Dee and Joe Indiviglio like to go out on their front porch at night, and look up. That’s where they were on Dec. 4, when they saw something they hadn’t seen before above their Middletown, New Jersey home: a group of lights, moving quickly, strangely all over the sky, for maybe a half-hour or longer.
A few days after that, Dee did something else unusual for her. She uploaded a video of those odd lights to a new-ish app called Enigma. “I usually don’t share anything, ever. Even if I did something crazy. But I don’t know, for some reason, something made me share that night. And I did,” she tells Rolling Stone.
Enigma started out as a tool to capture UFO sightings. “By using modern technology, we will crowdsolve this age-old mystery together,” the company’s website reads. But in the last month, the company has made a hard pivot to a more-modern puzzle, tracking whatever the hell is flying over the Eastern Seaboard, where all sorts of people are claiming to have witnessed something unusual. “Seen a drone? Hundreds are being reported to Enigma,” the top of the site now reads.
Enigma is currently #25 in news in the iPhone app store. Usage of the app is up 40 percent from last month, the company claims, and “hundreds of thousands” of people are using the network. Daily sightings in the New York / New Jersey / Connecticut area — ordinarily just one or two — hit 37 last week, and more than 250 around the country. The surge says something, and not just about about how much weird stuff we see overhead in an age of cheap drones, or how prone people are to freak the fuck out in our post-rational age. “Officials (FBI, DHS, and local police) are failing in communications and the internet is rife with misinformation. People need somewhere to go,” the company’s founder tells Rolling Stone via email. She’s hoping that Enigma winds up “filling the vacuum.”
Courtesy of Enigma
The founder only wants to be identified as “A” — “I’m just trying to minimize the crazies that enter my life in the next few months,” she says; it’s a drawback of dealing with a rather, um, intense alien-hunter community. But I’ve verified her identity. She became fascinated with the subject after the military declassified those UFO videos around 2020. Eventually, that led to a start-up, which received backing from well-known venture capital firms like Haystack and Lux Capital. The website went up in January 2023, and the app launched that May. Today, she has a small team, still less than 20, trying to keep up with the flood of reports.
Each Enigma submission is geo-tagged, categorized by factors like the shape of the object, the type of movement it made, and how long it was in the sky. Then Enigma gives each one a reliability score on a scale. The report from a ship’s captain in Parsippany, New Jersey describing a silver disk scored a 62 out of 100. A report out of North Plainfield, New Jersey from someone who saw “4 different white or sparkly orbs” while “praying” only netted a 39 out of 100. The Indiviglios’ sighting ranked 58. Joe Indiviglio, a regular stargazer who counts himself as “a little [nerdy] when it comes to aviation,” sounds even more confident than that. “It’s not like any aircraft that could be mad-made,” he says.
“If you’re standing in our backyard, facing the planes as they’re landing at Newark [Airport], they come in from the west and make a hard left turn,” he continues. The lights he and his wife saw were “nowhere in a flight path. [They were] more towards the ocean … definitely more towards the coast, away from Newark.”
An FBI official told reporters earlier this week that they’d received about 5,000 tips, less than 100 of which were credible enough for follow-up investigation. “The sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and even stars that were mistakenly reported as drones,” added John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson. “We have not identified anything anomalous or any national security or public safety risk.”
Rebecca Weiner, the New York Police Department’s intelligence chief, told reporters that amateur sleuths trying to probe the mystery lights with drones of their own might actually be feeding a sense of hysteria. “You can create the public safety threat that you’re trying to investigate,” she said.
A version of that argument is what worries some observers about Enigma. When I was first introduced to Enigma Labs in the summer of 2023, the company promised they were on the verge of getting officially endorsed by NASA. That endorsement never came, though an agency report endorsed the idea of an app for collecting UFO sightings. I also spoke with a number of science writers at the time who were wary of the project. It wasn’t just that eyewitnesses can be shockingly unreliable, especially about lights flashing in the sky. It was the idea of combining what should be the most serious of scientific questions — are we alone? — with the dopamine-chase of a social network. It didn’t seem like a recipe for rock-solid information. But, as A points out, people are sharing their sightings anyway; at least Enigma applies some rigor to the clips. “Think about the incentives on Facebook or Twitter, where people are more likely to do something because they want likes or they want to be famous or they want engagement,” she says. “You’re not going to be famous or go viral because of us. Everyone goes through a standard reporting process where you have to report basic facts. Like, we need the time, we need the location, we need standard descriptions. And we’re looking at the metadata, we’re making sure we don’t have deep fakes.”
Courtesy of Enigma
Some of the biggest peddlers of drone hokum have been elected officials. There’s the Republican congressman who swore the drones were being dispatched from an Iranian mothership; the Democratic senator who swore he saw something UFO-y in the sky — only to later admit it was just plain-old planes; the former governor who posted a video of “what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence” — turns out, it was the constellation of Orion. Rep. Nancy Mace, notorious in Washington for her attention-seeking antics, tried to hop in on the drone panic by publicly speculating whether the objects were “from outer space.” Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is not exactly camera-shy, proclaimed that he was “taking to the Senator floor … to respond to the reports of drone activity.” President-elect Donald Trump, never one to leave a new cycle without his imprint, posted, “Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country. Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
This may be getting some significant public attention, but it isn’t the first time such concerns have gripped D.C. Over 17 days last December, a squadron of a dozen or more drones buzzed by Langley Air Force Base, home of the U.S. military’s top-of-the-line F-22 stealth fighters. That October, five drones appeared above a Department of Energy nuclear test site in Nevada. Officials from the Pentagon, Department of Energy, and FBI are still stumped about who’s behind the incursions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Enigma founder says she was in Washington, D.C. the other day, mostly talking to folks on Capitol Hill. The guesses about what these sightings might be ran “the full gamut” from secret military project to “‘oh, these are just hobbyist drones, or commercial delivery drones.’ Which is bananas to me, because nobody’s getting a burrito from Amazon these days.”
If A has a favorite explanation, she’s disinclined to share it. But one explanation she completely rejects is that everyone is just mistaken, and all at once. “Of course, there’s a general part of the public that does get confused. They look at a Starlink [mini satellite] and they think it’s an alien. But that is definitely not 100 percent of what’s going on. And not everyone is confused by airplanes. it’s not just mass hysteria. There is a percentage of the activity that is real,” she tells me.
“And of the reports we get, a lot of them describe objects that are very large. You know, this is not a DJI drone, right?” she adds, referring to the popular mini-drone maker. “So that’s the stuff we pay attention to. We did an analysis last week. We found, like, 54 percent of things reported to us were described as hovering. So that’s not plane activity.”
The Indiviglios’ were hoping to find a little confirmation on Enigma that others saw just what they did. “I can’t find any. That’s why I’m kind of freaked out,” Dee says. It’s especially disconcerting, because she keeps seeing something strange up above. “I’ve seen them three times now. The latest was earlier this week. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, here we go again.’”
