Before To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science pivoted its post-pandemic plans to focus on the entertainment division with To The Stars, the Tom DeLonge-founded venture planned to release an analytical tool for tracking UAPs called the V.A.U.L.T. The V.A.U.L.T (Virtual Analytics UAP Learning Tool) was supposed to be an app to serve as a public-facing database of UFO sightings. As of 2022, the app has yet to be released, but two newer companies Enigma Labs and PhenomAInon seem to be taking the lead on this technology as the UAP topic continues to interest those in the intelligence and scientific communities.
Enigma Labs is poised to take the charge, as the up-and-coming app promises to have the “largest query able UAP database in the world.” Enigma Labs target audience includes the scientific community, and current government and military officials, and will also feature an archive/ database of famous cases and figures in UAP history. The company boasts “270k citizen and military reports across every country, awarding every sighting an anomaly score based on multivariate models.” Enigma Labs looks to also build “tools for everyone to deconflict sightings with identifiable variables, glean insights, and connect to other people with similar sighting stories.” The app is currently in a limited, invite-only release, though they encourage people to submit their sightings through the website.
Conceptually, this is similar to what the V.A.U.L.T was to be, but Enigma Labs never worked with To The Stars outside of being in touch with Chris Mellon, and was told TTS briefly explored the idea of the app.
One To The Stars adviser is also getting into this game he helped inspire in 2019.PhenomAInon is a multi-tiered subscription service that will be the “the world’s first Cloud Native Data & AI platform for phenomenon-based data analysis.”PhenomAInon is led by AI expert Joe Schurman, who is still listed as an adviser to TTS. Schurman’s previous software work includes NASA. The platform will also be used to “analyze data from any source for Space Domain Awareness and threat detection. The website describes the process as: PhenomAInon deploys data and AI services alongside modern data & AI engineering to surface insights to explorers, researchers, organizations, publications, and communities through advanced data & AI analysis. Schurman moved forward with these efforts after TTSA decided to focus on entertainment, and it is the intellectual property and ownership of his company 0 to AI, LLC.
“We soft launched (released the initial site and social media channels) without any marketing on May 4, 2022 due to pressure from another show I was interviewed for,” Schurman said. “We have several data sets we are getting cleared by the USG and we have a Content Analysis tool we have developed that we’ll launch when ready.”
Schurman once appeared alongside former Pentagon UAP official Luis Elizondo on the History Channel hit “Unidentified” to discuss how AI and modern data engineering could be a solution to solving UAP-related problems. This was the “leverage” PhenomAInon says that was needed for the V.A.U.L.T concept.
A chart on the PhenomAInon website explains the process. (Screen shot)
“We are working together with multiple teams both public and private to continue to curate the data sets, clear documents for public review, and provide advanced analytics and AI capabilities never seen before to the public,”Schurman said. “From a data and analytics perspective, we are applying Machine Learning and advanced analytics to find correlations and anomalies in the incident reports across multiple data sets. Some of these are public, some are private, and some we are clearing for public review. The analytics will go far beyond incident reporting and showcase heat maps, correlative incident maps to key private and public sector facilities, and trends analysis never reported (e.g. incident reporting correlated with time, weather, FAA & drone flight data, etc). We also have a new Content Analysis platform that users will be able to eventually run their own AI / ML analysis on their own videos while curating the largest library of incident videos, images, and audio recordings.”
Enigma Labs has an impressive list of collaborators and consultants, as the platform is ever-evolving to match the needs of the science behind it.
“The design of our app has been based around two core principles,” said Head of Research and Content Alejandro Rojas. “First, we have reached out to many UAP researchers, including SCU, the Galileo Project, and figures like Jacques Vallee to get input on what structured data would be the most useful for scientific investigation. Secondly, we spent a lot of time interfacing with people who think they've seen a UAP to best understand how to serve them with a frictionless product and community. That learning process is ongoing and informs our feature design.”
Both companies have legit funding, and a potentially important future in the world where anomalous phenomena will be taken and studied seriously.
“This phenomenon, it’s implications to multiple aspects of our lives and possible security threats all come down to a data problem and the organizations that have been in place to-date just have not had the level of cloud, data and AI engineering capabilities we take for granted and have access to in the private sector,” said Schurman. “My goal is to bring this all together, starting with PhenomAInon, but beyond that as well in other areas.”
-By MIKE DAMANTE
If you are a fan of UAP studies, Mike Damante’s latest book “Punk rock and UFOs: Stranger Than Fiction” features exclusive interviews with Travis Taylor, Leslie Kean, Tom DeLonge, Peter Levenda, Kevin Day, Sean Cahill, Diana Pasulka, Jeffrey Kripal, and the producers of “Unidentified.” Order now.