UFOs reported in Tulare County

Enigma Labs is a UFO recording center, as well as a research and analysis community. According to its website, it has received more than 280,000 reports of UFO sightings, with more than 40 of them coming from Tulare County.

In its first three years, Enigma Labs has developed a network of more than 200,000 people around the world who record and submit their sightings, according to Alejandro Rojas, a consultant and spokesman, who also oversees its analysis of UFO sightings.

“We’ve got a big burgeoning community of people who are looking at the sightings and analyzing also,” Rojas said. “It’s really interesting because you have these different opinions and people saying, ‘Hey, I figured out this is that,’ and people disagreeing, and debates going on.”

Encouraging people to share

Most of the sightings of space phenomena reported to Enigma Labs have been made through the organizations app, which currently only operates on the Apple iPhone. An Android version is being developed, according to Rojas.

“What we wanted to do is what NASA and the Pentagon have talked about, harnessing the power of the cell phone that is in all of our pockets,” Rojas said. “We wanted to build an app where people can upload and see videos very quickly.”

Rojas said that a lot of people have told him they have an “exciting” video of a UFO, before adding that they only showed it to friends and family. He hopes that Enigma Labs can inspire them to share their video with a much larger audience.

“The app will collect that information and they’ll be able to upload those pictures and videos for everybody else to see, and for researchers to use to analyze,” he said.

The site includes a globe where a visitor can zoom to their area, or see videos, photos, and information about sightings in areas around the world.

Enigma Labs’ app has a tool called the identify camera that lets users know if they are looking at a plane, a satellite, or a planet. The app also reports the user’s location and the angle of the phone when the sighting was recorded.

Rojas encourages people to report any unusual sightings that they see in the sky, adding that they have the option of remaining anonymous.

“If you don’t know what it, report it and maybe we’ll figure out what it is,” he said, adding that even a sighting that is easily explained is a good thing.

“It’s helping us figure this out and get data,” he said, but he watches out for hoaxes.

“The illegitimate sightings are ones that are made up and, of course, that happens,” said Rojas. “We try to keep an eye out for that and not pass those along.”

An anonymous report from Visalia was made on July 1, 2023.

“It was a warm, silent early morning when I couldn’t sleep so I stepped outside. I noticed this bright light in the sky and suddenly it started shapeshifting. Then it would get brighter, and it did that for a while until it finally just disappeared into the sky.”

UFO vs. UAP

Scientists and the government now use the acronym “UAP” instead of “UFO.”

The U.S. Air Force created the term UFO in 1952 because the anomalous objects they were studying at the time were called flying saucers, and everybody assumed these were alien spacecraft, said Rojas. “The Air Force was saying, ‘No, we don’t know what they are. We’re investigating to figure out what they are. They’re unidentified.’”

The term was used in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, its study of unidentified flying objects that continued into December 1969.

“Over time, UFO has made people think of alien spacecraft,” Rojas said. “So now with renewed interest in this topic, scientists don’t want to talk about UFOs. Scientists and the government like the term UAP, which is an unidentified anomalous phenomenon.”

Credibility vs. visual proof

The most compelling sightings don’t have video or radar data, Rojas said.

“One example was involving the Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group,” he said. “They had radar data and some strange things happening during training exercises.”

Five witnesses reported seeing a place in the sea where the water was boiling and a white object that was 40 feet long and shaped like a Tic Tac emerged, according to Rojas. The flight commander decided to go and take a closer look. He said the object reacted to him approaching. He tried to get behind the object, but it outmaneuvered him to avoid being followed.

“Eventually, it flew off at an incredible speed,” said Rojas, who added that witnesses of that incident appeared on “60 Minutes” and were interviewed by a lot of newspapers and broadcast media.

“It’s that sighting, when it was covered by the New York Times in 2017 that mostly compelled Congress and others, including NASA, to take this seriously,” he said, adding that the pilots have also testified about the experience at government hearings.

Geographical factors

Some parts of the country generate a lot more UAP reports than others. Enigma Labs found New Mexico to be really high on the list of most sightings, along with Colorado and Arizona.

“The Southwest has always had more sightings than other areas in the United States,” Rojas said. “That could be because there are a lot of military bases. You have, of course, Area 51, you have China Lake, and you have Vandenburg where all kinds of rockets are being launched.

“In Arizona, there’s a large training area, the (Barry M.) Goldwater Range, so there’s a lot of military aircraft and certainly some that do get mistaken for UAP, but (Arizona has) also got more clear skies and warmer weather so more people are outside,” he said.

“Any area where people are able to be outside and look at the sky, inevitably they’re going to get more sightings,” said Rojas, who noted that areas such as Tulare County have less sightings than larger metropolitan areas.

“It goes by population and there’s not a huge population in your area,” he said, “but I did find quite a few sightings and some interesting videos. Of course, you do have a military base that does some experimental type of stuff in the area so some of it could be because of that.”

Identifying objects in space

The way Rojas identifies a satellite is an object moving in a steady direction at a steady pace. Aircraft also travel in that way, but typically have blinking lights, he added.

“What’s really crazy about today is that SpaceX right now has over 6,000 satellites up there. A few years ago, it used to be you could see a couple at night,” he said. “Right now if you’re in a dark area, you can see tons of them, sometimes multiple satellites in the sky at the same time because SpaceX is just covering the planet with them.

Satellites can dim and then reappear, sometimes appearing to flash as they reflect the sun and go in and out of shadows. However, many people have seen what they thought was a satellite, only to see it take a right hand turn or do a zigzag motion, Rojas said.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will likely become more and more involved in designing satellites, which may make more of them appear to be anomalous, but Rojas has a different concern about how AI could affect Enigma Labs efforts.

“The danger of AI in the future will be deep fakes with videos that are created to look like something when they’re not,” he said, noting a recent website that was known to take military videos and add UFOs to them with CGI (computer-generated imagery). “People who are familiar with the video analysis would be able to identify that they were fake, often finding the original video that was a war video and had nothing to do with UFOs.”

‘Neutral’ about UAP

Enigma Labs describes itself as being “neutral about UAP.”

“That means that we haven’t come to the conclusion,” Rojas said. “We’re not going to be out there like a lot of groups saying, ‘Oh, it’s aliens.’ We don’t know it’s aliens, but we’re also not going to say it’s not aliens because we don’t know it’s not aliens. In other words, we’re neutral.

“We’re looking for anomalous objects and then doing our best to help get those researched and analyzed to figure out what they are,” he continued. “If they are (aliens), that would be very interesting, but along the way I think there is scientific value in this research.”

For more information about Enigma Labs, visit https://enigmalabs.io.