published immediately to our mobile app and website. Sightings that do not meet the quality bar – typically because the description is not coherent, the required fields were not filled out, or the media failed to upload – are not approved and not published. There are many reasons we would not approve a submission, but The analysis below is based on all the sightings that we received, whether published or not published.

Also important to note that all of the data below is based on self-reporting – that is to say, information provided by sighters themselves. Enigma did not independently verify the information they provided. I the sighter said "the object was a triangle shape," then we counted it as a triangle, even if the submitted media suggested a different shape. If the sighter said they "detected the object on radar or night vision," then we counted it as sensor detection (as of today, we are not requiring that they submit the actual sensor data to us).

When sightings happen

On average, most sightings occur between 8 and 11 PM local time. One thing that's surprising is that the distribution is remarkably consistent across both years and geographies.

What were people doing when they had a sighting?

It’s not surprising that our witnesses are often engaging in the most common outside activities when they have their sighting. Driving is the single most common activity in our reports, appearing in 10% of all submitted reports. Walking accounts for another 7%. Smoking appears in 4% of reports. Dogs appear in 5% of reports — which can include walking the dog, dog barking at or reacting to the object, or a dog just being present during a sighting.

Geography of Sightings

The United States accounts for 73.6% of all submissions, with the UK, Canada, and Australia forming the next tier. This is reflective of our current platform reach and a strong culture of civilian observation and documentation of UAP in the US, rather than UAP themselves being more prevalent in the US.

When it comes to which states have more sightings, we find that where there are more people, there are more sightings: California, Texas, Florida, and New York lead on raw numbers. After adjusting for population, New Mexico, Vermont, Nevada, Arizona and Oregon rise to the top. These are states with open terrain, low light pollution, and in several cases, proximity to military installations and restricted airspace. The pattern echoes what Enigma has documented in sightings near U.S. military bases and nuclear facilities .

Who is reporting

Among the ~16% of submitters who shared their profession, the majority come from backgrounds trained in observation and identification. Veterans make up ~43% of that group. Scientists account for ~22%, with law enforcement officers, pilots, and active duty personnel making up most of the rest. A small share of our community are repeat sighters. Around 5% have submitted two or more unique sightings, suggesting a core of highly engaged observers within the broader community.

Of the 16% of submitters who disclosed a profession.

How people report

Reporting has been getting faster and faster, and is now close to real time. 24% of our sightings are reported within the hour that they have occurred. 42% of eyewitnesses report what they saw within 24 hours, and 58% within the first week. This speed reflects how frictionless reporting by mobile phone has become.

The way people capture and report sightings is changing, with more and more using smartphones. In 2025, nearly 60% of submissions attached either photos or video. The result is our database increasingly has timestamps and geostamps from the media’s metadata, a shift that meaningfully helps us corroborate what the written descriptions say.

What people are seeing

After normalizing text descriptions across 50,000 reports, a few object shapes are the most commonly seen by witnesses. “Light” in the sky is the number one way a UAP’s appearance is described, followed by specific shapes like “sphere” and “circle”, then “triangle”, “disk”, and “formation” of objects.

Descriptors like "changing" are also frequent. Most sightings happen at night and at a distance — conditions that make perception difficult. What the shape data reflects as much as anything is the challenges of observation and how elusive a clear sighting can be.

Witnesses are frequently reasoning about what they saw. "Starlink" is mentioned in 10% of reports and "drones" in 9%. This is either because the witness is wondering if it could have been a starlink or drone, or conversely, they are affirming that it definitely was not a starlink or drone. That's why we have released tools like our AR identification lens , to help deconflict known objects from genuine unknowns.

How many sightings are inexplicable?

Across sightings that met our quality bar and were approved and published, we queried for reports that met a higher threshold of anomaly; where the witnesses saw no means of propulsion on the object — no fixed wings, no rotor, no exhaust jet — and also where the witness noticed anomalous flight patterns and behavior inconsistent with known aircraft or natural phenomena. The result was 3,681 reports.

Visual characteristics and behaviors:

Within this anomalous subset, the most commonly reported shapes are circle (20%) and sphere (12%). This is a meaningful difference from the full dataset analysis above, where “light” dominates. Most “light” reports are objects seen from far away, so not likely to be as anomalous. Proximity enables the viewer to better ascertain the actual underlying shape of the object.

Speed & Movement: 1,500 (41%) reports explicitly said the object moved "extremely fast", with witnesses describing instant acceleration or impossible velocity. A further 1,245 reports mention abrupt changes in direction; 907 describe erratic and unpredictable movement. 1,115 reports said that objects "vanished" or "disappeared", of which 94 were a very "sudden" disappearance.

Sound: 1,360 objects were said to be “hovering” of which 67 were "hovering silently." 644 witnesses said the object was "silent" or emitted "no sound."

Multiple objects: In 218 reports, the witnesses describe seeing formations of multiple objects rather than a singular object.

Ongoing activity: 81 reports describe ongoing or repeat sightings — the same witness seeing the object or phenomenon over days, weeks, or months.

Witness reasoning: 163 observers reasoned about what they saw and ruled out known explanations, stating it wasn't a plane, satellite, or a Starlink.

Number of witnesses: Half of these anomalous reports have multiple witnesses, with an average of 2 - 3 witnesses per event.

We decided to drill even deeper into the 3,681 sightings to find the most interesting ones. So we ran a query to narrow down for reports with credentialed witnesses, or reports that combine decent duration, strong descriptions, and physical proximity in ways that make them particularly persuasive. 869 (2.4% of all approved reports) clear this second bar:

Credentialed witnesses: 381 of these reports come from credentialed witnesses — 59 pilots, 254 active or former military (including veterans), 77 law enforcement, and 29 scientists. Some witnesses fall into more than one category.

Duration: 1,319 witnesses describe sightings lasting more than five minutes; 956 cases lasted more than ten minutes.

Description strength: One in four reports in the anomalous set runs 175 words or more. Clearing this threshold gives the sighter room to describe not just what they saw but things like how it moved, what it resembled, and what they ruled out. 895 reports reach this length.

Proximity and scale: An unidentified light in a distant sky could be almost anything. An object the size of a car or bus, seen within a football field's distance, with no wings, rotors, or exhaust is a much more explicit observation. 373 reports describe an object that was simultaneously large and close.

Cases that Stand Out

In ~33 cases, witnesses describe seeing fighter jets during or after the sighting.

A military service member watching RAF Tornado jets practice maneuvers described two additional objects following them at "unbelievable speed... no wings and no white trail." [Case #286515 ]. Another military account is more terse: "A huge fleet with a three diamond formation... disappeared straight up in succession. Afterward, several fighter jets combed the area." [Case #304390 ].

299 reports in the wider anomalous set mention entities or beings. A military family driving cross-country described, "a building-size craft with windows all over the top level... we could see the yellow lights that you would typically see inside homes. We could see shadows cast to the ceiling of the inside of the craft moving around." [Case #319241 ].

The most striking account in this category comes from a marine at Camp Pendleton:

"The object stopped only 20 feet above my head. It made no sound. It appeared to be a classic saucer shape, with two large windows across an upper section. I saw people inside the craft staring down at me; one raised a hand as if waving at me. I was in full-blown panic mode." — Active duty Marine, Camp Pendleton, 1973 [Case #298668 ]

196 reports contain explicit emotional language. A witness recounting a camping trip: "Within seconds the tent lit from above... my friend started crying, within seconds there were footsteps all around our tent. I grabbed my shotgun then.... NOTHING. My friend and I both woke up the next day horrified, asking what happened. Neither of us remember." [Case #318787 ]. A child witness described a saucer-shaped object glowing above a church spire: "It was so big I felt absolutely terrified. There was something about it that just looked unearthly." [Case #318151 ].

If you'd like to dive into the 869 cases in more depth, shoot us a note at [email protected]

Scoring Anomalousness

As well as this qualitative analysis, Enigma applies a proprietary scoring algorithm to every sighting. The goal is for us to have a mechanism to quickly help us find what we are looking for as the volume of reports submitted to us rapidly scales. Every sighting we receive is automatically scored from 1 to 100 by a multivariate model. The higher the score, the higher both the certainty around the event and the anomalousness of the object. There is no human input into the score, and it is a work in progress. We continue to regularly refine the methodology of scoring to incorporate new factors as we learn more about what UAP reports are interesting.

The sightings with no observable means of propulsion and anomalous movement have two peaks in the score distribution, at 52 and 68. The first peak is consistent with the average score in the full set of sightings, but the 68 peak is a full 19-point gap above most sightings. This means that the algorithm is agreeing with the witnesses' qualitative descriptions, and finding that these sightings in the second peak did seem more anomalous.

50,000+ sightings and counting

In sum, what can we learn from this huge and growing dataset?

1) The window between a sighting and a submission is closing, with the community is reporting faster and with more evidence than at any point before. That enables us to have a real time alert network - read more on that here .

2) Our users and community are actively trying to rationally analyze what they are seeing. Over the coming year, we'll release a suite of analytical tools to help make sense of it all: datasets overlaid on sightings to deconflict from known objects, computer vision to analyze object movement in video, and machine learning to surface patterns across thousands of witness accounts. We've been testing these internally, and we can't wait to show you.

We are proud of the hard work by the team to reach this significant 50,000 milestone. The next 50,000 will come even faster, the tools will be sharper, and the picture they reveal will be clearer. As the evidence from the community grows, so will our collective understanding of what's moving through our skies.

Explore a handful of the best sightings below.