Beyond the Report Button: The New Wave of UAP Identification Tools

For decades, reporting a UFO sighting meant filling out a text form, submitting it to a database, and waiting — hoping that maybe someone, somewhere, would eventually look at it. That era is ending. A new class of tools has emerged that doesn’t just collect sightings; it actively tries to analyze them, cross-reference them against real-world data, and give the witness something useful in return: an answer, or at least a meaningful step toward one. Here’s a look at the tools currently leading that charge.

The Old Problem With UFO Reporting

The traditional approach to UFO investigation, pioneered by organizations like MUFON and NUFORC, was built on the assumption that human investigators would eventually review submitted reports and apply their expertise. The system worked, in a sense — both organizations have accumulated massive archives spanning decades — but it was fundamentally passive. You reported. Someone might read it. Something might come of it.

What witnesses actually want is different. They want to know, right now, what they saw. Was it a satellite? A drone? An aircraft on an unusual flight path? Something genuinely unexplained? The gap between what legacy reporting systems offered and what witnesses actually needed is exactly the space that the following tools are now trying to fill.

1. Enigma Labs — The Community-Powered Identification Network

Platform: iOS and Android  |  Cost: Free  |  Website: enigmalabs.io

Enigma Labs launched in 2023 with a clear and ambitious mandate: become the world’s largest structured, queryable UAP database, and use that data to “crowdsolve” the mystery of unexplained aerial phenomena. Backed by venture capital and featured in publications ranging from WIRED to The New Yorker, it quickly became the most visible player in the space.

What separates Enigma from legacy platforms is that identification is baked into the experience from the start. Its flagship feature — the AR Identify Lens (iOS) — lets you point your phone camera at the sky and overlays known objects directly on the live feed in augmented reality. Satellite telemetry is ingested in real time. Spot a string of synchronized lights? The lens tells you immediately if it’s a Starlink train. Enigma has described the feature as “Shazam for the skies.”

The platform has also demonstrated multi-phone triangulation, using GPS and orientation metadata from multiple smartphones at the same sighting to establish geometric estimates of an object’s position. Its interactive map covers over 200,000 historical and recent sightings worldwide.

The limitation of Enigma is that its post-submission analysis is still largely community-driven and retrospective. If the object genuinely can’t be identified, the tool hands off to the crowd rather than a verdict engine. For a witness who just saw something strange and wants an answer tonight, it can still leave open ends.

2. SkyScan-UAP — The Active Detection Machine

Platform: iOS  |  Cost: -bash.99  |  Developer: Independent

SkyScan-UAP takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than waiting for you to point your phone at something suspicious, it actively hunts. Using a custom-trained machine learning model, the app monitors your camera feed in real time and automatically triggers video recording whenever it detects an object in the sky — whether you’ve noticed it or not.

A user can prop their phone up in a window and walk away; if something crosses the sky, SkyScan-UAP will capture it. The developer has noted this makes it particularly well-suited for aircraft cockpit applications — pilots can mount a phone against the window and have the app running as a background observer throughout a flight. Every detection is tagged with timestamp and location metadata to establish an evidential chain.

Where SkyScan-UAP is less strong is in the analytical aftermath. It is an exceptional capture tool, but once footage is recorded, the work of determining what was caught falls largely to the user. There’s no atmospheric cross-referencing, no satellite query, no verdict engine. It excels at making sure you don’t miss something; it’s less focused on telling you what you caught.

3. Project Hermes — The UAP Analysis System

Platform: Web (mobile-friendly)  |  Cost: Free  |  Website: projecthermes.tech

Project Hermes occupies a category of its own. Where Enigma is built around community and real-time visual identification, and SkyScan-UAP is built around automated detection and capture, Hermes is built around something rarer in this space: structured forensic analysis. It doesn’t just log what you saw — it interrogates the conditions surrounding what you saw, cross-references them against live external data, and renders a verdict.

The intake form alone signals this difference. Hermes collects not just the basics — location, date, time — but precise sighting geometry: compass bearing in degrees, elevation angle from the horizon, and duration in minutes. It asks about object characteristics with meaningful specificity: color, shape, light intensity, light character (steady, pulsing, strobing, flaring, glinting), and behavioral profile (hovering, erratic, formation, accelerating).

What sets Hermes apart most sharply is what happens after submission. The system runs a multi-source analysis pipeline: it queries Visual Crossing for actual atmospheric conditions at your location and time, queries N2YO for satellite positions overhead at the moment of the sighting, pulls live ADS-B aircraft traffic data via Skylink, and runs altitude geometry calculations at three candidate distances — 5km, 25km, and 100km.

All of this feeds into a verdict engine that produces three critical outputs: Eliminations (what can be confidently ruled out), Flags and Anomalies (what can’t be explained), and Recommended Next Steps. Every case is logged with a unique case ID and full raw JSON export. The entire pipeline runs in seconds.

The result is something genuinely new: not a social platform for sighting enthusiasts, not a passive detection camera, but a forensic analysis engine that applies structured methodology to a problem that has historically been handled impressionistically. The closest analogy is what aviation investigators do after an incident — gathering atmospheric, traffic, and positional data and cross-referencing it against witness accounts — except Hermes does it automatically, immediately, and for free.

How They Compare

Enigma Labs makes the bet that the answer lies in real-time visual deconfliction and community-scale pattern recognition. Best suited for curious observers who value the social and educational dimensions of the platform.

SkyScan-UAP makes the bet that you can’t analyze what you didn’t capture. Best suited for systematic researchers, pilot-observers, and anyone who wants to run continuous monitoring sessions.

Project Hermes makes the bet that the key to identifying UAP is the full constellation of contextual data surrounding a sighting. By integrating weather, satellite traffic, aircraft traffic, and geometric modeling into a single automated analysis, it produces an evidence-based verdict that either eliminates conventional explanations or flags their absence as genuinely anomalous.

The most complete approach would combine all three: SkyScan-UAP to ensure the sighting is captured, Enigma to identify known objects in real time, and Hermes to conduct the full forensic analysis afterward. That these tools are complementary rather than competitive is, perhaps, the most encouraging sign that the field of UAP investigation is finally growing up.

Project Hermes is available now at projecthermes.tech. Submit a sighting, run the analysis, and see what the data says.